Last month I received a call out of the blue. Unsure as to who was calling me and exactly what they wanted (the conversation was in Japanese) I took the time to find out. Eventually during the conversation I somehow deduced that I was in fact being called by an editor wanting to feature a 6 page article about me in a Tokyo based web design magazine.

Web magazines are thin on the ground these days, since the bubble burst most publications went out of print. Therefore Web design note is a strange one, being virtually the only web design mag out on stands. A quick flick through the mag also reveals they have no advertising in the magazine it’s self — how they keep the magazine afloat financially is a bit of a mystery.

Later that month they came to interview me at eat’s office. Always good for a photoshoot, this office holds it’s own. The dangerously happy profile picture of me is another matter entirely. The article is only in Japanese, and as such we had to use a translator for the interview. Without translation (as they wanted to do at first) I’m sure they would have made me sound like an otaku. Actually this something to be wary of. As soon as you mention something like “akira” unfortunately you can be branded with the gaijin brush, although this is not to blame the people interviewing you as Japanese people have a reasonable interest of how their culture permeates in the minds of others. Just choosing my words carefully!

If you have time, pick up a copy. The magazine is out from today until September or so. My friend Carsten and his company Less Rain is also profiled, with their award winning work. The magazine is interesting, insightful and a sort of enigma in this age of web magazine drought.

Requirements are fairly simple, you just need to be super interested in making games for the iPhone with ample games programming experience. However this is not a paid partnership - it is purely revenue (royalties) only.

What I’m bringing to the table:

• many years of professional games company experience designing small, quick to play games.
• graphics! 3d and 2d
• unique game ideas
• dadako brand

What I need:

• experienced programmer, proficient in C++ and cocoa
• no commercial experience necessary
• interest in openGL 3d engine programming, especially with cocoa
• eager to see project through to completion
• ideally a mac user but not essential
• us, canada, france, uk or japan based (please do not contact me if you are not based in these territories, this is for financial reasons)

Initially I have a few well thought out and documented game ideas, which can be started asap as homebrew projects.

Contact me for more details!

As part of this we were asked to create a Japanese version of the one website, entirely built and localised by us. Myself and the programmer knew that we needed to untangle the site a bit so worked from scratch via my illustrator templates, instead of the existing code.

I guess the highlight of this is watching the “one” juggernaut  at work, with celebrities like (dr) Bono and Antony Gormley coming to Japan to support the effort. The entangled limbs of the respective charities do serve to provide a powerful voice this year, effects are noticeable - Japanese PM pledging more aid to Africa  already - and tanabata day is the pinnacle of this, when the G8 summit is held.

The global website they have is labyrinthine at best, so my job was to simplify things for Japan, which is still an emerging market for Pantone. I was asked to come up with an art direction then take it to production level after approval from the client. To my amazement head office approved the design straight away [even though it's very different to the global site]. Needless to say, they are very happy with it.

A few features of the new site are:

• colour coding. Each area of the site is a pantone colour combination - with corresponding swatch at the bottom of each page - which helps users remember which area a product belongs to.
• Rounded corners. For browsers that natively support them. Currently IE6 and IE7 have square corners, which also looks nice!
• Full validation. Pantone shop Japan is fully standards compliant.

Along with some other spicy things like jquery drop down transitions, hopefully this incarnation of the shop translates pantones image better to the Japanese audience than previous incarnations.

additional programming by Erik Johansson

While I’m not adverse to a total ban on smoking in Japan, entering a pub where no one is smoking was kind of strange. I haven’t been back to the UK since the smoking ban was enforced, so I had no idea what it was like.

You can smell all sorts of new and exciting smells, like; wood, beer and sweat.

Needless to say I gave up after one pint and got a drink at my local where all the normal people were.

The daisy represents convergence.

Instead of going for a custom font on the type my friend wanted (or rather insisted) on using the open source font Gentium. It was a bit of a challenge getting this font to behave, and like Linux it is constantly being upgraded and amended by the community. A bit of kerning later and we have something we are happy with. We’re trying to use the logo in the open vector “SVG” format where ever possible.
This project is truly a logo in action and more about active presence than refinement. It’s interesting to see what happens when you hand over “the keys” to a project like this and watch it grow into t-shirts and so on.

As part of the may 1st reboot, we decided to create a new look for Eat’s homepage, which has been out of date for quite some time.

Although in need of a facelift to something more web friendly that reflects the type of work Eat do, and the web standards it preaches; time has been in short supply.

Sometime in late 2007 I was drafted in to come up with an idea, art direction and make it work. I picked up this hot potato and ran with it!

Features include:

• no menu. I wanted the sites content to be the navigation. Was hard to wrangle the idea of sitemaps and menus away from Eat, but eventually I think we all agree that it works well without pre-defined menu items.
• accessible. One of the major concerns was to get google to pick up on the content and let users bookmark articles and so on.
• basic, content driven interface.

As the site grows and becomes an archive of everything Eat produces, it will start to take on a life of it’s own.

This cuts diagram had gone through a few iterations, some slightly eyebrows raising spelling errors. I believe this is the final version.

I may not be articulate enough a reviewer to pin it down but, I just couldn’t be bothered to play it after a few days, theres something mind numbingly boring about racing the AI. Not that it’s too easy or anything. Online is OK… bit like the DS online.

There’s lots to make the game more chaotic than it should be, so racing skill is not really needed. you can be in 12th position and still finish 1st if you get the right item. Which with recent mario kart iterations is a real let down. They keep adding more random penalties to level the playing field but at the same time have eroded the skill element which should have been paramount as on the super nintendo. You could be the best driver in the world and still finish last if you’re unlucky. in fact, this happens far too much.

Choosing drivers for their advantages / disadvantages is also pointless. If you chose a big heavy driver you won’t get anywhere, because the random factor of being penalized is so frequent it removes any advantage of incremental speed gains, because you take longer to recover / gain speed. So an old mechanic is left in and you’re left with the worst aspects, none of the gains.

I’d give it 3 / 10 on gameplay, 5 / 10 on graphics and 2 / 10 on audio

The DS version has better tracks, better racing mechanics and is a trickier game to master, that rewards the player.