Design Archives - Ade Rowbotham

September 8, 2020 — No Comments

New website launched! (meta)

Now feasibly you might be reading this in your favourite RSS reader like it’s 2007 or something i.e. you might not be looking at my website at this exact moment. But most likely you literally are reading this on my new website, in which case welcome, I hope you like it.

[Version for the Feed Crew: Hey I just launched my new website, check it out it at https://aderowbotham.com ]

In any case it seemed fitting to mark the launch with a blog post. So here we are.

Speaking of this blog, in 5 days time it will have been running for 17 years. Here is the first post. It started out as an anonymous journal of my day to day experiences having recently moved to London. The first few years are on Blogger and I can’t actually get into that account any more. It seems it’s not associated with my Google account, but they’ve left it up so *shrug emoji*.

The archive here in WordPress goes back to February 14 2008.

Anyway – the website. I decided it was high time that I had one again, seeing as that’s what I do for a living and so on. I have been working on it “live” for the last few weeks and now It’s pretty much done (except for a small glitch in Safari that has surfaced, third party thing, blah).

Mostly it’s archival work currently due to the fact that I’ve been heavily involved with long term business stuff with both Milk and WRP for many years. However I have a few more projects to add including some work in the pipeline and some experiments, oh and and music too – all of which I will no doubt share as it happens.

A good website is never *finished* it should always keep evolving.

Do click around and so on.

Published by Ade in Design, Personal, web, work

Tags: meta

September 5, 2020 — No Comments

Old NET magazine article

Remember Net magazine? It ended publication a few months ago after 25 years on the news stand. As a keen amateur / pre-junior designer I used to buy it to be inspired and learn various coding top tips.

I blogged about this back in 2013 but this morning while I was searching through old files to create the Pirata work page on this site I found the actual PDF of the article they published about us. Rather than let it languish on my backup drive it deserves to be on the web.

I’m not loving my profile photo (no fault of the Photographer, James) – I was much heavier back then and resemble a kind of young Steve Ballmer, but anyway here is the article:

NET238.profile Download

From the archive: McLaren

Better late than never! I have been lucky enough to not really need a portfolio for years. But it seemed a shame not to have one and, after all, I do know how to make websites so here we are. I am slowly adding both new and old projects to this site over the coming weeks.

This one is something I’ll always be proud of – at Pirata (RIP) we built a new and innovative site for McLaren, starting work on it in late 2009 and launching the first version – the award-winning ‘The Race 1.0b’ – for the start of the 2010 Formula1 season. We continued to reinvent, maintain and support the site for several years.

See the work here >

More than just a typical site, it was built around race weekends when it became a live dashboard with realtime data from the cars, drivers and team wherever they were in the world.

It goes without saying that it was a huge team effort, we had some some incredibly talented designers, developers and producers.

Take a look at my McLaren portfolio page for more details and screenshots.

I have plenty more more work to add both recent and from my archive. You can find all projects on the Work page.

Published by Ade in Design, Tech, work

Tags: f1, formula1, mclaren

September 4, 2020 — No Comments

Portfolio update: Rachael Smith Photography

Just added to my portfolio: Rachael Smith Photography.

I have plenty more more work to add both recent and from my archive. You can find all projects on the Work page.

Published by Ade in Design, Photography, work

Tags: photography

February 12, 2020 — No Comments

Week 07

On being a creative person trapped inside a technical person’s brain

Published by Ade in Design, Music, Tech

Tags: design, music, technology

October 31, 2015 — 3 Comments

cappchur, data capture app

cappchur is a simple data capture app for tablet and mobile, aimed primarily at the exhibition, trade show and retail markets. The project is a collaboration with Paul Pike.

The app launched this week and is available for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch for FREE in the App Store, and for Android tablets and phones here on Google Play.

cappchur has been designed to be simple and intuitive without any complicated set up process. Once you've installed the app you can start using it straight away, with no need to register up-front. You can also use it completely offline.

If you or someone you know is running a stall or exhibiting at an event please give our app a try and let us know what you think: cappchur.com.

