Flaming Desks is a blog…

Okay guys, below are the three themes that I’ve designed for the look and feel of Flaming Desks. Simply click on the thumbnails to enlarge!

They should be fairly self explanatory so I will try to keep my chat down to a minimum! With each one, I have followed the same order; starting with the homepage; then clicking through to the search function of ‘Find a desk’; followed by the search results. I think that this is sufficient enough to show the ideas clearly.

Theme 1
With a nice and simple interface, this design is about attention to detail. The homepage (Thumbnail 1) allows you to search for desks straight away meaning one less click from a user journey perspective (compared to the themes following - hence only two thumbnails for this theme!).

I would like to really work at crafting the assets of the page to reflect heat in an attempt to make the Flaming Desks logo itself look hot and bright. A nice little touch like this remains in context with the simplicity of the site design and will give it a real premium look.

Theme 2
Dave, this is the one we hope challenges the hell out of you, excites you, and doesn’t send you running! Is it possible to have the whole background of the browser as the interactive map itself??!

As you can see from my designs, the idea here is that the content of the site is over-layed on over the map. Users are able to select Find or List a desk and the relevant overlay unfolds above the map. Minimize them again and use the map to manually search out desks all over the world!

The nicest touch with this design (as I’m sure you’ll agree) is the hole cut out of the overlay when search results are displayed (Thumbnail 3). The idea here is that by selecting any of the located desks in the results list, and the map will zoom to the correct location of that specific desk, centering it tidily within the hole in the overlay… so Dave, you think this is doable?!

Theme 3
Still using the overlay idea, instead of the map as the background, using some really crisp imagery of nicely burned wood textures could look amazing! The photo I’ve used in these designs was taken by Alec Mills, an amateur photographer I found on Flickr. She has extremely kindly agreed to allow us to use her photo on the blog (and Dave, she will hopefully be providing a higher res version of this for you too). Even if we don’t use the image for the main site, it would be nice to use this in some way. Additionally, I am sure we will get some good photos from our desk burning exercise too, maybe the images could change?! Maybe that’s a conversation for another time!

The homepage (Thumbnail1) is as simple as can be; a nice self contained logo with buttons to ‘Find’ and ‘List’. On clicking one of the buttons, the self contained device then expands out from the center and everything happens within the white box.

So here it is, the Flaming Desks logo! Find below, a zip file containing everything any of us should need regarding the logo. GIFs and JPGs for web and print as well as Vector files too.

(You’ll also notice that the Web 2.0 style reflection is no more!)

Flaming Desks Logo Artwork

Rob, this one’s definitely over to you, but we need one!  Short, sharp, punchy, and hopefully a bit funny.  Suggestions as comments please…

Guys,

great catch up meeting yesterday. Nice to get our first team pic of us ‘hard at it’!

It’s nice to see us getting more and more excited about this as everything unfolds. The PR and Marketing developments are really really promising, so Rob, please keep us updated with anything cool in this area!

Design-wise - the logo is more or less decided upon now and Nick will be getting these artworked up in the next day or so. In the meantime he is working on developing the look and feel of the site and we’ll be seeing some visuals posted soon for inspection! Dave - we hope these inspire and challenge you rather than send you running (especially one of them!).

Keep on keeping it up guys and look forward to our next catch up meeting!

I got rid of the 3D specs and made a bespoke “g”. What are people’s thoughts?

Taking on board the comments from my original logo post, and following further discussion at Nonsense HQ, find below some more evolved designs. The annotations should guide you through, but basically, these are focusing on a more Web 2.0 sort of style; maintaining gradients as per the favoured 1st set of designs, but considering a couple more rounded, playful sort of typefaces.

Oh, and as requested by our mate Nathaniel at ActionAid, you can click on the scribbles below and view them at a larger scale!

Comments please.  If all else fails we’ll get one from the web 2.0 logo creatr…

More still to come.  Mike’s “flames-from-the-side-to-make-it-look-like-its-moving” idea is one I’m gonna look at.  (But Rob, your “just use a photo of a desk on fire” thought is going nowhere mate.  We all agree its a great marketing idea - maybe you should stick to that…)

Airbeds... pah! It's all about the desks...

http://airbedandbreakfast.com/

Except it’s airbeds / sofas that they’re renting out and they’re charging.  That said the interface is great - very much in the direction that we’re heading with the mapping.

Techcrunch said they set up with $20,000 of seed capital… I think we can beat that with our $0.00 slush fund!

