Sitting on the plane flying back to London, having a glass of Chardonnay and reviving  the weekend away from pitiful British summer, city smoke and just life routine… I am glad to say  the weekend was a success.

It is that time of a year, when Veronika gets older (yes, we all do, even the richest and smartest of us) on one particular day in July.  Among others, that means one thing -  we should go somewhere to celebrate it. It’s a small tradition of ours. IN the last few years we celebrated it in Paris, Amsterdam, Bath (Bath was great, by the way). Decision about the destination this year was made quite in the last minute (not sure why… I think we were just taking our chances), and we never did regret it.

We got some nice last minute deal at expedia.com with a BA flight (I am soooo glad it wasn’t Ryanair or alike) and a hotel Marconi in the very town center, next to Rialto Bridge. As with most hotels in the cities like this, typically you don’t get an awesome room until you want to splash the cash and we did not expect much from it (in the end, you just need a tidy place not too far from the places of interest to come at night, go to sleep and be off next morning), but there was a pleasant surprise for us. While doing reservation, we put a ’special request’, not because we were expecting to get  it, but just because we could put something in the special field, - a room with a canal view. Now imagine our surprise when we actually got that room with a view, the best one in the hotel. With no extra. What was the catch? Well, for the next night we were getting the smallest room in the hotel. We thought that was fair enough.  So here we are out in our balcony facing the Grand Canal and Rialto Bridge. Awesome! On the second night we had probably, the smallest double room ever, it was more like a wardrobe than a  room, but we were absolutely fine with that :)

Ok, enough of ‘big room’, ’small room’! Venice is definitely a fairy-tale place. Even with those crowds of tourists, it is still surreal. When we we arriving on the boat from the airport, it was exactly what you thought of it, how we pictured it ourselves.

We were sailing along the canal and I was looking at the buildings along it and gondolas and boats and thought to myself - that’s like a candy-shop for a photographer! You don’t even need to think or to look for something - just pull out your camera and push the button - so many things around crying out to be captured. An irony though is that all those sights have bee captured from every possible angle thousands of times already, so you have to be a genius to see something new and unique there. I am definitely not the one, and frankly speaking, I think I am having a bit of creativity crisis right now :) Honestly.

So yes, Venice is beautiful. In every way. It’s probably one of the most distiguishable cities in the world. If I show you a picture, you would instantly say: Yep, that’s Venice.

People are very friendly and relaxed, and apparently it’s a very safe city as well, even at night. Also is it just me or Italians are kind of not as loud as usual there?

Forgive me, but I don’t like well (geometrically) planned cities, like NYC, I love when city grows naturally and organically, even if that means troubles finding a particular place in those mazes and dead ends. That’s what I like about London, and that’s what makes Venice charming, though less practical. Narrow streets, extremely narrow passages, a lot of dead ends… well in the end, Venice is built on a bunch of  islands, remember?

Yes, of course there are hordes of tourists (and I heard a lot of Russian speech as well), but just take a road aside from the main routes and you find yourself in a very quiet, intimate and often empty streets.

We spent quite some time just walking around, exploring the city, popped in into a few museums and galleries, but mostly we were just enjoying  the scenery, and were just happy to recognize the views we’d seen in the glossy magazines for years. We’ve also bought few masks, in case we will receive an invitation to attend some masquerade.

(This was a funny example of a literate translation)

Mind you though, Venice is veeeery expensive. Hey, we don’t live in the cheapest place in the world (London, that is), and still we were very surprised with the Venice’s price tag. The pound-euro ridiculous 1:1 exchange rate also did not help. Transport, exhibitions, food, I mean we were hoping to get a taste of local cuisine for the local price, but actually it turned out the most expensive dinner for two we had so far :), and we did not have anything fancy. I know it is a tourist place, but come on, can you really justify a 120 EUR for 40 minute gondola ride for two :)

Don’t get me wrong. The place is unique, even for Italy and with all those climate changes it will probably drown eventually, but the memories we’ve got are amazing and worth more than money spent, but still there were few things which we have left for our another visit. Hopefully next year. Maybe during the carnival week? Arrivederci Venice, see you soon.

