Thinking

We’re very pleased to announce Adobe as Premier Sponsors of UX London. They’ll be joining us in London next April, and we look forward to seeing them there for what promises to be another fantastic event. There are still additional sponsorship places if you’d like to be part of the super UX festivities. And don’t forget to register if you haven’t already - the current ticket price is only available for a limited time!

It’s all go in the rather elegant world of Fontdeck. The webfont service was a highly commended entry for Most Innovative New Technology in Econsultancy’s Innovation Awards, which we’re thrilled about. And of course that follows hot on the heels of its recent win at the BIMAs. Illustrating just how impressive the fonts on offer can look, you can now see a gallery of Fontdeck served sites. Take a peek and see how a little Fontdeck typography can inspire your site.

We’ve rolled out the welcome mat again for our new User Experience Designer, Harry Brignull. Harry is a veteran design researcher who has previously worked at Flow, Madgex and Amberlight. In addition to his splendid work, Harry spreads the UX word by helping to run the thriving UX Brighton events, and curating the famous Dark Patterns wiki. We’re delighted that he’s now part of the Clearleft team.

Back in November we took part in a World Usability Day promotion, donating 100% of Silverback app sales to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. In addition to our own sales, our friends at Optimal Workshop included Silverback in their World Usability Day bundle, and we’re thrilled to say we’ve reached a combined total of $8,500!

The hard-working folk at the Fossey Fund are thrilled too. President and CEO Clare Richardson said: “The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund protects and monitors silverback gorillas and their groups every day in Africa, so it is especially wonderful to add the support of Clearleft, Optimal Workshop and Silverback software buyers to our efforts. This donation will help us continue our daily efforts to save this important endangered species, including the all-important silverbacks, who are known for their strength and leadership in guiding the other gorillas.”

At Clearleft we’re continuing to support the gorillas in donating 10% of Silverback profits to the Fossey Fund. They currently need help in raising money to build a fence at their gorilla rehabilitation centre - a costly project, but essential for the well-being of the orphan gorillas. To make a donation, or for more information, check out the Fossey Fund website. You can also follow them on Twitter.

UX London, now in its third year, has always been popular with those already working in the industry. We bring industry leaders such as Don Norman, Jared Spool, Alan Cooper, and Jesse James Garrett to London to share their wisdom and passion. We do this by combining inspiration talks with practical, hands-on workshops that give attendees skills they can use every day, and share with their colleagues and clients.

But we know that three day conferences aren’t cheap, and are often unaffordable for students. We really care about the future of interaction design and helping the next generation of talent is an excellent way of ensuring that it’s in safe hands. In previous years we’ve done this by using student volunteers to help out at the event, but we want to do more. This year, we’re offering three students a free conference pass, worth £995. If you’re interested, send us either an email or video explaining why coming to UX London would be useful to you and your future career. Please include your contact details, what course you’re on and where you’re studying. We’ll choose the three we find the most inspiring. Please send your entries in to sophie@clearleft.com by Friday 25 February.

Check out Fontdeck’s very merry typographic advent calendar - or rather, Adfont Calendar! There you’ll find a free webfont available every day in December.

Since its launch a few days ago, the Adfont Calendar has gone viral on Twitter, with thousands of tweets resulting in tens of thousands of visitors snapping up the fonts.

If you haven’t yet booked your ticket for UX London, you really must get your skates on! The reduced Standard rate is only available until January 28th, so be sure to snap one up before then. You can check out the speakers and programme to see what splendid and enlightening UX wonders we’ve lined up for you this year. As ever, it promises to be a fantastic three days, packed with the inspirational expertise UX London is famous for. See you there!

We were mighty proud for Fontdeck to be shortlisted for no fewer than three prestigious BIMA awards this year. Fontdeck’s nominations were for Best Web App, and special awardsfor Usability & Accessibility, and Innovation.

And at the awards ceremony, we couldn’t have been more thrilled when Fontdeck was announced winner of Best Web App (and it’s a fetching looking award too!), so thank you, BIMA.

