Wisely if sincerely…

First published by Daily Express on 16 April 1963

According to the BCA’s website…

The British Cartoon Archive is getting a major facelift!

Visit us at www.cartoons.ac.uk after 5 November 2008 to use our new, updated website.

A grant by the Joint Information Systems Committee is not only enabling the BCA to digitise the Carl Giles archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history, but it is also giving the BCA the opportunity to update its website to significantly increase its accessibility, usability and teaching-related resources.

All the existing content will be moved to www.cartoons.ac.uk and will be available when the site is launched in November 2008. In addition, Over 12,000 new images from the Giles archive will also be available on the new site with more material and functionality being added in the months following the launch.

The existing database will remain for the time being, although content will not be updated after the end of October 2008.

http://www.dpreview.com

http://www.kenrockwell.com

http://strobist.blogspot.com

http://tipsandtricksphotography.blogspot.com

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk

I design a regular newsletter that has just been pipped at the post for a major industry award, for two years running. Fingers crossed that it’s going to be third time lucky for 2009!

The Trade Association Forum aims to “assist buyers, government departments, researchers, the public and other enquirers wishing to access information about UK trade associations and business sectors.” In doing so, they run Best Practice Awards every year, with sub-categories that include coverage of things like newsletters and magazines. The lowdown for 2008 is here and my contribution is touched upon thus…

They <the judges> also felt that the Association of Interior Specialists deserved a special mention for their unusual broadsheet format newsletter offering a good chance for member companies to publicise themselves and their services and products.

You can read about the work I do for AIS here.

Various forms of colour-blindness exist. One of the most common is red-green colour blindness, and, depending on where you get your figures, this affects around 7% of males. (Women are afflicted in very small numbers due to having to have defects in both X chromosomes.)

That’s a large part of the viewing audience, so have a care when slapping pastel-shaded text around, especially in areas of low contrast. Actually, that’s good advice for legibility across the board - not just for colour-blind people.

So, given that colour-blindness is not that rare (you probably know someone who has this problem), why is it overlooked so casually? I don’t know, but I’m colour-blind, and a visit to blogcrowds.com had me in a tizz recently. Before you can leave comments you have to circumvent an antispam mechanism. You know, the things that usually ask you to type in some scrambled text. Except I was presented with this…

Pick all the green ones? Crikey, I’m guessing that some are yellow or mustardy, but without grabbing the image and reading the RGBs in Photoshop I’m stumped.

Because they’re isolated by white space in the above example I would be tempted to select h, q, f, k, j, f, c, x, m, r and q! I know some are different, but to my eye they could all be green!

I tried four times, and failed. I noted the line at the bottom about contacting admin for help. You know what? I couldn’t be bothered.

Then I thought again. No, I would contact admin for help: I sent them an email, as advised. Over 2 weeks later and I’m still awaiting a reply. Several million minus points there I think ;)

Your average colour-blind chap isn’t so afflicted that he regularly goes through red lights. It doesn’t work like that, it’s all about context. I rarely find it a problem, and if I’m unsure I ask someone to help me.

However, deliberately designing an antispam mechanism that actually goes out of its way to slip up a large portion of the audience is absolute lunacy.

I’m currently helping Mike Robinson with the development of Mloovi.com - a service developed to provide free translations from and to 24 languages via RSS feeds. What’s the fuss? Well, it’s the first time anyone has packaged this service in quite this way. The lowdown is that if you’re a blog author you can now reach out to the non-English speaking world and, importantly, vice versa. For example, if you’re championing a cause via your blog in Russia, you can now communicate with English speakers. Moreover, English need not appear in the mix at all!

My role at the moment is split in a few directions…

• Most of the time I’m engaged with revamping the visual identity, and the look of the website.
• At the same time I’m maintaining and contributing to the Mloovi blog. My small skill at writing is also going to be tasked with constructing PR materials and the like.
• While all this is going on, I form part of a triumvirate that bounces ideas around cyberspace, using assembla. Working this way is essential, not least because Mike lives in the Czech Republic!

We’re hard at work with the site revamp - I’ll post again when this is done. If you visit Mloovi now you’ll see Mike’s working test model, that’s already delivering many thousands of translated pages.