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!

Thanks to Steve for his comment and link to designer Maarten Baas.

He is a young Dutch furniture designer and has a great range of furntiture called “Smoke” which you can view on his website in the ‘Works’ section.
Long story short, he burns classic pieces of furniture, and just before the pieces become structurally unsound, he puts out the flames, and lacquers them up, making these amazing piece’s of furniture that look like they’ve just been pulled off a bonfire!

There’s a nice clip here from his Milan show earlier this year.

He’s had some nice little write ups and interviews on various different sites should anyone want to learn a little more!

This appears to be the biggest question people are asking us.  But, also its the one that that has prompted the most answers from commenters too.  So, I thought I’d try to get it all down to a nice succinct answer.

Partly because I think it’ll be a useful bit of copy once we’ve got a Beta up, and partly because Dave asked me to and I said I would!  Here we go:

Q.  Why would anyone lend a desk for free on flaming desks?

A1. To meet / be around good people.

Nonsense had been doing this for a while - offering desks to people that are good to have around.  (In fact, the offer I made to Dave from White October that sparked the whole idea was partially motivated by us needing to develop relationships with awesome developers.)  Simon from Human Zoo pointed out that people could even ask for work favours e.g. “10 min chat about our website”.

This is my Dad. You could benefit from his wisdom!

Flaming Desks will encourage this by allowing Desk Lenders to state the kind of people they’d like to meet, and later by selecting categories so searchers can filter desks that are right for them.

A2. To feel good about yourself.
Lending a desk is a nice thing to do.  And we all know that being nice feels, well, nice.  Marcus from Proximity argued that its also nice to the planet; cuts down on wasted resource… I like the idea that one day Flaming Desks may be being used to such a level that we can count its value in No. of skyscraper builds abandoned!

Unnecessary.

Flaming Desks will be nice and friendly, and free - so should fit in this whole area… nicely.

A3. For tea, biscuits and solid gold timepieces…
Account Planning genius Matt Tanter (who is looking for a job right now, so feel free to use the comments to state your agency’s interest!) reminded us of a thought we’d had a while ago; allow people to ask Desk Borrowers to bring something along to say thanks for the free desk.

FYI: tea; milk, no sugar.

We are DEFINITELY going to do this, if only so Nonsense can invite Charlie Gower again and stock up on Custard Creams.  (I imagine that in other establishments the ask will be higher; e.g. to use a corner of Donald’s desk in Trump Tower, bring a Rolex…)

P.S.  I’ve made an ‘FAQ’ category, so we can put all this type of stuff in there and find them easily later.

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

ParkAtMyHouse.com - the service that lets you do exactly that.

Our mate Jay, who runs the very excellent auctions-for-experiences website, Sweemo.com just pointed me in the direction of a service called Park At My House.

I was gonna explain what it is, but between the picture above, and the name, I think that’s pretty obvious.

Note to team; can we all have a play with this to see what stuff they’re doing that’s good?  Cheers.

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…)

I’ve updated the prototype today to make the geolocation during registration much more resilient. All of the scenarios are now covered - it does its best to locate the street address of the company, then falls back to the city, and eventually the country if it can’t locate the city.

I’ve also updated the interface on this page with instructions that change depending on the accuracy of the geo search.

The top 3 items on the outstanding list in this post have been sorted. It took almost as long as it did to get to the original prototype, but I was being distracted by Olympic medals for GB!

Update : Now when view the home page of the app it will try and figure out your country from your IP address and centre the map on that country.  I’ve used the open source IP to country database from MaxMind which is 99.3% accurate.  I think this is working but short of a round-the-world trip I’ll need people to let me know if it’s not!