Hello. Matt here.

I recently got a new job title: I’m now a product manager rather than a UX designer. So here’s a blog post to an imaginary person thinking of doing the same (you? as you’re reading this) where I try and qualify what the skills shift I think you need to move to this role.

Empathise and carer about users. So this is the easy bit and isn’t really much of a shift. If you’ve been in UX this has been the main focus of your job and it’s a huge benefit to making product decisions. If you’re developing a product you need to care lots about what users want and how they use what you create. You’ve then got to bring that knowledge to bear on the features you’ve got or intend to build.

Design understanding. Again, obviously you have this but in particular you will need to be able to explain design decisions and be able to communicate to both designers who you’ll use and to the rest of the company and management. You need to be able to explain why designs are good and why they benefit the business. It’s a subtle one but being able to design and being able to communicate design is not quite the same thing.

Forward planning and time management. If you’ve done any freelance work, you should be used to planning your time somewhat. You now need to be able to do this at a much deeper level. You’ll probably be in charge of a roadmap, except it’s not much like a traditional map in that it’s an ever-changing living document. You’ve got to be able to pick items off this and get them rolling too.

Negotiation. With the rest of the business, aka stakeholders. Almost all forms of being a designer mean you’ll probably have some experience in negotiating with clients (in terms of requested features, design opinions). Effectively the rest of the company is your client and it’s your job to help them work out what they really need.

Analytics and metrics. Probably the bit that most designers would struggle with when it comes to be able to do a bit of maths and analysis. I’ve always quite enjoyed it as when it comes to looking at site analytics, I just consider them a different representation of user behaviour. And being able to wrangle numbers into usable KPIs is pretty rewarding.

Liaising with developers. If you’ve spent any length of time doing digital design you should have developed this skill when you came to hand designs over, iterate with them and QA the work. This side isn’t that dissimilar, you’ve just got to be organised further in advance and flag upcoming pieces of work with them rather than chucking mock-ups over the fence.

And last of all, why do it? It’s not for everyone but if you want a deeper understanding of how the things you were previously designing affect a bigger share of the business and to take on a challenge and learn new skills, it can be pretty rewarding. And if you don’t fancy it after a while, the design skills won’t just disappear.

When I’m in a job that isn’t keeping me occupied I’ve found I fill the gaps with side projects. I’ve recognised this tendency for a while so when I started my last job I made a deliberate effort to not work on side projects but to give myself over to just working when at work and socialising and enjoying what London has to offer in my spare time.

This lasted two years before I found myself offered an exciting freelance project. That site was enough for six months or so but then I found a few more things coming through and the day job was quiet enough that I had the time to take them on. Before too long I was down to four days a week at work and it was the freelance and self motivated stuff that kept me excited.

Perhaps inevitably I felt I had to leave that job for something more inspiring and with enough freelance on the go I decided to head out the door without a new full-time position lined up. As it happened I only freelanced for a month before deciding to take an opportunity at a rapidly growing startup.

So once again I thought I should pack in the freelance and side projects to focus on the job in hand. But for the first six months or so I found myself struggling to do that. Partly it’s because once you’ve got the freelance word out there it’s hard to stop requests rolling in and partly it’s because I found myself looking for those opportunities to excite myself. I resisted staying late at work feeling it was too uninspiring, to give myself the variation of my own projects.

Eventually the freelance work slowed right down and I stopped trying to create the ultimate side project instead preferring to give myself over to the job I’m being paid for. Perhaps not coincidentally, it seems to have coincided with an increase in responsibility and a lot more interesting stuff to get my teeth into.

It’s taken me this time to realise three things:

• The context switching of changing from freelance to full time involves two very different mindsets that take time to move in and out of;
• Working for yourself isnt the only way to satisfaction, doing so for other people can be just as fulfilling if you’re prepared to dedicate yourself to solving much bigger problems;
• Starting new work is often just a short term illusion of freedom, fuelled by the excitement of a fresh idea.

For a long while now I’ve not been a big fan of Facebook but it’s been hard to pinpoint exactly what they’ve been doing that bugs me. However recently I’ve noticed how Facebook appears to be getting less and less good at telling me about the important things and better at the same news you can get elsewhere.

Logging into the website to illustrate this shows just how poor that news feed has become. The ‘top stories’ updates (i.e. I assume the things they have curated for me as the most important) are:

• Link to a Sun story from seven days ago;
• A story from a website I follow from six days ago;
• Someone I haven’t seen in six years announcing they got a job five days ago;
• Someone I haven’t seen in ten years announcing they’re in the Navy five days ago;
• A mate changing his profile photo six days ago.

Hardly a compelling selection. Even switching to the ‘most recent’ option doesn’t show any stories before five days ago. Truly, what is the point? I can honestly say I’ve no interest in any of the recent stuff it’s been presenting me with. I imagine this is down to two things: my friends aren’t updating very often and Facebook’s sneaky new policy of charging to get those updates out to more people.

Of late in my circle of friends I’ve missed several break-ups, a marriage and a baby announcement. Why? Because (quite rightly) they weren’t put on there. How did I find out? From talking to friends. This is still where I find out about the important stuff.

So if I’m not missing anything important what am I getting from Zuckerberg’s network? I don’t post updates (as Twitter is better for that) and I barely look at people’s photos because as I grow up I get past caring if I missed something. There was a time when it was unsurpassable for event organising as if you said you were going to a party it was a guarantee of attendance but I don’t place much importance in that any more. I can barely be arsed with uploading my own photos as it’s a poor experience due to them changing the interface every time.

