Thinking

Recovering from a fantastic UX London in the best way possible, Kate is taking some well-deserved time off.

We're really excited to announce that Matter – the scientific publishing start-up we worked on with our friend Bobbie Johnson – has been acquired by Obvious Corporation. Here's our part of the story.

This week was almost entirely monopolised by some conference called UX London. And what a conference it was.

Pattern portfolios are a great way to deliver modular, flexible and responsive design systems. They also offer huge benefits to both clients and technical partners when compared to traditional page-by-page static page template deliverables.

Judging by the amount of activity in the Clearleft office this week, you'd think we were already packing up to move into our new office.

We’re really pleased to announce the full schedule for this year’s Ampersand web typography conference.

It’s been a shorter week than usual, what with the Easter holidays about to kick off. The Clearlefties are dispersing to celebrate the feast of the Zombie Christ in their own individual ways.

The big news this week is somewhat bittersweet: Harry is leaving us for pastures new and the undiscovered country of freelancing. We’ll miss having him around.

Richard is back from South by Southwest and he’s brought a miserable cold back with him. So he’s taking some time out to recuperate. Meanwhile Andy is off galavanting in Mexico with some post-SxSW sunshine and diving. The rest of us persevere in the cold drab English weather.

It’s been less than two weeks since we had our Responsive Day Outhere in Brighton and we’re all still buzzing with ideas from the knowledge bombs that were dropped in the Corn Exchange.

The big news this week was the announcement of our move to a new office later this year. This is something we’re all really excited about. We’ve been gleefully poring over architectural drawings like Bond villains planning their lair. I’m still holding out for a fireman’s pole right down the middle of the building. Is that too much to ask?

With a number of new projects kicking-off, discussion during our weekly design review turned to initial visual design explorations. We looked at some tools and techniques that can help us do this, and we weighed up the pros and cons of each.

Since Clearleft started in 2005, we’ve grown steadily but surely. We’ve spent the vast majority of that time housed by our friends at Lighthouse, moving from their smallest studio to their largest. We love it here, but we’re starting to feel a little cramped, so we felt it was time to strike out on our own and secure a permanent base for our company.

We've been going to SxSW for the last 8 years and have had some great experiences along the way. However could 2013 be our last?

This week was dominated by two big events: the Responsive Day Out, and the launch of Springboard. But that's not all: everyone’s been beavering away on a nice broad range of client work.

Today we launched Springboard, a fast-track programme of design and UX thinking for teams with big ideas but who are short on time or budget. I thought I'd write a quick post to shed some light on the thinking behind it.