Ok, we are landing now. Captain has just announced that ‘the weather is not that nice with a 20C’. Oh well, life is life.

See many more pictures on my Flickr account. Hope you will like them.

Another website designed and built. I told you I’d been busy :)

This time it is a young real estate agency in UK. I was recommended for the job by my ex-boss (thanks for that ;) and it was a very enjoyable ride.

I guess the most interesting thing about this project was the fact that the only form of communication which we used was though emails. I haven’t seen my client in person yet and haven’t even heard his voice:) He lives outside London and was quite busy at that time for initial meetings and somehow this email-only form was established.

Even more Wordpress tweaking, and more functionality in the back-end. The website features a clean and rather minimalist design (I guess this is quite characteristic of me) and was built based on client’s requirements. One of them was presenting property information in .pdf and having a preview on the website rather than posting all the description on the website. This probably wasn’t the best solution ever, but it still made the information quite accessible and also would make it easier for client to update the website with a less risk of breaking the pages.

Hopefully website will be filled with more content shortly. Next week I will be meeting my client (for the first time :) to show him how to make updates on the website though the CMS.

www.everardcole.co.uk

Last week I’ve launched a new website for a music festival in London, Brick Lane Takeover, an event organized and sponsored by Macmillan Cancer Support, a big UK charity organization.

Macmillan maintains a very strong corporate identity on print and in digital, and this was the biggest challenge, when building the website (together with the time constrains, which is a very common thing in our industry). You can have 3 colours, and all of them are… green. Literally. Light green, green and dark green. Not much, huh. The same goes with the typefaces - a very limited number with no chance for variation. No wonder the design went through a number of revisions :)

Hopefully, I have managed to incorporate those guidelines without loosing the very spirit of the event - youthful, bold and loud. Actually, it turned up to be too ‘bold’ and too ‘loud’ - I had made a mistake of creating it on 17” laptop where everything looked balanced and legible, but when we opened the site on a more typical monitor… OMG!! everything was HUUUUGE, so I had to hastily change the size of the most of the graphics on the website. Lesson learned.

The website and its Content Management System were built using glorious Wordpress, an amazing open-source framework, but that does not mean that I hadn’t had my share of banging-my-head-against-the-wall moments :)

Enjoy the website - www.bricklanetakeover.org.uk, hope you will like it. And maybe buy a tickets and go to see the bands live…

It’s been quite busy 6 months (I guess, you might have noticed that by the lack of updates). I was contracting for JustGiving, a company in central London, that helps UK charities raise money online, working on the redesign of their website justgiving.com. Was brought in for a week, but stayed for a little longer :)

It was a great experience to work on an in-house project, quite different from working in agency, what I am used to. As a lead front-end developer I was (obviously) doing a lot of HTML and CSS, some jQuery and helping with User Interface redesign. And the good thing was I have also learned a lot from the guys I was working with, so big cheers to the lovely JustGiving team, and especially to @kaichanvong, my extremely enthusiastic half-oriental co-front-end-developer-slash-designer, @wilcolley, a sneaker-freek designer, and of course smart-ass mac-fan-boy UX-slash-UI-slash-IA pro @simondoggett.

We had a lot of fun together, playing pranks on Kai, sharing our obsession with Apple products and all sorts of men’s toys and gadgets that were periodically delivered to us, and of course having a countless number of lunches at that awesome sushi place (God I miss that place, was already being treated like a regular there).

Yeah, that was a good time with a bunch of geeks with SLR cameras, netbooks and ‘I am a PC’ stickers on their belongings (well, some of them), people who would rather post on tweeter than use IM or email. I also think they had the record percentage of iPhone owners among random reference group, and the percentage keeps growing steadily.

I’ve done my job, the website is going to be launched very shortly and my contract is over right before my family is coming to visit me for the fist time since I have moved to London, so next couple of weeks I am going to be busy again being a London guide and a general entertainer.

See you guys later, I will surely come to visit you.