But I still can’t bring myself to fully quit. I guess I’m afraid that something of importance might yet happen that I won’t see. And it would be a massive hassle to sign back up again. Also they’ve got all my data anyway so at least I should have access to it rather than just leaving it to them.

Instead I’ve set up email notifications for all the major events I’m interested in and logged out for good. I’ve been about a month out of the game now and once I got over the daily reflex trigger to check Facebook I can’t say it’s been missed. In fact in the last two weeks I’ve had just the one email from them. And that was a friend request from someone I don’t know. Whilst I won’t have fully dropped off the grid, I’m not going to be one of the ‘active’ users that logged in during the last month.

So cheers for keeping me connected for the last five years or so Mark, many a good gathering was organised through your platform and the funny image results were inevitably hosted with you afterwards. But I’ve got the email addresses of the close friends I care about and for everyone else there’s the much more eclectic and real-time Twitter.

Over the last few months I’ve been making infographics inspired by films under the banner of Flickographics (i.e. going to the flicks, nothing to do with photo sharing). I’ve been playing around with infographics for a few years since learning my craft at the BBC. For a while I did some for The Football Ramble, riding the wave of football-based infographic blogging that recently seemed to explode in this country. But there’s lots of people doing great stuff with sport (what with there being an abundance of data now) so I fancied trying to go down a different route.

I am interested in the ability of infographics to tell stories and it seemed that the ultimate visual storytelling medium could be an appropriate subject matter for them. Effective news graphics can tell you the key point of a story in one glance, cutting through the barrage of words to deliver a clear representation of an inequality or a correlation. News journalism has used them in this way for years and I think they can go further: there’s room out there for a product that just presents the big stories of the day in graphic form. Done well it could be both snackable and enable you to absorb a lot of information in one go. I think it could genuinely emerge as an alternative to the written word and a discipline in its own right.

In the meantime I fancied doing something more fun. Flickographics is a mix between film trivia (for example, which Bond slept with the most girls?) and investigating a geeky question (is there a pattern in the roles Denzel Washington’s chose through his career?). The written part of the post is just the background notes behind each piece otherwise I have aimed for every graphic to tell a story unsupported.

With my graphics I try to keep things simple and clutter-free and following the rules of ‘correct’ visual data design as laid out by Edward Tufte rather than following many of the purely illustrative pieces that have sprung up lately. In fact I’d prefer the term datagraphic to separate what I aim to do from the poster-style ones but infographic now seems to be understood by the majority of people so it would be churlish to abandon that familiarity.

My aim is to make a one a week (currently averaging three a month) and keep going until I’ve got about 100 or enough to print a book of them. We’ll see how it goes and if you’ve got any ideas for what would make a good Flickograph do let me know…

Advertising in Minority Report: not there yet

I probably shouldn’t write this because everyone knows online advertising is an all-invasive beast growing rapidly into every corner of the web and it’s only going to get bigger and more annoying. Hell, I’ve even put an advert on the side of this page (woohoo, here comes 60p a month) and in fact it’s these kind of Google ads that I really don’t get. If we’re going to have to have them pervading our web experiences (and we are) they might as well be better.

Right now they broadly split into two camps: the irrelevant and the pointless.

The irrelevant

Usually: I’ve just arrived at a big news site, so of course here’s a massive advert of the latest mid-range sports saloon. I certainly can’t afford one so that’s easy to ignore. Or: I’m on a film magazine site so here’s the biggest new blockbuster filling the background. I might go and see that at some point. These ads are targeted around the demographics of the website’s audience. It’s the age-old model of the newspaper/magazine industry and it’s probably about as effective as a print advert.

There’s obviously the bonus of a link to the official website of the product but I’m not going to visit that, I’m going to judge whether to buy/consume something based on independent reviews and peer feedback. Maybe some people are still clicking through but they’re going to be fewer and further between as this digital generation ages. So these ads are pretty much irrelevant relics.

The pointless

These are the ads that I really want to challenge. These are the future and they’re certainly going to get better but right now they defeat themselves. How they work is this: you visit a website and then later on when browsing other ad-supported sites, you get shown an advert for that website. That’s pretty much it. There is the subtlety that if you’re lucky sometimes you’ll be shown a set of search results for products you’ve looked at. All done of the cookies created by your web-browsing behaviour.

If you’re just being shown an advert for the website you’ve been to that’s most likely a complete waste because you certainly know that website exists, as you’ve just been there. I quite regularly get adverts for my energy company, which makes literally no sense to me. Not only do I know the company already exists but surely I’m the last person they want to see that advert, that advertising dollar is better spent on everyone but me. If they’re tracking your website visit via a cookie, going forward it might be an idea to provide a different cookie if you reach a login url.

If you’re being shown search results from the site you just visited that’s just as pointless. Several times I’ve been served up adverts featuring products I just bought. Hey you’re right I am interested in that! But you’re too late. Or perhaps I didn’t buy, in which case I probably don’t want to be reminded of those products I obviously didn’t want. Either way it’s like being showed a trailer for a film you’ve just watched. There is the use case that I didn’t buy but might yet do in the future but is the answer repeatedly show me those things across every website I visit like a harassing salesman? Well, it might work for some.

