Frustrated by your food waste?

Are you always:

• busy
• tired
• hungry

and never really manage to make the most of all those helpful shopping list and food saving apps on offer?  (Or didn't know they existed?)

I'd love to have a quick chat with you.

I'm doing some research in to how we struggle with using our food, just by simply shooting-the-breeze about our experiences.

Drop me a message or leave a comment if you'd like to chat.

Quick snippet: Adobe Reader error message

One of the things I've constantly read about in my UXD studying is how error messages should be informative, helpful and constructive for the user.

Good work Adobe, good work.

It reminds of me of one time I was "using" Baselight, an incredibly advanced/complicated colour grading system made by Filmlight.  It's a desperately unwieldy system, with not so much a learning curve but cliff.  (I get the sense the developers and company take pride in that, though.)  

Anyway, while frantically trying to get some work done it spat out this garbled error message that ended with:

"This can't happen."

Oh wow, good to know, THANKS.

Two snippets: Merrell and Inside No.9

There's an advert I've been seeing around the Tube for Merrell walking shoes.  I've had a quick search online but can't find it - next time I see it I'll take a photo and update this post.

UPDATE: HERE'S THE AD:

I've just started a part time UXD course (more on that later) and quite a few of my new classmates come from a design background - which makes me panic as I don't.

However, even I can't quite believe this advert got released.  There's a big wide shot of a couple hiking in the background on the bottom layer, but they're massively overlapped by a hulking great portrait shot of a bloke's face that looks like it's taken from a Hugo Boss advert or something.

Worst of all, the actual shoes themselves - correct me if I'm wrong, but the supposed star of the advert? - are superimposed on top of the above, with one pressed down at the toe angle.  (So ... the USP is the shoes can bend like 100% of the other walking shoes out there?)  BUT, the madness doesn't stop there folks.  Because these shoes are next to a whopping great head shot of this guy, they look LIKE TINY TOY SHOES - it's ridiculous!  I couldn't stop looking at the advert with disbelief at its design.

I really hope this advert isn't considered decent design, because then there's not much hope for me.  

As I see it, placement, scale, identity, theme and focus are just completely out of whack.

On a more positive note...
I'm just catching up with an excellent series on the iPlayer - Inside No. 9 by those League of Gentlemen blokes.

It's an anthology series, so each episode is unrelated to the next.  I've only caught the odd episode so far, but having just seen Sheridan Smith's episode, I cannot rate it highly enough.

If you're looking for superb examples of sheer economy of storytelling, transitions, subtext, a twist, and an emotional thump at the end, then look no further.  Totally top notch stuff.

You can watch the episode here.

You've only got until Saturday so hurry.

Brand new CV

After many years doing back to back Marvel films in the UK (Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron) I've had to revamp and update my CV as part of my career change.

It was a tough but great exercise to concisely summarise what I'd been doing these past years, and state my future goals.

As part of it, I had to update my LinkedIn profile which was [sarcasm/] REALLY FUN! [/sarcasm], and can be seen here:

My LinkedIn Profile

For the CV, I did a lot of searching around for great examples of UX CVs, and found this template that you can buy to get started with a great design:

Light Resume Template

I've opted for a two-page CV, and you can see it here:

My April 2015 CV

Before the moment passes.

I'm not sure how long Blogger will be around for (I may have even read somewhere that Google plans to scrap it) but for what it's worth I need to get somethings off my mind, and without a website or actual blog, I've hastily set this up.

I'm an apprentice in User Experience design, coming from a career in feature film digital workflows - Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron and Eon's Skyfall amongst others - and hopefully this blog will chronicle my successful transition to UXD.

Other than my thoughts and adventures on that particularly journey, other things to get off my mind are:

• my feature film career, the films I worked on, the environments I've left behind, and the software and hardware combos I struggled with
• photography and filmmaking
• My personal digital/tech life - e.g. I'm really very close to leaving Facebook, and why
• My hobby of creating animated book trailers
• My ongoing fascination with storytelling and its importance

After lots of reading and typing up notes from UX books, I spent today searching the prospective London job scene and how I may enter it, so now I need to kick back and relax for a bit.

Lots more coming very soon.