cre8d design

I’ve moaned about this before but bear with me. I’m so frustrated that iTunes hasn’t yet come to New Zealand. I’m a big music listener and frankly, I’m tired of listening to the radio while I commute. There’s just far too many ads. I love discovering new music and lately I’ve found that more and more music I like isn’t getting any airplay. When I’m online lately, I’ve been using last.fm and Pandora to discover new songs and artists.

Oh, and I’m a little obsessed with the music from Grey’s Anatomy (importing the soundtrack from Amazon because it’s not available here isn’t enough). I’ve fallen in love with Imogen Heap’s music (again, Amazon imports).

I have a good friend who’s been lending me CDs of less-mainstream artists – Evermore (beautiful album), Phoenix United, Turin Brakes, The Album Leaf, Transatlanticism and Portishead – among others.

But I’d like more music to listen to while commuting. I’d love to download a tonne of songs… but because I’m in New Zealand, it’s not easy. Our copyright laws here are well overdue for an update. You see it’s still illegal to format-shift. I.e., it’s illegal here to copy songs from your CD to your computer, iPod or cellphone. It’s illegal to make a mix tape or CD. It’s illegal to make a back-up copy of your CDs. Of course, no-one I know keeps the law in this regard – and iPods are everywhere here. Technically, the only digital music New Zealanders should have is digital music they’ve bought online.

When law changes to allow one single backup copy of our CDs (like Americans already enjoy) were proposed a couple of years ago here, the head of Sony NZ, Michael Glading, said “At the end of the day, you’re sending a message that it’s okay to copy, and that is going to kill our business,” he said. Of course, nothing has happened yet and the law is falling well the pace of technology and far behind what consumers want.

Here’s another problem: iTunes hasn’t launched here yet – presumably due to legal sagas and record companies not wanting to hand over digital sale rights. Our NZ online store options currently stand at:

1. Amplifier – MP3 format but only a limited number of New Zealand artist tracks only. No DRM which is nice. ~$1.20US for a single.
2. Coke Tunes. Try going to their site on a Mac (“the Mac version of Windows Media Player does not support the Digital Rights Management technology used to protect the music”) or in Firefox (“CokeTunes does not currently work in the Mozilla Firefox browser due to technical limitations”) and you’re turned away at the door. They don’t have anywhere near the music selection iTunes does (not all labels are on board) and the files are in WMA and have DRM. ~$1.05US for a single.
3. Digirama – WMA and DRM again. ~$1.01US for a single.

In summary: there’s currently no legal way to buy non-New Zealand music online within New Zealand for iPods. (Yes, you can illegally play around with the formats if you have the right software and convert from WMA and get rid of the DRM.)

So when TechCrunch reviews AllTunes – a Russian site which will accept overseas credit cards (unlike other online MP3 stores), naturally I was interested. Besides at a mere 9c US a song, it’s attractive financially. But is it legal? People argue both sides over at TechCrunch’s post. It seems to be taking advantage of a legal loophole there and I wonder if anything makes it back to the artist.

People are finding other ways of trying to get around the system legally – such as purchasing US iTunes gift certificates via Ebay (!), getting a friend in the US to purchase the songs on their credit card and then reimbursing via Paypal (messy and you’re paying for too many currency conversions).

Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that there’s nothing legal to play on video iPods. No Google videos here. No TV show downloads here. *Sob*.

Territorial rights for digital content make no sense at all to me.

there’s some limitations. I personally don’t imagine using it much, just like I have spell-checker turned off on my email program. What irks me more than typos are things that spell-checkers aren’t going to pick up: in particular the misuse of “it’s”.

Over the next little while, I’ll slowly be building up a blog theme called “cre8d 2.0″. It’s not built yet, so I’ll be relying on your feedback during the process on how you think it could be improved. There’s a tonne of free templates out there and personally I’m a bit reluctant to start churning out free ones every month as I have enough already on my plate.

I’m hoping that this series of posts will help people see the process I go through to create a new theme and I hope that I’ll also learn from your feedback in creating this.

Blog design steps:

1. Consulting with the client about the purpose of their blog, learning about who the blog is aimed at, what style of writing, what feelings they want to convey through the design. Learning about how they’ll be using the blog.
2. Constructing a wire frame (if necessary – it depends on the complexity of the layout).
3. Constructing an initial design idea in Fireworks. We may go through a series of completely different design ideas or adapt one of the ideas.
4. Converting the design into the (WordPress/MovableType) template files (includes installing relevant plugins and writing any code required for the templates).
5. Tweaking the design to suit – focussing on the smaller important details such as comment forms, archive pages.
6. Re-addressing the blog’s design after it’s been used for a month or two. Usually you find your blog’s “voice” by then and can adapt the design to reflect the key things you’re focussing on.
   I think this step is really important and it’s not about adding the latest plugin but going back to the initial questions of the purpose of the blog, what people are looking for when coming to the blog, thinking about how they’re using the blog again. Sometimes things you thought were really important at first become unimportant and unecessary. Other things need improving.
7. Blog maintenance – staying on top of software updates, keeping track of how your spam filters are working, checking your error logs, looking at highlighting things people are most looking for, cleaning up your blog and so on.

Last week I met Kim from IdolBlog. She’s been on the site for a few years now and it was fun to see each other in person and hang out for a little while at a local cafe (photo).

Here’s her take on the meetup – her comments are quite funny:

I was expecting Rachel to be really nice, but quite quiet and serious – not particularly friendly. Then I expected Regan to be very friendly and talkative, but rather obnoxious at the same time. They kind of like.. switched. Rachel was incredibly friendly and talkative (btw not obnoxious in the slightest ), and Regan was rather quiet and serious (but friendly when he did talk ). Oh and Dad postponed a meeting so I could meet them and he thought they were “very pleasant”…

Most of the people I do design work for I’ve never met face-to-face. We’ve communicated via email, IM, Writeboards, Skype, and occasionally on a real phone.

Of course, I’ve met a tonne of other people after knowing them online first (the other most recent example was meeting Lee Lefever). They’re usually like their online presence and they usually say I’m just as they imagined. So I hope you haven’t got the impression that I’m not that friendly Although, my role at IdolBlog is more about keeping people from being too naughty