The future

The thought of browsing the web with cookies tracking you scares some people. But for me it’s a long way to being scary. When you can actually predict what I want to see and click on, that’s scary. It’s also, paradoxically, the only way online ads are going to be truly useful and get impressive click-through rates.

When asked at uni, I used to say that I loved doing graphic design because it was the perfect blend of art and science. On the arty side you’ve got your sketching, illustration, photography and idea generation while on the science side there’s the typography, grids, CMYK, RGB and colour rules. Yep, I’d found a discipline that kept all of the grey matter occupied.

But my journey through design has taken me across the spectrum from painting on canvas in art at college to the other end measuring analytics and coding as a UX professional. It’s a journey my younger self would probably be surprised and maybe even disappointed at, after all we’re brought up to worship the visual brilliance of the artist/designer and it’s hard to get away from that love affair. But for me it’s just been a case of following the rabbit down the hole into something that is more rewarding. Here I delve into why…

Standing on the shoulder of giants

The arts don’t really advance. And this isn’t a criticism, it’s not their nature, not what they should be doing. The arts are for reflecting back on society and emotion, helping us come to terms with ourselves. Creativity should be an outburst born of necessity and desire. It’s about originality not about improvement. For example many band’s best albums are their first, despite the fact they’re probably better musicians later in their careers, it’s the real urgent stuff that means more. And for me there came a time when trying to come up with the next great idea became a bit frustrating: how much did it mean when you’d only have to start all over again with the next brief?

Science is all about building on top of work that has gone before, advances don’t happen without the complete body of work and understanding that has preceded it. The web is a fundamentally scientific invention, and at its heart is the idea of linking to and utilising others content. Standards, shareware and creative commons allow us to design and build quicker and faster than before, using the work of previous generations. If you need to solve a web-based problem, chances are someone’s already done it and with a bit of luck you can google it, grab their code and innovate on top of it.

Constant achievement

This is probably my strong achievement impulse (it’s what motivates men apparently) and I do enjoy the constant tinkering to improve performance. I’m constantly measuring results and progress from self-improvement to the analytics of any site I’m involved in. The instant feedback of the web is a powerful thing and a hugely motivating factor. Yeah I may be barely progressing at all in the grander scheme of things but feeling like my project is constantly improving and heading in the right direction helps get me up in the morning.

Cod psychology

I’m fascinated by what makes people tick and group behaviour (recently that has included an interest in modern dictatorship organisations from North Korea to Scientology). When you start delving into the world of UX you instantly find yourself hypothesising about why your users behave the way they do. It’s a bridge to whole other sciences and an understanding of the principles of psychology come into play. No longer be unsure why something works – there’s a whole field of research that can tell you why.

Stop arguing the subjective

Perhaps the best thing about a scientific approach to design is the tiresome hassle that is saved. By this I mean a lot less of those constant ‘Clients from hell’ style discussions over who’s right about whether your latest design ‘works’. A lot less time is spent working on a masterpiece only to have it thrown back in your face by a clueless client. Whilst in this world the wins are great, I found the losses can really grind you down.

Instead with the scientific approach you bring data into play. Arguments can be settled with the more objective ‘what do our stats say?’ or ‘lets test it’ or ‘lets knock a prototype up’. Far from being restrictive, with a scientific approach to design it frees you to try whatever you want with a lot less risk.

Reality over portfolio

Questions like ‘What designers do you like?’ or ‘Who’s your favourite?’ used to infuriate me. Totally missing the point of design to answer the brief and be the medium rather than the subject. At the science end you’re reading books about practices that have been proven and stand the test of time not this month’s flash in the pan trend. I’ve waffled on about this in a previous blog.

Introduction

In part 1 I looked at the rise of superhero films in the five years between 2001 – 2005 and in part 2 I showed that this trend has continued at a very similar level in the years 2006 – 2010. In fact in 2011 and 2012 we’ve already had 10 superhero films made, meaning the five years between 2011 – 2015 is set to be the most prolific yet. Why this continuation and why now? Can it all be down to the explosion in patriotism since 9/11 and generally associated with wartime USA?

I’m going to look into a case study of The Dark Knight Rises as it is one of the most recent and this is the final part of a trilogy of films that began with Batman Begins, which I looked at in part 1 and it is interesting to see how the themes have changed (or stayed the same) over a seven year period. I will then go on to look at two other potential factors for the growth and success of this movement: the improvement in technology, which has helped facilitate such films and the Hollywood machine, i.e. the business factors in film-making.

The Dark Knight Rises: return of fear and terrorism

With Barack Obama in the presidency and no longer George Bush, the subject of war and terrorism has taken a back seat in the media narrative of late in favour of economic struggles. Interesting then that The Dark Knight Rises (2012) is a film that ties so closely to the themes set up in Batman Begins (2005) and introduces villains that once again are about terrorising the population of Gotham.

This similarity could be put down to the fact that it is a trilogy and the themes are always going to be the same however the second part, The Dark Knight (2008), moved away from this with ideas of chaos introduced by the main villain of The Joker and a focus on organised crime in the story arc of Harvey Dent. So it was no guarantee that the third part would bring back the character of Ra’s Al Ghul and his disciples, all of whom are intent on destruction of a ‘corrupt’ city, as Bane explains to Batman:

“So, as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clamoring over each other to ‘stay in the sun’. You can watch me torture an entire city and when you have truly understood the depth of your failure, we will fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s destiny… We will destroy Gotham” (1)

Bane hides his plan under the mask of freeing the people, “we give it back to you… the people” (1) whilst at the same time going further and causing more damage than any other villain in the series so far as he tunnels under the city, blowing up several key places and the bridges in and out. This is clearly shown when he sets off explosives in the American football stadium just after the Star Spangled banner has been sung, even more obviously putting him in the position of enemy diametrically opposed to the state of the USA.

