A series of cleverly designed interactive infographics lighten the process of discovery, as the quiz steps you through a series of questions that effectively reveal whether you’re involved (obliviously) in evil slave-mongering or not, and how many slaves you have working for you throughout the world! Needless to say, my ownership of an iPhone makes for iShaming results. You’ll be amused by quirky execution of these questions, and surprised by what you learn along the way…try it out!

The Colour Scheme Designer makes choosing a colour much less of a mission, especially when you need to move quickly! Have a click around this clever kit, and if you’re a colour nerd like me, this site will give you heart palpitations.

Firekites AUTUMN STORY – chalk animation from Yanni Kronenberg on Vimeo.

This year’s Australian Open served up live data-feeds for all fans via iPad’s then ‘app of the month.’ iPad owners enjoyed the luxury of following all the action via this tennis court inspired design, as seen here

Making TMG Better

We’ve continued to work closely with Trader Media Group, helping them launch Razsor, their bespoke website product for car dealers, as well as the dedicated commercial vehicles website, Commercial Trader, and the innovative Auto Trader New Car website.

Branding a future classic

We’ve built on our existing work with Masterframe and after running a productive brand workshop with them we’re having great fun developing and refreshing their flagship Bygone Collection as we type.

Doing our bit for Blighty

Our identity for Digital Mission helped Chinwag and UKTI sell British digital entrepreneurship to the US market at SXSWi in Austin, Texas and at the New York Digital Mission. We also helped out with Social Media Week London.

We don’t like to talk about it but…

We worked with Bliss, the special baby care charity to test direct donations in the social media space with our Bliss Billboards Campaign

Designing for Touch

We helped The Open University maintain their position at the cutting edge of education, launching an iPad optimised Annual Report website for them just before Christmas.

On the launch pad

Right now there are website launches in the pipeline for Chocopologie by Knipschildt, a high-end Chocolatier from the US, and for a new initiative by Nottingham City Council. Keep an eye on our work feed to see the finished products.

Latest developments

We launched our Facebook page in March, and we’re posting stories about great integrated marketing campaigns and case studies of projects we’ve worked on – as well as stuff that just floats our boat. Join us to join in!

Oh, and we made a little stop-motion animation for our clients at Christmas, telling the story of the humble Christmas card and helping to raise money for Bliss, our favourite charity.

Bigger and better

Big news for Better Things: our little team is growing. We’re proud to welcome Beth Robb into the fold as Art Director. Beth joins us from Sydney, Australia, where she worked across multiple disciplines – branding, marketing materials, DM, advertising, websites, packaging, illustration, photography and installation – and multiple market sectors. She’s also a talented musician, so we’re looking forward to impromptu gigs in the studio.

That’s all from us

All in all we’ve had a great year and we hope you have too. If you want to have a chat about any of the projects on our site, or get in touch with us to discuss a new project, give us a shout – we always love to hear from you.

First is this cool video from CPG Grey. He tells us lots of stuff we already know about the UK, but he does it in a concise way that seems to poke fun at the ridiculous complexity of the whole thing whilst not explicitly doing anything that pokes fun at the ridiculous complexity of the whole thing. And it has a Venn diagram in it, which in our mind means it rocks.

Second is this nice little idea from Grey Stockholm and Ogilvy Stockholm:

They’re merging, dontcha know. They wanted to reveal their new name, INGO in a cool way. So they asked users to follow their page on Facebook, and then used the profile pics of the followers to gradually reveal their name. It took 2,922 faces and 4 hours to reveal the name, apparently. Pretty cool. Shame the name itself is a bit weird: INGO means ‘International Non-Governmental Organisation’ in English. They sort of know this – they refer to the NGO part on the website. But WHY dammit, if you know that the aconym is already taken? WHY? It’s like calling your agency WTF. WTF?

Anyway. Nice idea from INGO. And we’ll post more stuff we like soon.

Donate to our friends at Bliss

The idea of the event is to draw attention to the fact that, despite being a young technology, the earliest components of the web – basic but sometimes beautiful websites – have been discarded and many lost for ever. There is a British Museum project to archive websites that have been built and abandoned over the last 20 years, and this exibition is a fun way to highlight the project.

Jim Boulton, curator of the exhibition, pulled off a bit of a coup in finding a load of machines of yesteryear – my personal favourite being an old powermac that bought to mind a cast-off machine given to me by one of my Dad’s mates back in 2000 – and getting them to function, complete with period operating systems and peripherals.

The array of machinery, much of it dating from the late nineties and early 2000s, so not all that old when compared to, say, my 1980s turntable that still functions perfectly well and looks great – looked incredibly dated. The PCs all big and grey and ugly; the macs smoother and latterly candy-coloured.

But piecing together this collection of antique computers wasn’t Boulton’s biggest challenge. His biggest challenge was getting 18 period websites, dating from 1992 to 2007, to run on them. It’s indicative of a fast-moving, technology-led medium that today’s big thing is tomorrows bit of dicarded code languishing on a server somewhere, and Jim had a hell of a time piecing together portions of code and broken links to get the sites to work.

But piece it together he did, and we got to nose around some sites that seemed so dated whilst at the same time fairly fresh in the memory. The aforementioned (and pictured) powermac was housing KylieUltra.com, a site built by Good Technology back in 1997:

Also in the house, amongst the 18 archived sites on show, were a cool series of ‘interactive experiments’ by Antirom that Jim had to find a 1995 vintage laptop to make work; Large Design’s 2007 Agent Provocateur site; and the 1992 second generation NeXTstation that became the world’s first web server.

Boulton reckons websites will be history within five years, as brands and other content providers stop pulling people to their sites to consume content and instead people tailor their own experiences, pulling the content they want to consume. If he’s right websites will have come and gone in 20 years, and without efforts like this exhibition, that’s 20 years of lost creativity, something that would be unthinkable in any other media.

So think on that.

Digital Archeology runs Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th November.

We’re pretty excited about Internet Week Europe hitting London for the first time. The five day festival started on Monday, and we’ve been having a poke around to see what’s on offer.

Tonight we’re going to head over to the Digital Archology exhibition, archiving and preserving the last 15 years of creativity on the internet.

You can check out the full programme here and there are tools for you to plan your own personalised Internet Week itinerary. Get involved – it’s been awesome so far!

So beautiful, so well-conceived, so compelling. Too many great bits to mention. Watch it.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Direction and animation is by Blu: blublu.org
Production and distribution is by Artsh.it: artsh.it
Sountrack is by Andrea Martignoni