Thinking

Every year at Clearleft, there's a week where we step away from client work, go off the grid, and disappear into the countryside to work on something fun. We call it Hack Farm.

We love the work GDS and others have been doing to improve the provision of digital services in the UK, and want to apply our expertise to one of the most interesting design challenges out there today. However the GDS procurement process is horribly broken, excluding the most experienced teams and favoring cheaper over better. Let's try and do something about this.

This week had an interesting twist: for a short time, we were behaving more like a print design agency than a web design agency. Boxman has been scheming up a physical printed deliverable for a client, which is why we've had illustrators, copy writers, and book designers in the office.

All the usual client-related activities are spinning away at Clearleft Towers, but they're overshadowed in our minds by the looming prospect of Hack Farm, our annual retreat in the country. It's just over one week away, and we're drawing up the cooking plans with military precision. We're splitting into teams of three or four people responsible for one night's cooking. A certain level of rivalry is emerging already. (I'm on Team Spaghetti And Meatballs, by the way)

I’ve been scheming away for a little while now on the third and final Responsive Day Out, and things have been working out better than I could have hoped—my dream line-up is becoming a reality.

The over-caffeinated edition.

The inexorable hipsterisation of Clearleft continues: fixie bikes, coffee machines, table tennis, facial hair ...it's just embarrassing really.

Quite a significant chunk of my time last year was spent organising dConstruct 2014. The final result was worth it, but it really took it out of me. It got kind of stressful there for a while: ticket sales weren't going as well as previous years, so I had to dip my toes into the world of... (shudder) marketing.

We spent a huge chunk of 2014 working on a new version of our hugely popular Silverback usability testing tool for the Mac. Want to know what we've been up to, where we've got to, and what's next? Then read on...

As we lurch ever closer to Christmas, only one question remains to be answered. Who did throw the cheese at the Christmas party?

I've spent a great deal of time this year finding ways to becoming more involved in solving the problems faced by the education system in England when it comes to the web.

After launching my first project at Clearleft, I revisited the site to see how I could improve its performance. This week I’m going to share some quick wins that I have learnt and used to shed a significant number of bytes and HTTP requests on silverbackapp.com.

When presented with my first development project, my instinct was to jump straight into writing code. Turns out I was getting a few steps ahead of myself and Jeremy had to rein me in and take me back to basics.

The days are short, cold, and grey. The nights long, moody, and haunted by the echoes of howling winds. And so we huddle around the warming monitors of our workstations, and share user stories around roaring post-it notes. Winter is here, that most paradoxically productive of digital seasons.

A collaboration between Clearleft and the Wellcome Trust.

It must officially be winter now, because this week not only have we been finalising our selections for the staff Christmas dinner (ooh!), but a few folk have been struck down with Lady Flu (Sophie) ’n’ Man Flu (Ben W, Graham). Yep, it’s Lemsip a-go-go here.