It doesn’t stop at the characters having terrorist-like motivations as the hardware of war (outlined in part 1 of this essay) is shown off more than ever with Bane claiming Batman’s armoury of Batmobiles and the two characters meeting in the middle of a massed battle, something the director himself claimed was an attempt to create more of an epic ‘war movie’ (2). Also the fighter-plane-like vehicle known as the ‘Bat’ has a starring role throughout the running battles and into the climax of the film.

Whilst not all recent superhero films carry this vein of post-9/11 fear, it is interesting that it is still an idea that persists in the American psyche even more than 10 years on and is a part of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed superhero films of all time. However there are other factors that could explain the continuation of these types of films, including potentially the proliferation of Computer Generated Imagery.

Technology

It must be considered that technological advances in the cinema have some correlation with the abundance of superhero films. For the very nature of the superhero story is to show “elements of the fantastical and magical” (3). Whilst the comic book was a perfect way for this young medium to grow cheaply and with only the imagination to limit the possibilities, superhero stories were quickly embraced by film and television. The most famous was Batman (1964), which was a big hit despite the series being in many ways a vehicle for portraying ‘camp’. However there had been very little technological advancement since the serials 20 years earlier as effects such as walking up the side of a building were simply achieved by turning the camera on its side. Batman was in fact an ideal character for television as he is a superhero without powers and effectively more a detective. Even The Incredible Hulk (1977) TV series with its fantastical green giant main character was simply achieved with a man painted green.

Once cinema got in on the act, with Superman (1978) being the first big-budget feature-length showing of a superhero’s adventures, special effects had jumped up a notch. This was the first time television or cinema had approached one of the more magical characters of comic book lore and it didn’t disappoint: watch as Superman flew, shot lasers from his eyes and lifted buildings. The technology was pushed to its limits: “blue screen shots and the complicated devices used (optical printers, the Zoptic front projection system) show how the film’s special effects broke new ground” (4).

Interestingly in the case of Superman and others, it seems that the technology factor can work in the opposite direction:

In the first years of its comic book life, Superman’s power of flight was limited to prodigious leaps. When the first motion-picture cartoons appeared, however, “he gained the power of pure flight,” which was subsequently incorporated in the comics… the mythic advance goes hand in hand with real-world technomythic breakthroughs. (5)

This shows how comic book superheroes have been at the forefront of new technology, often being the characters that require the new imagery to move the character forward and maintain the fantastical element. Perhaps it can be best summed up as a dialogue between the demands of the superhero and the opportunities of new technology.

It is widely considered that there wasn’t much change in the fundamentals of special effects in film between 1920 and 1980, it wasn’t until Tron (1982) that computer animation first arrived, coinciding with a rise in popularity of the home computer game. However the film wasn’t a success and “computer graphics went away and hid for eight or nine years” (6).  The advancement to computer graphics for film was sealed with two block-buster films: Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), which made new demands on the technology and featured computer-generated characters, meaning “everybody noticed and jumped on the bandwagon” (6).

However computer graphic advancements didn’t noticeably effect the superhero genre until Spiderman in 2002. Throughout the nineties it was possible to create landscapes, creatures and vehicles very realistically within the computer but the ability to create a convincing human took longer. Toy Story (1995) director John Lasseter points out, “the human being is probably the most difficult thing to create, because we see them everyday… one mistake and we’ll spot it” (6). This was key for a superhero film where the main character is (mostly) human and to do the things Spiderman can do is nigh on impossible in real life: “the truth is it’s either too dangerous or physically impractical for stunt people to do these scenes” (7). The camera was going to be following him closely and so it needed convincing effects for us to believe he really was swinging around New York as director Sam Raimi states: “It was so important to me that this looked real, if it looked bogus it wasn’t going to work” (7).

With all the fancy new CGI now in place, is this the signal of a watershed in the superhero movie that saw every comic book being adapted? Maybe but then not all superheroes place the demands of Spiderman on the medium: arguably many could have been created without digital technology, for example Batman Begins (2005). Superhero films have always been embraced by the latest technologies and the fact that they look more realistic recently doesn’t change the fact that the latest effects have always looked better than older ones.

The Hollywood machine

As my infographic in part 2 shows, the proportion of sequels in the period 2006 – 2010 has increased, suggesting that it is the momentum of the Hollywood machine and business factors that account for this continuation in the superhero films. Perhaps the political climate of a time has little effect on the way films are made, maybe the reason they are all coming out at the same time is because this is simply how Hollywood works and once one becomes a hit, studios simply follow it up with another. But what makes superhero films such successful Hollywood property in the first place?