My laptop stand has finally arrived. Yay! They got them back in stock in UK so I happily ordered it on a Friday night. The stand is lovely and sits great with my MBP (no I should probably say ’stands’ well, since it is a stand : ), and it goes hand-in-hand with apple’s ergonomics. From my experience (I tried it before) that’s the best laptop stand, but what I was actually surprised with was… the packaging. It’s really really nice, cubic and with a handle for a convenient handling :) I like it so much that I am actually going to keep it :) Well, until we run out of our storage space.

Another thing which amazes me, when I think about it, is how much the personal recommendation matters. Laptops, headphones, bags, hard drives, all sort of accessories… I am probably a collective look of my friends and people I communicate on a daily basis. Well, the choice of my gear. Yeah, we probably look ridiculously the same. But hey, at least when know what things work when we go to buy them :)

Yesterday the news emerged on a twitter about Dr.Manhattan to make a ‘one-off spectacle appearance’ later at night over the river of Thames. Naturally, I was intrigued to come and see it. Never read the graphic novel itself, but the movie trailer looked uber-cool, so for the last 6 months I was eagerly waiting for its opening in the cinemas.

So what was promised? At 8pm sharp a giant 72 feet figure of the blue-skinned man to emerge from the dusky water of the river and some unseen footage from the movie to be shown along with some other spectacular effects. Well ok, let’s go and see. We were in a hurry to arrive before 8pm, so were there probably 5 mins before that fateful hour. The figure was already there projected on the wall of water in the middle of the river.

8pm. Nothing happened. The figure still floating motionless over the water. 8.05. The projection changed to that yellow smiley. Ok…. 8.10. Back to Dr.Manhattan. 8.15 Back to the smiley. Huh? Also not sure about the ‘giant-size’, which was well… overestimated. What happened then? The movie trailer, seen hundreds of time was shown. And then? Then we had left, along with a quarter of other rather disappointed viewers (there were not so many of them anyway). And all this was happening with no sound at all, apart from the street musician playing nearby, but he definitely wasn’t ready to play the movie theme… Probably something really amazing was shown after we had left, but it was quite freezing and we gave up on it.

So, even if the pictures look cool (oh, thank you :), the reality was absolutely dull and I would definitely rate it as a failure. An expensive FAIL. (Should we blame the adverse weather and a wrong type of wind? ) Let’s not associate that with the movie though, which hopefully will be great. Well, we’ll see tomorrow night.

And we are continuing our exploration of the world of stereotypes. Absolutely lovely subject :)

The other day I was going to ask Kai, my co-worker and mate about how healthy food at Ping Pong was (it was after the lunch at some American burger place - I am still shocked at the variety of milk-shakes there, man… it’s just sick):

- Hey Kai, I want to ask you about something you are related to… about Ping Pong.

- What? Why??? Is it because I am Chinese? You think we all play table tennis? You, vodka boy!!

- No, actually not… because your uncle works there…

-Oh…

P.S. Should I blame Simon for making me looking so stupid on that picture? Mmm, probably not.

That morning people in London woke up to realize it wasn’t a typical day in the city. Everything changed. Finally people got  a taste of a proper winter :) Most of them also realized they can’t (or don’t have to) go to work. And apart from those poor people who had to fix the interrupted transportation links in the capital (there was only one fully working tube line with most of others fully suspended and minimum bus services), most of the people just went crazy. Crazy about the snow.

City was on a halt, with streets in town, shops and offices half and almost completely empty, but it was a total bliss outside in the parks and just on the streets. People of all ages were playing snowballs, making snowmen, sledging where possible and taking pictures. The snowball fights were initiated instantly and people were absolutely willing to participate. It was probably like when America got its independence and everyone was happy and everyone was like brother or sister to one another :)

By the end of day London has lost its magic, its white look of the morning hours, but the snowmen craze continued for a few days and you could see those white guys all around, pretty, happy and occasionally ugly,  wearing hats, scarves, holding fans, bags and mobile phones. Apparently, the UK economy lost around £600 million that day, but it’s not always about money, right?

Check few more pictures on flickr (plus see them hi-res).