Last friday I waved good bye to my friends at LexisNexis. After 5 years I have moved on to a new company called Ellipsis Media. They are a web design agency which also sells and supports its own suite of online products. My role is that of art director and I jumped straight in on monday.

Since monday I’ve surprisingly got immediately involved in design work, creating an html email and flash game for Cancer Research UK. There was already a concept produced which I’ve been working on to satisfy the client, and then finalising the look and feel of the game, creating the symbols which I’ve passed on to the developer.

So, that’s all good. I had thought I’d be tied up in meetings for the most part getting to know the workings of the company but that has had to take a back seat. At this moment in time the company has a ton of work on, which is brilliant, and this clearly takes priority.

The guys here are cool too. I’ve not really had much chance to talk to them so far but hopefully we might get a chance to go for a drink one evening and step away from work mode.

It’s been a wierd few days, leaving LexisNexis behind, not going in to Holborn on monday morning. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it. 5 years is a long time in one place, my collegues were like family and the office a second home. I will miss it. Thankfully they’re having a summer party on the 28th at Soho House which I’ve been invited to which should be fun.

I just spent the last week out in the States. I flew out to Dayton, Ohio on the Sunday where I spent the week through to Friday and then jumped on the plane to New York for a couple of days.

The reason for my trip to Dayton was that the LexisNexis UX department had their second annual UX week. This involved bringing together members of the team from across the States and Europe to participate in activities and talks on a range of usability subjects.

I hadn’t expected to go. I have handed in my notice with the company, leaving on the 1st of June, so thought I’d miss out and have to stay in London to focus on finishing off my project commitments. As it turned out I was able to get on top of this and so given the chance to fly over and take part.

As a result, I was suddenly put in the position of having to give a presentation on the Monday, after lunch, on the subject of accessibility. Given the short notice I spent the flight over writing up my notes for the slides in a word document, then when I got to my hotel at 4:30pm local time I set to work putting it all together in a flash presentation. Luckily I was able to use the Monday morning to wrap it up, adding the finishing touches. I’d hoped to cover more, including a review of the global product and perhaps some images to break it up but needless to say I ran out of time.

However, I think the depth of the information made the presentation credible, even if i struggled at times to remember the flow (having not had time to practice and review). I will upload the presentation to my site shortly so that it available for download.

The rest of the week was fun. Lots of things to keep us busy including, on the Thursday, a visual design competition. I had originally come up with the idea as a test across all disciplines. The test covering all aspects of interface design. I thought it would be interesting to see how each discipline coped with having to handle over areas of the process. In my mind I thought it would show that visual designer were the most prepared to handle other roles and could take a project from concept to completion.

The reality was that only visual design took part so it really just became a visual design test. In my mind it was a chance for us to step away from branding convention and try something new. I reality, on review it seemed that the designers couldn’t break away from existing visual styling. To be honest I was disappointed with the results. We only had 2 to 3 hours to come up with something but that is no excuse. It was a great opportunity for everyone to showcase their skills but it never materialized.

The resulting presentation at the end of the day to the whole of UX was fairly predictable too. I think people missed the point of the exercise and couldn’t see past ‘brand’ conventions. My design that had an underlying LexisNexis feel but tackled the brand in a completely different way:

• focused on ‘the grid’ removing the use of red
• tackled the poor navigation of the existing interface
• incorporated some marketing techniques
• introduced new graphical elements for a web 2.0 feel

As Carl pointed out, the other designs were essentially cut and pastes of other interface designs with the appropriate content overlaid.Click here to see my design.

On a social level it was great to see everyone, meet those I’d only spoken to by phone, and then get the chance to say goodbye one last time.

Before returning to London, I did a short stop over in New York, staying with my friend Andy just off 72nd & Broadway.
It didn’t look like we were going to make it at first. I had a car all week, a ford explorer, which I dropped at the airport on Friday afternoon but when we checked in all flights to New York were canceled. I ended up hiring a mini-van and driving everyone to Cincinnati so we could make a flight to JFK! On the way we passed a major crash on the opposite side of the freeway with cars flipped all over the place. Nasty.

Got in to NY at 10 and cabbed it to Broadway. Made it to Andy’s for 11 and went out to his local. Just like Cheers, everyone knew his name. Ha. Despite this we managed to drag ourselves down to a bar and watch the FA cup final the next morning.

That afternoon I went for a run round Central Park. Did a loop of the perimeter and then round the reservoir in the middle, clocking up about 16km. The result of this is that I have broken 500km since I started with Nike +! Pretty good going I reckon. Hopefully I’ll be well clear of 1000km before the end of the year.

Saturday night I met up with the other LexisNexis guys and went out for dinner at an over priced restaurant called Smith & Wollensky. They do steaks, the cheapest which is about £30. They might be big but you don’t really need that much food anyway. Plus, the wine was even more of a skank. I bought a bottle of house red and a white, and the price was roughly £60!! So much for America being cheaper the the UK. That really left a sour taste in the mouth. Especially when there are so many great, cheap places to go.

That aside I had a fun night. We met up with Andy again and went to a few bars in the West Village. The night turned vague toward the end, which I think was about 4am?

The pity of the trip was that I had so much work to do for Caroline Sylge’s website that I spent the whole of Sunday working until I got the plane back to the UK.

Who knows when I’ll next head state side. I hope it’s before my new jeans wear out!

I’ve just spent the evening digging through a pile of old cds and trying to clear out any of no value (some how they just seem to build up). And it’s a miracle! I found the cd containing my old rafcareers.com website which I built back in 2001. I’ve been wanting to add it to my portfolio since I put it together.

The site, or the version which I’ve added to the portfolio is the flash version. I also designed an html version, with the help of Tom Thorpe, when I worked at design net. The previous version had been built by Deep End but the COI weren’t happy with it so we got the contract to sort things out.

Having such a clear and obvious brand I developed the design around that and the idea of using an airbase to navigate around the site. It was a fun project to work on although we ran in to a number of technical issues, primarily with the integration of a ‘flight bag’ (shopping basket) to save jobs which users were interested in.

In the end though, the site launched and was extremely well received, making the cover story of Cre@te Online and being awarded 10/10 on The Web Review, on ITV.

Adding an archived version of the site to my portfolio proved to be a bit of a mare. When Tom burnt it to disc using his mac the formatting of the file names was changed to all caps and the names were truncated. So it has taken me a good hour to go through and rename the files correctly, opening all the different flas and seeing what loads where. As it stands I think I got most of it working. At least you can get a sense of what the site was like. I don’t think any of the games will work, or the downloads either.

So if you are interested click here to check it out, but remember it isn’t live so not everything works!