To begin with there is something that all films need to get people’s interest: conflict and change or to put it another way,

“In any script the protagonist needs a powerful transformational arc to emotionally grip your audience and hold your story together.” (8)

Almost all superhero films have this ‘transformational arc’ built into the story, quite literally with the main character changing into a super-being with superpowers. So superhero films have an essential ingredient to be effective but Hollywood studios want to create films that are guaranteed to earn money at the box office. In this case it could be said that the superhero film falls into the category of a ‘high concept’ movie or one of “those films, which seemed more likely to reap huge dollars at the box office” (9). There are many definitions of high concept but the following seems to include the most important parts: “a unique idea whose originality could be conveyed briefly” (9).

The idea behind them is that if you can instantly sum up the plot, it would be much easier to sell the film to a wide audience, for instance Spiderman can be sold as, normal teenager gains the powers of a spider and everyone instantly understands what they are going to watch: a film for the younger audience with fantasy elements. This is a key part of the marketability of a high concept film but there are other things which it should have to gain success: “high concept films lend themselves to merchandising and marketing by the abstraction of a key image from the film” (9). This suggests that not only should a film be able to be briefly summed up in words, it needs to be captured within one image, so that this can be duplicated across a wide range of media to promote the film and raise awareness, and is something superhero films do well.

Another element that falls in superhero films’ favour is that they are adapted from existing material and if the comic is a success then it is likely that the film will be too, as has been identified with films based on novels in the past: “The film is pre-sold by the novel, which in turn is re-sold on the back of the film” (10). This idea of having a ‘pre-sold’ film means that it has been released with the knowledge that the audience has already responded well to this product and there is a built-in fan-base before it is even released, which is as close to a guarantee of success as you could wish.

If superhero films carry with them the associations to generate success, such as a ready-made fan-base; easy marketability; the opportunity for merchandising and interest from a youth audience, then it must stand to reason that Hollywood would want to repeat this success by launching more superhero films. The following quote suggests just that:

“The production of popular film is a process of innovation and imitation shaped in part by producers assaying previous hits and recombining their components in new exploitable forms that they hope will be successful.” (10)

Hollywood is certainly keen to repeat its successes and if something proves a hit, reaping millions of dollars, the studios and filmmakers aren’t going to be shy in making sequels. In fact in the top ten films by box office of 2011, none of them were original (all either sequels or adaptations) compared to seven of the top ten of 1981. This growing trend is surely not helped by recession and other economic woes: “when times are tight… the safest investment you can make is in either a sequel or a story built from an existing franchise with a large fan base” (11).

This all amounts to propose that perhaps the recent run of superhero films is little to do with any political climate and a lot more to do with a Hollywood business model that means when they come across a hit film, they will attempt to repeat it until it runs dry. But does that mean the areas that I identified in Spiderman and Batman Begins as being influenced by their time were pure coincidence? I don’t think this can be true as this quote adds a further dimension to marketability for film:

“Marketability is based upon such factors as stars… a pre-sold premise (such as a remake or adaptation) and a concept which taps into a national trend or sentiment.” (8)

This addition of the element of ‘national sentiment’ having an influence on the production of a film brings me back to thinking that films can be affected by world events. It suggests that if a film were to have an association with a current national fear such as ‘terrorism’ it could only help to sell it. On top of this, if the world economic situation can affect how decisions towards film-making are reached, why wouldn’t the politics of fear?

Conclusion

It may be surprising that now eleven years on from the events of 9/11, the superhero still has a role to play in helping America come to terms with how it copes with those issues but I believe it is still doing just that. It’s gradually becoming a smaller part of the influencing factors behind these films but as The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, the spectre of terrorism is still present. As this influence gradually decreases, the realities of capitalism and the Hollywood machine take over, perpetuating the stream of superhero films because the market demands it.

This need to keep creating superhero films was highlighted by the recent Amazing Spiderman, a reboot of the Sam Raimi Spiderman only ten years after the original, mainly because the studio needed to make some kind of Spiderman film “in order to keep the movie rights to the franchise” (12). I predict in that 2011 – 2015 will show the highest number of superhero films but also the highest percentage of sequels and the fewest with terrorist-threat themes.

References

1. Nolan, Christopher (2012), The Dark Knight Rises, Warner Brothers/DC Comics
2. The Republic (2012), The Dark Knight Rises Shooting and the Propaganda of the Deed http://www.republicmagazine.com/news/the-dark-knight-rises-shooting-and-the-propaganda-of-the-deed.html
3. Klock, Geoff (2002), How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Continuum
4. Peters, Ed (2001), Superman: The Movie DVD Review http://www.dvdreview.com/fullreviews/superman_the_movie.shtml
5. Shelton Lawrence, John & Jewett, Robert (2002), The Myth of the American Superhero, William B Eerdmans Publishing Co.
6. BBC 2 (1998), Horizon: The Computers That Ate Hollywood, BBC
7. Raimi, Sam (2002), Spiderman DVD, Columbia/Marvel
8. Frensham, Ray (2003), Teach Yourself Screenwriting, Teach Yourself (Hodder & Staughton)
9. Wyatt, Justin (1994), High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, University of Texas Press
10. Austin, Thomas (2002), Hollywood, Hype and Audiences: Selling and Watching Popular Film in the 1990s, Manchester University Press
11. Short of the Week (2012), Has Hollywood Lost Its Way? http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/01/05/has-hollywood-lost-its-way/
12. McMillan, Graeme (2012), Time Magazine Entertainment http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/27/the-ol-parker-luck-why-the-amazing-spider-man-cant-catch-a-break/

The haters were proved wrong. There were many moaning tweets, blogs and articles before the games about the sheer cost of the undertaking and how the billions could have been spent better on police or the NHS or schools. Which is true to a degree but if you’re not holding celebratory events like the Olympics that are incredibly positive and unite the whole population in joyful outpourings, what’s the point in living longer anyway?