Drumroll, please! We’re delighted to announce the arrival of our new interface designer, Michelle O’Loughlin. After two years working in New Zealand, Michelle recently returned to Blighty and has now found her way to Brighton, and (luckily for us) Clearleft Towers. She has over ten years’ experience, designing for an impressive medley of clients - and of course we’re looking forward to her bringing her design wizardry to our upcoming projects.

Congratulations to our very own Cennydd Bowles, who’s been announced as the Closing Plenary Speaker at the IA Summit 2011. He’s the first international speaker to be bestowed with this honour, which comes after impressing folk at many recent events, including this year’s IA Summit, along with SXSW, UX London and SHiFT. Of course, we’re mighty proud that his UX wisdom is getting such recognition!

If you’ve not already snapped up a copy of Cennydd and James Box’s book, Undercover User Experience Design, until 21/11 the PDF format is available for just $9.99!

We at Clearleft like to think that our Silverback software is already quite fantastic (easy, affordable, and gets the thumbs up from lots of happy UX folk), but for World Usability Day it’ll be getting an added bonus - 100% of the day’s sales will be going to the The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. So if you haven’t already experienced the joys of simple and truly effective Silverback, buy your license this Thursday, November 11th, and send a little love to the gorillas!

And if you’re in the market for some tip top UX tools, our friends at Optimal Workshop are offering an incredible World Usability Day bundle which you can check out here. Amongst the goodies you’ll get are Silverback and a $70 donation to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund - it’s a real steal of a deal!

Firstly, and rather splendidly, the complete line up of talks and workshops for UX London will be announced tomorrow, so be sure to check that out. We’ve again been lucky enough to assemble a top notch group of speakers who’ll be sharing their wisdom, and we can’t wait to unveil them.

Also unveiled is our Universal Playback site, which has now gone live, and is looking rather slick and super. If you’re intrigued to know more about our work on that and additional Universal sites, along with Channel 4 News, Razoo, Riverford, Gumtree and Mozilla Add-ons, we’ve just added details about those here. It takes lots of tea and cake to fuel those ideas, you know!

Crikey! If you hear champagne corks popping it’s because we’ve been nominated for not one but two lovely awards! Fontdeck, our rather splendid one stop shop for webfonts, is a finalist in the BIMA Awards’ Web App category. And Clearleft are once again in the final three for .Net Awards’ Design Agency of the Year - it was a treat to be crowned last year, and we’re thrilled to be in the running again. Goodness, with all this excitement we need to sit down with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit…

We’re happy to have a full house again after a couple of weeks of Clearlefties gadding around the world speaking at conferences. Andy Budd just got back from Web 2.0 Expo in New York, IDEA in Philadelphia, and Iceweb in Reykjavik. Jeremy’s been at An Event Apart in Washington DC, and Fronteers in Amsterdam, where he made the opening keynote address. And a little closer to home, Cennydd took part in FOWA.

Cennydd also shared he and James Box’s UX wisdom, running the first of their UX Fundamentals workshops. And their book, Undercover User Experience Design, is now available, so make sure you snap up a copy!

And speaking of things to snap up, UX London 2011 tickets go on sale tomorrow! Early Bird tickets are strictly limited, so grab yours while you can!

It’s been an exciting few days at Clearleft towers. Last week Channel 4 News launched our new site redesign, which has received a fantastically enthusiastic response. And we were tickled to see Jon Snow walking all over it - in the nicest possible way!

Our friends at Razoo also launched their new site, which is looking rather splendid, if we do say so ourselves.

And we’ve just started working with super U.S. nut-sellers, Nuts Online - after our kick off workshops with them last week, we’re now beavering away on their redesign. Watch this space!

We’re very pleased to announce our line-up for UX London 2011, running from 13th to 15th April. We have a fabulous array of presenters who will be speaking and running workshops over the three day event, including Alan Cooper, Robert Fabricant, Sunni Brown, Kate Rutter, Matt Jones and Josh Porter.

Tickets for next year’s event will be released on Tuesday 12 October, at 11am. Stick the date in your diary now! We only have limited number of early bird tickets available, so grab them whilst they’re hot.