Thinking

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)

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.