This might just be the best branded Olympics there’s ever been. Forget about the strange form of the logo and the odd typeface, as a marque it’s worked extremely well: sitting in all sorts of odd positions, from the centre of a boxing ring to sponsor’s adverts, it’s proved unique and highly recognisable. Having had a look some applications of the Rio logo, as lovely as the typeface and colours are, it only really works in one fixed position, which means it’s always going to have to sit on a white background. In London the use of colour has been one of the nicest touches, as the event tickets were same colour as the hoardings, decoration, backdrops in that venue (water polo = blue, boxing = red, athletics = purple etc).

TfL deserve credit for clearing out the transport network. Some people are going to get the wrong end of the stick and say it was scare-mongering but you’ve got to say the previous couple of years spent telling everyone how they had to avoid public transport because it was going to be unbearable really did work. Workers and employers totally bought into it and for those of us that were left, the empty tubes made London feel like a different city for a couple of weeks.

The park was a great piece of design. Having so many venues so close together; wandering around eating overpriced hog roast; watching face-painted fancy-dressed masses trooping around; chilling out late into the evening; being surrounded be greenery and flora. It made me think this was the closest you could get to a sporting music festival and there certainly was some of that Glastonbury-style atmosphere in the air.

Great support everywhere, across each event I watched. The ticket ballot was kind to me and I managed to get to five different events and venues and what I saw there was that Britain has proved itself a nation (or nations) of sport lovers. As a set of supporters we usually know a little about every sport and even the ones we don’t, like handball, we were prepared to throw ourselves whole-heartedly into cheering the players like they were our local club. And the Brits do still love an underdog as I witnessed by the crowd’s uncanny knack at the boxing of always backing the fighter who was going to lose.

Refreshing your phone and spreading medal news in public became the new talking about the weather. Everyone was at it across the city, even tannoy announcers in stations. Telling strangers of the latest exploits of our boys and girls against the world must be what it was like to live through World War 2 (well, minus the shit bits).

The BBC justified the whole license fee in the last two weeks. They’d been planning for a long time for this and promised to show every minute of sport and they only went and did just that and then some. Accompanied by an excellent panel of informed experts, they gave a new definition of public service broadcasting.

Despite the love and life affirming nature of the games they really are a one-off. Combining all these disparate sports under one banner is a ridiculous undertaking really and nothing like it is likely to start up soon that could rival it. They’re greater for the fact that they only happen once every four years. After this we’ll fall back into our old ways of sport watching (football mainly) and I for one am not ready yet. I remember being hit equally hard by this feeling after England’s amazing Ashes triumph in 2005, when all I wanted to do was watch more test cricket. It’s like wanting the school summer holidays in your childhood to never end as you try to cling onto those long evenings. I’m just glad that there’s the Paralympics to help with the recovery…

For a designer I do enjoy a spreadsheet. Nothing particularly tech and complex but I’ve found that applied correctly they can help make sense of a lot of the more messy parts of life. I’ve been tracking my finances using a Google doc for a few years and it’s helped me feel in control of this part of my life so when I came to need to shift a bit of a beer belly I turned to this method. So using that example, here’s why I think benchmarking with spreadsheets works so well:

• If you want to change a part of your life you’re unhappy with you need to first understand the problem. And by keeping track and building up data on a situation it really increases your awareness of what’s not working. Simply doing this solves a lot of the problems by tuning you to be able to spot patterns. So when it came to wanting to sort out my body shape, a part of my spreadsheet was recording everything I ate. Pretty quickly I was able to spot the troublesome parts of my diet and cut them out. Then a few weeks later I was able to look at what was left and see if I could optimise those parts. Just by recording and giving yourself data puts you halfway there.

• Getting the right metric to measure your success is key. The thing I wanted to change was losing an encroaching beer belly so most people would expect I should be weighing myself. But that wasn’t the problem here. Weight is an irrelevant measure: I genuinely don’t care if I weigh 12 stone or 16 stone, the problem was size not mass. So distance around my middle was the key performance indicator I used to tell if I was quickly reaching my goal. Incidentally I think this is a bigger issue around dieting: giving yourself an arbitrary weight goal to reach doesn’t tell you if your body is the shape you want it to be.

• Feeling like you’re achieving a goal is all about having regular updates: giving yourself constant feedback so you want to keep bettering yourself. It’s the achievement impulse, it’s gamification or whatever you want to call it. And the simplest form of it is a spreadsheet with some numbers. During my target period a good example was carrying a pedometer (well an iPhone app) to measure how far I was walking and then wanting to walk more and more each day to beat my weekly record or keep my averages high. Watching world records fall at the Olympics certainly helps get you in the frame of mind for this…

• Ultimately it’s about long term changes in behaviour not short fixes. So I did this ‘diet’ for six weeks until I reached the size I wanted and have since continued in that vein without the daily measuring. But now my eyes had been opened to how I ate and I’d seen how successful the changes had been so I wasn’t about to just return to my old ways. Because the changes had been fairly minimal I was able to keep them up.

