Blogging and all that malarkey

This week on Unfinished Business, Paul Boag, Jon Hicks and I dispense with any pretence that this is a show about business and spend 90 minutes talking about something much more interesting. Peter Capaldi’s first series as Doctor Who. We talk about our thoughts on Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and the best (and worst) episodes of the season. Then we finish up by discussing the series finale, Clara and Danny Pink and of course Missy. If you haven’t seen the final episode of this season, there are spoilers galore.

When I arrived at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this week, conference organiser Marc had a nice surprise waiting for me, a new Joli Originals laptop sleeve for my Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

The week’s Unfinished Business was recorded live at The Web Is… conference in Cardiff, as part of Geek Mental Help week. I was joined on-stage by Christopher Murphy, Cole Henley, Relly Annett-Baker and Dr. Clare Symons to talk about a wide range of mental heath and mental illness issues.

I put the lower audio quality this week down to everyone wearing lapel, not using condenser microphones, (sorry about that,) but recording live in front of an audience was fun, and I’ll definitely do it again. Thanks to Craig and Amie Lockwood for recording this episode from the mixing desk for me.

There are no sponsors this week, as it didn’t seem appropriate.

I really like Norway and the Norwegian people are among the friendliest I’ve met, so I never need convincing to visit them. While I was in Oslo in October, speaking at the Making Web conference I met the wonderful people at IGM and when they asked me to take my CSS3 For Responsive Web Design workshop back to Oslo on December 3rd, I jumped at the chance.

This week is Geek Mental Help week and on Unfinished Business I’m joined by Liz Elcoate, one of the people who helped to spark the idea. We ask if our industry attracts people with issues or cause them, does our working environment add our problems and what we hope the outcomes from this week will be? But not before we talk sport, Liz’s obsession with wrestling and my Uncle Haystacks.

Next week, starting October 27th, is Geek Mental Help Week:

A week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.

Our friends at Code Enigma relaunched their website at DrupalCon in Amsterdam. The launch included the branding we designed for them.

What the hell. We still have plenty of places available for mine and Brads workshops at The Web Is… next week. Come and join me for ‘CSS3 for Responsive Web Design’ and you’ll get a free copy of my Hardboiled Web Design paperback.

A few days ago was the fourth anniversary of our publishing Hardboiled Web Design. Four years since some friends and I wrote, illustrated and published a book.

Brighton-based developer Benjamin Hollway loves a burger in a brioche bun and joins me on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how young people feel excluded from some industry events and how conferences and meet-ups should cater for people who don’t want to or are too young to drink. Benjamin was shortlisted for ‘emerging talent of the year’ at the Net Awards and oh, did I mention that he’s only sixteen?

I’m researching advertising successes for a new talk that I’m writing and of course that means PG Tips and their famous chimpanzees campaign that ran for 32 years from 1956 and within two years made PG the number one tea brand in Britain and kept them there for decades.

Speaking of podcasts, the latest episode of Guy English and Rene Ritchie’s Debug is well worth your time as Don Melton—former Director of Internet Technologies at Apple—and Nitin Ganatra—former Director of iOS Apps at Apple—talk about presenting to Steve Jobs and offer a wonderful insight into working at Apple.

Designer and artist Brendan Dawes is back on episode 90 of Unfinished Business this week to talk about his recent commission by Mailchimp, Six Monkeys, which explores interactions with email through physical objects named after six famous chimpanzees. Before that though, we talk more about what’s happening with Geek Mental Help Week, including whether the word ‘geek’ takes something away from the project and is somehow derogatory.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

Something tells me that Jeremy will approve of this.

I couldn’t be happier that the brilliant Richard Wiggins and David Hughes, the pair behind Milton Keynes Geek Night, are hosting a special Mental Health evening event as part of Geek Mental Help Week.

I’ve been over the moon with messages of support and offers of help for Geek Mental Help Week. I’m going to write personally to everyone who offered to design and build the website

After talking with Laura on Unfinished Business this week, about burgers in donuts, we moved on to discuss the Geek Mental Help Week that I’ve been thinking about and planning for the last few months. Something that I sincerely hope will help those of us who suffer from mental health issues and the others who support us.

Jeremy pointed me to this. I supppose he likes it because it fits his dislike of advertising. I like it because it fit my dislike of awards.

This week’s an emotional episode of Unfinished Business. After talking about why a burger in a donut should never, ever have become a thing, Laura Kalbag and I discuss mental health issues in our industry. We talk about my own struggles with depression and depersonalisation disorder, issues that stem from my father’s own mental health issues and suicide.

This week on Unfinished Business, Harry Roberts and I have some pretty big, Boag-shaped, boots to fill after last week’s episode. Harry takes the opposite view to Paul about sharing personal struggles in a work context and worries about the impression that sharing give to prospective clients. Then we talk about how clients’ commissioning process for creative services is largely broken, the differences between an open conversation starter, an RFP and a brief and how we, as designers and developers, can help clients to commission what we do better.

In the 1960s, advertising legend David Ogilvy offered advice on how clients should choose an agency in his book Ogilvy On Advertising. In it, he wrote:

This week on Unfinished Business, I had planned to talk with Paul Boag about client briefs and managing expectations. But when we sat down to talk, we were both in the mood to talk about something much, more personal. We discussed how we feel about how Twitter has changed, Erin Kissane’s ‘Ditching Twitter,’ Dan Edwards’ ‘Treading through treacle’ and our general sense of melancholy about our industry. Then we talk about how, contrary to what we often hear, our industry is filled with acts of kindness.

We discuss how we maintain our optimism and the steps we take to protect ourselves emotionally. If you think you know Paul and I from our public personas, I think that you’ll be very surprised by this episode. If you haven’t listened to Unfinished Business for a while (or at all) I urge you to listen this week.

Last years’ Handheld Conference in Cardiff was an incredible event. A bearded me even got to push a dalek with my friend Jon, as well as deliver a talk and host a sell-out workshop. This November I’ll be back in Cardiff for Handheld’s successor, The Web Is… I’m a last minute addition to the speaker line-up (again) and back workshopping with a new ‘CSS3 For Responsive Web Design’ workshop.

We don’t develop with Wordpress, I’ve never used Wordpress and I can’t see myself starting this late in the game. So I was surprised when Troy Dean asked me to talk with him on his WP Elevation podcast. I was sure that he’d confused me with someone else, but he convinced me that he hadn’t and we spent a fun hour talking about designing content/mobile first, why we write content for our clients and ultimately why I don’t use Wordpress.

Troy normally hosts video podcasts, but my internet connection is so poor at home that we had to switch to audio only. We recorded at 8:30am so that was probably a blessing. If you’re not already sick of the sound of my voice on Unfinished Business, I think you might enjoy this one.