I’m not going to say whats wrong with the image I’ll leave you to guess that in the comments but I’d hate to be the person that designed it because if it was me and I saw this round Leeds Festival all weekend I’d be royally annoyed with myself that I missed such an imperfection.

I also have an issue with the choice of fonts on the wristbands, but this comes down to personal preference rather than a mistake. Lets just say the font they did choose was only just a step up from comic sans in my opinion.

In all however it was a great weekend spent with some great guys (and lady).

Everything has to be designed by Kean Richmond

This is no more true than when it comes to my personal stuff. Although my new site design has only been knocking about for a little over a month I’d been wanting to look at refining certain areas based on both my own personal desires and also feedback gained from others.

The first job

The first change has focused on the buttons on the website, these only happen to be in use on the comment and contact forms but I wanted to find something a little more visually appealing. These also seemed like the best place to start as they are a fairly small change in the grand scheme of things.

So the original comment button looked like this:

and the new one like this:

As you can see the original button design is still there within the new one, however I’ve looked to refine it and by doing so I think it makes it more distinctive on the page.

Next time

I always have the best of intentions when it comes to tweaking the current design on my site rather than waiting until I get to the point where I want to completely redesign. Yet again the hope this time is that I follow through as there are still some things that I still don’t think I got right the first time. It was a case of rushing some decisions when it came to almost getting the site finished and live so with more time I want to relook at these things and hopefully with the extra time do something even better.

First change to the new design by Kean Richmond

Personally I think this is Facebook trying to have a presence in yet another arm of social networking. But while they expand into yet another market are they able to compete with those who operate solely in the geolocation game?

Geolocation: What I don’t like

Frequently Facebook’s privacy policy becomes big news online with people crying out as to why their data is not being secured as well as they require, but yet some of these people are willing to broadcast their every move using these services.

I’ve already been a victim of identity theft this year and although I know I have more personal information online than some I’m just not willing to take that leap into geolocation. We already have the term Facestalk being coined for those that stalk people on Facebook so it’s not such a stretch to think that these services aren’t being used entirely innocently either.

Geolocation: What I do like

Although I don’t use the services I do see the tweets that pop up with people having collected badges or become Mayor of a certain locale. This aspect I do actually think has some merit because it is a very clever vehicle these services have employed to provide longevity to their services and keep people coming back. If it was simply about figuring out where your friends were I think these services would have a very limited lifespan but with this added element of gameplay they have turned this service into more of a game than just simple networking.

But on the face of things it appears Facebook has missed this. Nowhere on their website have I found anything about this and to me if they truly wanted to compete in this marketplace then this is something they would have definitely needed to implement.

Not for me

As much as I like one aspect of these geolocation services I am simply not able to give in to the idea that all the people I know and possible some I don’t know being able to find out where I am at any given time. For me I think I much prefer trying to minimise the amount of personal information I have floating around the Internet so for me geolocation is something I’m going to steer clear of.

Added: Check out this link on how to turn off Facebook Places as it’s actually something that is switched on automatically: http://lifehacker.com/5616395/how-to-disable-facebook-places

Why do I want to know where everyone is? by Kean Richmond

Unfortunately given the poor standard of work that is still being released onto the web it does appear that some have let the community pass them by. This could either be ignorance or a desire to not get involved, simply happy to go to work and be paid at the end of the month.

It does surprise me that some people do wish to work in this manner. Of course in most other industries this is the norm with communities seemingly working at a slower pace or simply not existing at all. I don’t imagine there is a SXSW for bin men? But for the web I think the community is so much a part of what being a web designer is all about.

We simply can’t force people to integrate into our community if they do not wish, given the strong opinions and infighting that occurs at times I think that sometimes it’s best to stay away but the reason our community exists cannot be forgotten. This reason is due to the speed and frequency our industry changes and develops, forever changing the way we work and the sites we produce. It’s this speed of change that has made the community such a large part of our working day and why we have developed this thirst of information. We grab any new technology that has allowed us to better consume this flow of information this is why we have blogs, RSS feeds and ultimately Twitter.

So if you’re not part of the community and you’re reading this then I recommend you definitely get involved as it’s certainly helped improve the work I’ve produced over the past 3 years. Even if you don’t want to get involved in the conversations that occur you can still subscribe to RSS feed and follow people on twitter, so long as you can get the information to help you it doesn’t matter if you get involved but it sure makes the experience much better.

Join in the Community by Kean Richmond