If you’re interested about the slight diet change itself, it was simply thus: Minimise sugar – so no sweet snacking (or snacks at all in the morning), only diet fizzy drinks and reducing the sugary cereals. Less booze, starting with two weeks off it completely before cutting right back on beer. No bread, so mostly salads for lunch. That’s pretty much it apart from giving myself one day off a week to eat whatever crap I wanted, which was based on this theory by Tim Ferris.

A lot has been written on the subject of waterfall v agile in many a blog. For what it’s worth, here’s my brief thoughts.

There’s still a persistent school of thought that designing detailed Omnigraffle wireframes followed by pixel-perfect Photoshop layouts is the only way to get design right before handing over to developers (it’s certainly often the only way management feel comfortably in control). Only then months later having awkward conversations with your developers as you try and work out how to make the required designs feasible.

It’s not my favourite method of working. I want a truly iterative and collaborative environment that is flexible and works within the framework of reality. By this I mean if you’re designing ages before you’re developing, you’re doing so without the full, live information of what the state of the site is. Every variable counts and the closer you are to the build the more aware you can be of the other affecting factors on your design. Plus when you work closely with a developer they’ll instantly be able to tell you what works and what doesn’t:

Here, a sketch on a post-it note can be design;

A screengrab of a firebug in-browser mock-up can be design;

Writing a bit of CSS can be design;

A chat over a laptop screen can be design;

A Skype conversation can be design.

You’re empowering the developers to be designers too and as a result the product becomes stronger. It’s a scary world that can put you out there, open to more unknowns. But in a space to be able to adapt and tackle them, which you can’t be from the safety of your Photoshop doc.

They’re making a new series of Arrested Development! Also recently I’ve been showing my girlfriend all the previous episodes (obviously she loved them) so I had to do a graphic to celebrate one of the best American sitcoms of all time.

This was inspired by the fact that since discovering the show back in the day, I keep finding Jason Bateman cropping up in everything Hollywood has made in recent years (mostly with Michael Cera as well it seems). So I wanted to know just how many films have the Arrested Development family made between the show starting in 2003 and 2012. And yep, my hypothesis was correct and Bateman is the leading man in that group. In fact all the men have had a lot of film work out it, with only young Michael Cera being out-performed by Alia Shawkat in the match up of his generation of the family.

This little graphic is the filpside to my previous Bond Girls number. Whilst in that I focussed on the lover side of the different James Bond actors, here it’s all about him as a fighter (or killer in fact). I’ve been holding on to putting this up until the week of the film release (keeping things topical) but in the last few weeks annoyingly I’ve seen a few different places doing their own version of James Bond’s stats in infographic form. The data seems to be slightly different but the main point still remains: Pierce Brosnan got really quite carried away with a gun in his hand. I look forward to seeing if Craig can get his average up in Skyfall…

The data for this and The Bond Girls infographic has mostly come from a rather excellent spreadsheet on bondmovies.com.

This one came about purely because I wanted a map showing where the characters in the Lord of the Rings films go. There are plenty of maps of middle earth but I couldn’t find anything showing where they travel to. There are numerous other characters but I’ve focussed on the nine of the fellowship and have grouped a few of them together to make it more readable. Hopefully the graphic holds up on its own but if you want it, here are the details around what’s happening at each point:

The Fellowship of the Ring

1. The four hobbits leave Hobbiton and get things underway.
2. Aragorn/Strider joins the fun at Bree.
3. At Rivendell the Fellowship is assembled.
4. They get as far as the mines of Moria before losing Gandalf to the Balrog.
5. The rest of the Fellowship make it to Lothlorien and Galadriel, before hopping on boats down the river.
6. They make it to roundabout Argonath where they are attacked by Orcs, Boromir’s journey ends and the Fellowship split.

The Two Towers

7a. Merry and Pippin are taken to the plains of Rohan by the Uruk Hai who are attacked by Eomer’s riders enabling the hobbits to escape into the trees. Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas give pursuit but miss out on them only to bump into Gandalf (now the White)…
7b. … at the same time Sam and Frodo pick up Gollum in making it to the Black Gate of Mordor, where Faramir and his men capture them.
8a. Merry and Pippin get to know the Ents in Fangorn forest…
8b. …while Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas find their way to Edoras and King Theoden.
9a. Gimli and Legolas goes with the main party to escape to Helm’s Deep. Aragorn gets their a bit later via being washed down a river but in time for the big battle. Gandalf had set off to find Eomer’s men before arriving at the battle in time to swing things…
9b. …whilst all this is going on Frodo and Sam are taken to Osgiliath by Faramir before being freed.

The Return of the King 

10. Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas meet up with Merry and Pippin (carried by the Ents) at Saruman’s tower in Isengard.
11. They all then regroup back at Edoras before Gandalf first sets off with Pippin to Minas Tirith (hence these hobbits’ split line)
12. Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas raise an army under the mountains via the Paths of the Dead before reaching Minas Tirith whilst Merry sneakily joins Theoden’s Army for the big finale battle.
13a. After winning the scrap at Minas Tirith Aragorn leads an army with Gimli, Legolas a, Merry and Pippin to the Black Gate to distract Sauron…
13b. …while Frodo and Sam have overcome Shelob to reach Mount Doom and toss in the ring before Gandalf arrives with some giant birds to bring them home.

Hey, those quirky Coen brothers like to use the same actors in all their films don’t they! Don’t they? Sort of.