Published by Ade in Design, Me, Mobile, Tech

April 23, 2014 — 2 Comments

New Twitter.com features

Twitter finally updated my profile to the new display format - several weeks after they upgraded my cat. Here's an almost pointless blog post about what I like and dislike about the new profile design:

Overall appearance: Like
Massive font size for just certain tweets apparently selected at random: Dislike
Front-end build details, particularly the way the profile photo slides up out of the way as you scroll down, to be replaced by the compact in-nav-bar version: Like
Pinned tweets: Dislike (because it reduces the beautiful simplicity of Twitter... but I'll probably use it to promote something)
Not showing replies by default: Like
Showing non-tweet-based activity in my timeline such as who I followed: Dislike (I think).

That's it. You don't care. Good.

Published by Ade in Design, Geek, Tech, web

Tags: twitter

June 17, 2013 — 1 Comment

New sort-of-site

Having left my big important position of responsibility in London I still need to take stock of all the work that I'm proud of from the past few years and put it together as a new portfolio. However, I've been pretty much flat out since the day I left Pirata, and I'm currently juggling three projects among other things, so it's going to be a little while yet. It’s a truism that your own website can be the hardest thing to get round to when paid work is vying for your time.

I bought a new laptop the other day and it has one of those ultra-high-resolution displays. It's a lovely bit of kit but (as is well documented) old software and old websites now look terrible on it, the graphics being either pixellated or blurred as they're scaled up. The newest of my personal sites was created in 2007, and looked particularly outdated on the new laptop so I decided that – at the very least – aderowbotham.com needed a quick and dirty makeover.

The old site was just the front and back of my business card from 2007:

The new site doesn't contain a whole lot more, but here are some of its key features:

Pretentious introductory ‘mission statement’ (in lieu of having some actual work to show)
Works on mobile (obv.)
Big silly tooltips
Shows off a few of my best photographs in high resolution
Some technical stuff that means it’s quick

Anyway, not much to see really. This post is mostly for myself, Google and of course The NSA. My website is at https://aderowbotham.com.

Next-up: a new CV.

Published by Ade in Design, Me, Tech, web

Tags: design, website

March 28, 2013 — 5 Comments

Farewell Pirata

After four years at Pirata I have very recently departed in order to pursue some personal ventures and to spend more time with my family. It's been an incredible four years during which we created a bounty of outstanding and beautiful work, took on some brave challenges and had a lot of fun together.

For me as Technical Partner the biggest satisfactions came from putting together a great team of talented and creative developers, and from overseeing the evolution of our capabilities as we went from building Flash microsites for ad campaigns to creating high profile high capacity dot-com sites in the contemporary world of HTML5, mobile and 'The Cloud'.

Much credit must of course also go to the design team which contains some remarkably talented individuals; Pirata's design prowess has always been second to none under the creative direction of Eduardo, Stuart and David. And I'll get in trouble now if I don't also include a nod to the producers. Of course nothing would have ever launched without you.

The key to great digital design is Agile integration with the development process – something we achieved more consistently than anywhere I've worked before, particularly so in the last year. We've always ensured that designers and developers sit and work together, and the quality of the work really shows for it.

Among the work I'm most proud of is the that which we've been doing for Team GB, not least teamgb.com itself which was a roaring success during London 2012. And more recently Pirata has re-designed and re-built the McLaren Formula 1 team's website from the ground up for the 2013 season. It still has McLaren Live during every Grand Prix, but it works better than ever before and looks fantastic.

I'd like to thank everyone past and present at Pirata for making it a brilliant four years, I'm going to miss everyone greatly and I wish you all the very best of luck! And likewise to all the splendid clients I've been fortunate enough to work with.

What now? Well I'm interested in talking to anyone about projets that lie anywhere around the cross section of technology and creativity. I have a lot of experience to bring to the table and would love to work with small teams of talented people to create tools, apps and games.

And in the short term I'd better get on because I have some websites to make. I still love doing that too.

Follow @_ade on Twitter

Published by Ade in Design, Me, Tech, web

Tags: pirata

June 11, 2012 — No Comments

Doing things right

MacBook battery compartment

Steve Jobs on attention to detail:

‘It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see." ’

— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Published by Ade in Design, Geek

Tags: design, perfection, steve jobs, stevejobs

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