Thinking

If I lived and worked in San Fransisco, the current “death of the agency” debate may have slightly more poignancy than it does in the UK. San Francisco and the wider Silicon Valley is undoubtedly living through a huge tech bubble, and has been for some time. The slew of new tech businesses quickly hoovered up the local talent, before starting to ship them in from around the country and the rest of the world. This includes dozens of Brits I know who have left these shores for a better life in California.

Recently I became familiar with :checked, a pseudo class which allows you to dynamically change the CSS of an element based on it’s state. Using :checked and :not (the negation pseudo class), I built a tooltip toggle feature. I think it’s a pretty awesome use of pseudo classes, so I’m going to share it.

It was a Tuesday, but not just any Tuesday.

Along with former resident, and tour guide Graham Smith showing me the sights, we headed up to Manchester, home to some of the greatest American food I have ever eaten, a thriving web community, trams, and a very special new event - Talk UX.

In what might be the most abridged week notes yet, here's what the team did last week...

Tickets for the third and final Responsive Day Out go on sale at 11am tomorrow, Tuesday, March 3rd.

Public speaking & jabberwocks, new project wins and Ant's departure.

Get ready to pounce on March 3rd.

It's post-Hack farm week. You might think everyone would be in a bit of a stupor, but not here. Not in Clearleft HQ, where it's all been kicking off.

At the beginning of the month I spent my first week with the Clearleft team in the English countryside for one of the annual Hack Farms. It's like Downton Abbey and Silicon Valley had a baby.

This year's Hack Farm spawned a couple of Strava-based projects, including one building on the Strava API to help provide users with some interesting historical reporting on their activities.

Strava's become pretty popular in the Clearleft towers. At this year's Hack Farm we explored a concept of making Strava better using a heads up display and a little imagination.

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)