Here are all the actors who have appeared in more than one film by the brothers with those nearest the top being the ones who appear in the most. Going left to right we have the films with the most frequent collaborators to the least. The honours of most frequent actor appearances are shared between Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi and Jon Polito with five. The film with the most regulars in is possibly their most famous picture The Big Lebowski with nine, followed by O Brother Where Art Thou and Barton Fink with eight.

Plotting this I started with the obvious stars but when I included all the actors (which meant all the smaller names) it soon became clear that over half of them only appear in two films so hard to call them that ‘frequent’. So there are thirteen actors who appear three or more times over fifteen Coen films. A bit of a troupe but overall their acting picks may not quite be as predictable as is made out.

Data from IMDB and this handy Wikipedia list.

It’s everyone’s favourite film threesome! As joked about by Ricky Gervais on Life’s Too Short, if Tim Burton is making a film you can be pretty certain as too who the leading man and lady are going to be. Sure enough this graphic proves that the last five of his films have featured both Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. In fact you have to go back to 1996′s Mars Attacks to find a film of his when neither of them featured.

In case the graphic needs further explaining, each dot is a film that they have appeared in (or in Tim’s case, directed) showing the Depp/Burton axis goes back to 1990. They had a break after Sleepy Hollow, while the director went off and discovered HBC before realising he could put them both in films and has done just that from 2005 onwards. It also shows the two actors have had a good number of other projects outside the ‘triangle’ with Bonham Carter working non-stop between 1995-2000 and Depp keeping busiest in his Burton gap of 200-2005.

Data from IMDB.

Jack Nicholson famously redefined how much the bad guy can get paid in a Hollywood film but which of the Batman villains have the most to say? Well they were all quite roundly beaten by Danny DeVito’s Penguin with nearly 150 lines in Batman Returns. And Ledger’s Joker had a very similar number of lines to Nicholson. And as pairs go, Freeze and Ivy had more to say than Two Face and the Riddler (unfortunately).

I’ve not included Catwoman because she’s more neutral than bad and have skipped the bit-part bad guys like The Scarecrow but otherwise I’ve tallied up every time a villain spoke in the scripts of all the films.

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

The origin of this graphic came from my old university house, where for a while we got into playing our own version of the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, where we had to connect one actor to another via the films they’ve appeared in together. We soon learned that Samuel L Jackson was a very useful card to play, as most actor connections in modern Hollywood seem to go through him. This graphic pretty much proves that, showing he’s appeared in films with no less than 150 big Hollywood names. The people he’s appeared in more than one film with owe a debt to the Star Wars prequels and Marvel series of superhero films he’s been a part of.

If you want to interrogate the infographic further to find out just who he has performed with, I’ve tried to keep the names in roughly in alphabetical order going clockwise around the circles.

It’s Back to the Future! Arguably one of the greatest films of all time(s), certainly one of the greatest scripts: funny, tightly plotted, memorable characters, intelligent, great for all the family and has an excellent guitar solo. What more do you need? How about the answer to just how many trips does the DeLorean make through time in the series? The answer is ten but for a more detailed explanation of those trips see the graphic above.

Most of the time-travelling is done in Part 2, which also features Biff getting hold of the car and popping back to 1955, as shown by the lines under the timeline. I’ve also zoomed in on the frantic 10 days in 1955 where most of the action centres around. This diagram also shows the two key lightening strikes (the first that sends Doc all the way to 1885 in Part 2 and the key plot device from Part 1 that gets Marty back to 1985). As a bonus, I checked and it took Marty one minute 22 seconds to from 0-88mph for his first time travel.

I’ve deliberately simplified the timeline as much as possible to exist on one plane (apart from the alternate reality as highlighted by the Doc in Part 2) but if you’re going to be really precise about how the timelines would work, read up on this very comprehensive post on the Back to the Future wiki (there’s actually eight of them…).

There aren’t many better film trilogies than the Bourne films (the one’s with actual Jason Bourne in, not including the Jeremy Renner version). He’s known for his European travel so I thought it would be worth finding out in which city he did the most damage. Turns out it’s definitely Paris, where the majority of The Bourne Identity takes place (while the other films tend to flit around more). But he certainly got around a decent chunk of Europe bookended in the West by New York and the East by Goa. The complete order of locations is: Marseille (off the coast of), Zurich, Paris, Mykonos, Goa, Naples, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, London, Madrid, Tangier, New York.

If you look closely you might realise that the kill counters in each city have some subtle variations in New York and Berlin as the faded versions represent people you see Bourne kill in flashbacks.

As reliable and consistent as they come but just how often has Javier turned out for Inter in Serie A?

Famed for his temper and card-collecting, how did Keane’s indiscipline relate to United’s success?

Those Latin Americans love a flamboyant goalkeeper - we take a look at how Chilavert and pals fare in the top 10 goalscoring goalkeepers of all time…

A visualisation of why Eric Cantona is a Manchester United legend - more goals, appearances and titles there than any of his other clubs. Mon dieu!

There’s been a lot of talk about what Arsenal need to get back to trophy-winning ways. If only they could call upon this man…

Following what would have been Bobby Moore’s 70th birthday, here’s an infographic comparing his England record with a certain Mr Beckham. Caps aren’t everything…

To put into context Pro Vercelli’s achievements in Italian football, here’s a chart of the all time Serie A title winners. They come above some big names…

When it comes to the classic footballing taunt of “show us your medals”, few can match Maldini, 25 years playing at the highest level and 1000 appearances for club and country.