Okay, so finding an old desk to burn is proving more difficult than first expected.. there are plenty of crappy old PC desks floating around on Gumtree and Freecycle etc, but I want one with some real character.. maybe one that I’ll even feel a little bit bad about burning after it’s all over.

So this is a call for anyone reading this blog, to spread the word that Nick at Flaming Desks is in search of a FREE desk for his bonfire.

P.S. We don’t really have a $1000 reward.

As Robbie points out, I have been preaching the everlasting gospel of sharing desks to one or two select industry contacts! Only things is, we haven’t really done a post that deals with “What are we doing?” and “What do we want?” all in one place yet - so anyone rocking up here might end up a tad confused.

I thought I’d have a go at that now. (Should also give us something to link to from our “About” page too - which has been a bit sparse and unloved so far.)

OK, so what are we doing?

First of all “we” is two friendly companies - Nonsense and White October. Rob from Nonsense and Dave from White October had an idea in the pub, and quickly realised that a collaboration between the two companies could make it happen. This blog is the manifestation of that collaboration. All posts are written by Nonsense and White October people, who are taking on various roles in getting what has become known as “Flaming Desks” made. (Hence silly posts about burning a desk for marketing purposes, and tedious ones detailing functionality!)

The idea here is that we’ll be 100% transparent about what we’re doing, so anyone can come along and read the actual conversations we’re having as we develop the Flaming Desks idea. And of course those people can comment on what we’re doing, which will enhance the whole thing.

Yeah, but WHAT ARE WE DOING????

So we had an idea (and I described how here) that we loved, which goes a bit like this:

There are lots of people (particularly “media types”) who from time to time could do with a desk for a day in a city somewhere. There are lots of offices, small and large, with a spare desk sitting there empty. Flaming Desks sorts them both right out… you’ve got a spare desk; you list it. You need somewhere to sit; you find one on offer and request it.

This is Flaming Desks. The beauty of the idea is that everyone wins. People with desks get an opportunity to meet new and interesting people (basically a nice way to network) and people without desks get, well, a desk. We can see loads of the “uber-freelance” brigade using this service once its up and running.

And finally, what do we want?

Right now, the main thing we want from all you lovely visitors is feedback. Please comment away on any of the issues being discussed as much as you like. This could be anything from something simple like “it’ll never work you muppets”, to something more complicated that I personally wouldn’t understand - like “have you considered using the Jango framework for Python in a Redhat Linux environment?”.

There’s a place for all your comments, in all the different posts. We promise that we’ll respond to all the feedback we get. (Although don’t expect us to be polite if your feedback is mean and nasty!)

Specifically:

• Are there any existing communities / web apps that you could see it integrating well with?
• Spotted any obvious pitfalls?
• Do you have an old desk you want burnt?

Answers on a postcard. (If you actually want to send a postcard, send it to Nonsense London, Studio 4, 10/11 Archer Street, London, W1D 7AZ - we’ll put it on the blog.)

Yeah, but what do we REALLY want?

Two things you could do that would be invaluabe to us right now would be:

- vote in our straw poll.
- subscribe to the RSS feed, or bang in your email address in the little box in the top right the blog [Or this one... DF].

- forward the link around like crrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzyyy.

[UPDATE:] And another thing! Why are we doing this?

Simple. Because we think its one of those things that just needs to be made. OK, and because it might make a few people notice our two companies a bit. And because we’ll hopefully meet loads of useful clever people through the comments and collaboration. And not to make any money. Well maybe one day, but only from someone who promises not to bugger everything up. (Hmmm - not that simple then.)

We’re called Flaming Desks because we’re going to be hotter than the hottest of hot desks. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

We’d previously talked about a cutesy web 2.0 stylee logo of a desk with little flames coming out, but in the spirit of Ben’s “do it for real” attitude, we thought about actually setting a desk on fire and using photos and video of the deskferno as a selection of brand assets.

A quick chat with Russell over a cuppa endorsed this, so I’ve roped in Nick - Nonsense’s most design-y creative and the man behind No One’s Home.

Nick and a photographer mate are going to stencil up an old desk with the words “Flaming Desks”, and torch it. Then we’ll have loads of useful footage and shots of a burning desk… which may or may not find their way into the logo and branding for our site!

Either way, it’ll brighten up this here blog a bit, and Nick will get to indulge his slightly pyro tendencies.

I’ve made Nick a login for this blog, so expect some posts from him soon. Probably ones with shots of Nick with no eyebrows…