Work in progress for the new Shinytastic site.  Definitely needs some robots and rabbits adding.

I have just launched the Shinytastic website v1.0 – http://www.shinytastic.com

Again I am not 100% happy with it, but I suspect it’s a case of being too close to be able to look at it properly. I’m going to be spending more time on it later in the week (hopefully). This month sees me hit ten years of doing this stuff for cash and this the first time I’ve had a website advertising my services. This is possibly the hardest site I’ve done in years. I think the homepage needs a good rehack and the template is possibly over-simple. I’m willing to take the risk on it. I’m not lacking work right now and (outside of this blog) I’m not going to be overly promoting it for a while so I’ve got a chance to hack it about and improve on it in the interim. To be honest I look around at a lot of my peers and they all seem to be as damn useless at their own websites as I am, regardless of the quality of the work they do for their clients. Am I just making excuses now? Possibly, but it’s two in the morning. Goodnight.

Shinytastic Screenshot

Not entirely finalised but I doubt we are going to for for any more changes prior to the printing. These are the first two business cards I’ve designed, and really the first two proper logos. I may post a breakdown of the process involved in each if time allows. I’m pretty happy with the Moonshine PR logo and cards, although we went through far too many variants to get to this stage (entirely my fault). I can’t work out if I’m entirely happy with the Shinytastic cards, I find it very difficult to do things for myself/my own business. I think I achieved the desired end (intentionally over the top silliness).

Following 10 years in web design/development I have FINALLY found the time to create an identity for my business:

Shinytastic

It’s only recently I’ve really had a need for an identity of any sort. For the large part of my career I’ve been acting purely as a freelancer, and as such contact with the actual clients has been minimal, and whenever I did have direct client contact I just used the name of whichever agency I was working for them through. Last year I decided to take the risk and start up as an agency/studio of my own, it’s taken a few months to actually decide on a name and the interim has been filled with those awkward conversations when calling a client’s office:

Me: Hello, can I speak to Geoff MarketingManager please?
Receptionist: Who’s calling please?
Me: Bob Barker.
Receptionist: Where are you calling from?
Me: Urm…. my desk?

Ok, I deal with it slightly better than that (not much though). Now I have the joy of yelling SHINYTASTIC like an over-enthusiastic child.

Choosing the name was a bastard of a headache. I hate choosing names for long term projects, it seems to get harder every time. Line Out Records was a relative pain in the arse, but back then I didn’t think too deeply about the value of a name, as long as I liked it, it was fine. I guess it’s because I put so much weight on a name/identity now that choosing it becomes so much harder. I generally much prefer a nice abstract name that can be associated with anything, for the dual reasons that most of the projects I work on are fairly far reaching and I don’t like having them tied down to any one thing, I might decide I want to expand a project over time. Say for example I chose the name “Bob’s Web Design”, as soon as I start offering video editing (which I do) it looks like a web designer that does video editing on the side as opposed to a creative studio which can work with whatever you give us.

Aside from the possiblity of expansion I like a nice abstract name because it doesn’t put so many pre-conceptions in the mind of possible clients. I also feel it gives an air of creativity that a descriptive name doesn’t, this has proved, within my limited experience, to really make a difference to the clients you end up working with. It shows you are willing to take a risk, try something out, you are not likely to be lumping your clients with a boring standardized website/interactive CD/exploding monkey. The biggest jobs I’ve worked on have been through the agencies with the most abstract and original names and branding.

The actual process of choosing the name involved far more faffing about than should really be required. Lots of thesaurus reading, random word lookups, I even wrote a script that slices up selected lists of words and re-arranges them in a random manner. None of it worked this time (it has in the past). Shinytastic is based on the language I used when working with Damien at GD30* we were both a bit poor at using correct technical terms and so would just use 1984 style language (unintentionally) to discuss the jobs:

“You handle the server side functionality and I’ll do the styling” translated to “You do the tricky-worky-work and I’ll do the pretty-shinyness” a good design was “shiny nice nice” or “shiny-good”. Now I write it down I see quite how annoyingly smug we must have sounded, but it got the job done. Shiny was generally my favourite word for “good” and I’ve been known to excessively overuse “fantastic”.

I’m happy using a word for my studio that I’d actually use in real life. I appreciate it sounds a tad retarded, but it’s upbeat and positive, and I think it’s nicely original. I’m not interested in creating boring work, so I don’t want a boring identity. I hope it doesn’t put people off but then it can’t put them off anymore than a web designer without a website. Reactions so far have been mixed, but the reactions of clients and peers has generally been good, so I’m sticking with it.

The screenshot above of the current holding page is not final by a long shot but I needed something up there to show to prospective clients, I have an inbox full of enquiries to my lineoutrecords.com address (existing clients passed that on to their friends), I don’t want to be mailing from a new address – bob@shinytastic.com – where the domain has nothing but a blank “coming soon” page. The current image is certainly in the direction I want to take the branding. As suggested by the ever brilliant Tim of EvoHosting, I’m going for a Retro-Future look, which suits me because I like it.

I still need to sort a bank account, business cards, proper logo and branding, official announcement to existing clients, and probably a bucket of other crap. But at the least I have a basic identity.

* Speaking of which, he’s likely to kill me if he reads this, he spend a large portion of the time we worked together trying to convince me to do a creative blog. Sorry Damo.