Life Less Literary

I went for a stroll this afternoon, to check out some art galleries in town (I’ll write that up in detail on the FAD blog sooner or later). Strolled around the edge of town, popping in and out of galleries, bought a couple of magazines and the cheapo Taschen 25 Photo Icons book from the Millennium galleries, and then strolled into the centre proper. Very strange. The G8 interior ministers were spending their second night in Sheffield, and police have been drafted in seemingly from all over the country. Everywhere they were standing in twos, threes, fours, fives, on every corner, in front of almost every shop. There was a very strange atmosphere, not particularly unfriendly or anything, just full of… expectation. In every shop, shopkeepers were standing by the door, as if waiting to shut it and bolt it just in case a herd of protestors came rioting by.

I tried to find somewhere to go for a cup of tea and a piece of cake, but the police seemed to have strategically cordoned off all of the coffee shops. So I walked out of town along West Street, to the café with the sexy waitresses and the home-made cakes. Bliss.

The sense of unreality followed me all the way home. I have no idea how much of it was down the the G8, how much to my own slightly heightened awareness, and how much to the sudden arrival of summer: I felt similarly wierd this morning, going to park and realising that, in the couple of days since I last visited, the grass seems to have grown from somewhere around my ankles to somewhere near my neck, and the previously purple-brown-maroon lake in Crookey Valley Park is now the colour of pea soup.

On the bus I passed men stripped to the waist, somebody in a cowboy hat, shades and a leather waistcoat. Just after I got off I walked past a couple outside the care home at the corner of the road, both were wearing nurses uniforms in different shades of blue, and both looked ecstatic to be walking hand in hand. It was one of those days when I wished I’d had my camera. But didn’t.

Things really are starting to hot up at work, it’s getting terribly exciting.

For the first time in about four years, it feels like I have a really clear idea of what our business is and where it needs to go. We have three strands. First is the local authority/kids stuff, which Allsum is a shopfront for, which pays the bills, keeps our karma in credit, and is a lot of fun.

Second strand is more general web design: I think we now need to establish a separate brand to encompass this (it used to be Bradonpace, but as well as being a crap off-the-shelf name, the whole ronin branding is in need of an overhaul. I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t perhaps make Wavepeople our design company, hence keeping a bit of the samurai reference - “ronin” is Japanese for “wave person”). It’s the area that has given me the most sleepless nights until now, because although web design has been the biggest part of what I do for the last ten years, I still feel uncomfortable coming up with ideas for websites, fitting things into a commercial mould, and generally producing stuff which a lot of the time doesn’t interest me all that much. However, this week Mark has turned my ideas around, by taking them back where we started. I want to try to rediscover some of the sense of fun which was in our early sites built with Keld, and I realised that a lot of that was about narrative and game-play. For years now I have been trying to straitjacket websites into a “This is what we are. This is what we do. Now buy something” model, but when we started out it wasn’t like that, everything was about having fun. Of course, you’ve got to include all the “this is what we are” stuff in there somewhere, but it’s so much more fun if you can work it into a story, and put some pointless game-playing widgets around it. I think my favourite thing I ever did on a website was in 1996 when I hid some invisible hyperlinks on the Diesel website and, if you clicked on one, you would get lost inside the Diesel Hotel’s ventilation system. It was web-design as an adventure game, and I miss it. Since then, Jakob Nielsen has probably loomed too large in my mind, but I’ve finally decided screw you Jakob, from now on all of my websites will take far too long to browse, and will be gloriously pointless.

The third strand is FAD, which has been on ice for around two years now although we’ve gradually been accumulating a FAD crew who accompany us to private views most Thursdays, taking pictures and writing up their thoughts for the FAD blog. FAD feels like something that is ready to make it big again. But what excites me most about FAD is that Mark & I agreed we can almost certainly get the funding and other necessaries for a FAD gallery in Sheffield. This is so exciting that I don’t know where to start. Our own art gallery! Selling works from our little crew of artists, putting on our own shows, selling prints, magazines, T-shirts, books… other nice little things which we like. With some work-space so that I can gradually build up Allsum/Bradonpace/FAD’s Sheffield design studio. And so many more opportunities for networking, for growing the artistic community in Sheffield, for making it big in the art world… everything. Wooo-ooo-ooo! Am I excited! Now we’ve just got to make it happen…