Thinking

We couldn’t be more thrilled to announce our final UX London speaker: Bill Buxton. A true pioneer, Bill is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences. Not only is Bill a trailblazing UX authority, he’s also one of the best speakers we’ve ever seen, which makes us even more excited that he’ll be joining our stellar line up.

Be sure to nab your place as swiftly as you can - our Super Early Bird places may have sold out in a few hours, but Early Bird tickets are still available. You can register through the UX London site, where you’ll find our full list of fantastic speakers.

We’re very excited to announce that Ampersand, our web typography conference, will return next year - back by public demand! We had a splendid time at this year’s inaugural event, which featured some fantastic speakers and a great crowd of font fans. We’ll be making further announcements, including details of our speakers, soon, but in the meantime mark Friday, June 15th in your diary!

Also, don’t forget to snap up your place at UX London 2012. Early Bird tickets are still available, so grab ‘em while you can!

We’re thrilled to have some fantastic sponsors on board for next year’s UX London: Executive sponsors Balsamiq, and Associate sponsors Axure and Optimal Workshop. The folk at Balsamiq are the creators of Mockups and myBalsamiq, the brilliant, rapid wireframing tools that reproduce the experience of sketching. Axure RP is one of the best known prototyping tools, used by UX professionals all over the world. The recently released Mac version of Axure RP has some big fans in the Clearleft office. And Optimal Workshop have taken their years of experience in usability and consulting to create a suite of usability study tools that we love - we regularly run Tree Tests and Card Sorts on our client projects.

Also, UX London tickets are still selling fast - there are only a handful of Early Bird places left, so be sure to nab yours quickly!

We’ve had to make space on the bookshelf this week as, very excitingly, we’ve won Net Magazine’s Agency of the Year Award - for the second time! We were entirely thrilled to win again, so thank you very much to the gang at .Net, and everyone who voted for us.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to attend the awards ceremony (though some of our former colleagues kindly accepted on our behalf), as we were all squirreled away in the Herefordshire countryside on what we’ve taken to referring to as Hack Farm. Here we spent a week developing a spontaneous, one-off project. We had a brilliant time, and came away with a new site which we’re pretty proud of: Map Tales, where you can easily create and share map-based stories. Take a look - and add your own tale, why don’t you?

Here at Clearleft we love The Week magazine, so were really happy when they approached us to create their iPad App. Excitingly, the app launched last week and has been getting a fantastic response.

The Week magazine is a brilliantly entertaining, condensed serving of the week’s news and events - basically all that’s fit to print in one handy package! It was started back in the mid ‘90s as a antidote to the deluge of information that readers got from the unwieldy, dense broadsheets. Since then, of course many folk have switched to getting their news online, sending many print publications into a downward spiral… but The Week has managed to buck this trend, actually growing in popularity each consecutive year since its launch.

As our super UX Designer, Harry says: “Dennis Publishing knew they had a winning formula for The Week magazine and they wanted to be certain that none of the magic was lost in translation when they created the iPad edition. This is where Clearleft came in – kicking off a project with numerous research and design iterations; and testing lots of high fidelity prototypes before settling on the best-performing design. We’re amazingly proud and excited about this product, and we can’t wait to see how it fares in the App Store.”

We’re very happy to be donating 10% of profits from our Silverback app to The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. We love receiving updates about the Fund’s incredible work, and last month were thrilled to be invited to the annual Dian Fossey Circle Lunch, which took place at the Yale club in New York. It was great to meet CEO Clare Richardson and legendary Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver, and also to hear more about what the charity achieves in the field, protecting gorillas in the wild. If you’d like to find out more about their work, or to make a donation, we’re sure the gorillas would thank you!

It’s always super to see our projects go live, and we were very happy to see the ITV Food site unveiled. Packed with recipes and the full dish on ITV’s chefs and food programmes, it certainly gets our taste buds going! And amongst the many treats are lots of delectable Autumn recipes which we’re looking forward to trying - mm!

We’re rather thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Clearleft team - whizz-kid front-end developer Josh Emerson. Josh has been working with us on a freelance basis for a while and has wowed us with his talent and enthusiasm. We’re excited to see the fantastic contributions that he’ll continue to make to our projects.

And if you fancy joining the gang here at Clearleft, we’re currently seeking a brilliant UX Designer. Our ideal candidate will be talented, passionate, and have at least five years of dedicated UX experience. Take a look at the full details (and online application form) and let us know if you think you’ve got what it takes to be the next Clearleft’ie.

It’s now a little over two weeks ‘til dConstruct, and it’s a hive of activity here at Clearleft HQ. We’re very much looking forward to welcoming everyone to Brighton for another fantastic and inspiring day. And we’re pleased to announce three new sponsors: Ubelly, Fontdeck and The Guardian - welcome aboard!

For those of you who are heading to the conference, if you’re planning on staying in Brighton but haven’t already booked your accommodation, keep an eye on your inbox, as we’ve just sent out a list of local hotels that have availability. If you haven’t booked a ticket, there are still a few spaces left on two of our workshops, and with tickets for those you gain complimentary entry to the conference.

Now, roll on September 2nd!