Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.

After reading Rachel Andrew’s excellent post regarding “Women and the backchannel” I felt the need to respond. Rachel is always someone I have looked up to from a young age and her opinion is spot on.

Paul Boag has since released an excellent video regarding this, Criticise Work, Not People

Yesterday was the fabulous 200th Boagworld Podcast celebration, I think this is a huge achievement for Paul & Marcus and everyone who has been involved in the podcast in whatever capacity. I know a heck of a lot of work goes into each one and it’s all for the benefit of every single person in the industry, so hitting 200 episodes is something I applaud them for, the man hours of work must be astonishing.

I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of the 200th Boagworld Show and have known about my appearance since just after Christmas, I had no idea who else would be speaking or what we would be speaking on but just to be asked to be a part of their special celebration was an honor for me. I don’t want what I’m about to say to have any effect on the superb day that everyone put together, this should by no means take the shine off a fantastic 12 hours of broadcasting.

Photo courtesy of Ryan Taylor

Fast forward to yesterday, 12th February 2010 – my slot was at 3pm just after the fab Relly and between Andy Clarke. I made the decision after tuning in earlier in the day to turn the USteam Chat off completely while I was on air, the comments had been juvenile to say the least and were just uncalled for.

I was happy with my portion of the show, came off-air and was surprised to see so many Twitter @replies stating that many people had been disappointed with some of the comments of the members of the UStream chat room.

NB. My favourite light hearted comment was from Ben Bodien who DM’d just before I went live saying “The chatroom people are getting all excited, wear a conservative jumper or something”

Unbeknown to everyone, I had also sent out a message to my clients at the start of the day letting them know it was on and which speakers might be most useful for them to also tune into, Relly was one of those on that list and luckily I was straight after so they all stayed tuned in in order to see me as well, I also had many non-web friends watching. My friends obviously weren’t backwards in coming forward in telling me exactly what some people had said after I came off air.

Suffice to say, they weren’t impressed with some of the comments being thrown around the chat room and I almost felt like I had to justify my position in the industry to them. I always promised that the first comment to ever come out of someones mouth that I am where I am because of the “way I look” (their words not mine), that I would come down like a ton of bricks on that person.

I started my business at the age of 19, with £1000 that I had saved from my £100 a week job in acting at the time, that’s every single penny I could save from my £400/month job going into a little fund in order to buy a decent computer, desk, printer, stationery and basic chair from IKEA. Aside from not having money to go out and do things a normal 19 year old wanted to do, I was also working every hour god sent in order to build up to a sustainable income that would support me in what I wanted to do. I missed out on countless nights out with my friends, rarely saw my bed before 3am every night and forwent the normal trips to Topshop, nightclubs and restaurants in order to be a part of an industry I knew I would love.

I have never had anything handed to me on a plate, I come from a very working class family who have built up their business from scratch, my Grandfather passed on his business expertise to me and that’s where the fire in my belly comes from, not from the way I look and me thinking it’s a free pass to success.

I’m now 26, I’ve been a part of this industry for many years and to now have people think I am where I am because of the way I look, is frankly an insult. I work my socks off and the fact that is recognised by various people is a wonderful thing of which I’m always appreciative.

I can only assume if you were one of those making the comments yesterday, you have no idea of my background, my work ethics or indeed me as a person. So, don’t you dare say I am where I am because of the “way I look” as I’d love you to rewind, look that 19 year old girl in the eye who missed out on so much and tell her not to bother, as our industry is going to be a fickle, hard place for a woman to try and be a part of and that it’s you that’s going to make it hard. Quite frankly, I’ve always been a stubborn and determined so and so and I would have probably ignored you anyway, just like I did yesterday. The only reason I’m not ignoring it now is so that I can stomp it out before it happens again.

I realise on the flip side I also had a lot of support and people telling these commenters where to go so, thank you for that if you were indeed one of those.

We all need to pull together and stomp this kind of thing out of our industry, it’s not clever, it’s not nice and it’s just not productive. I’m not going on a big women’s rights campaign or anything like that but we do deserve to be here just as much as you fellas whether you like it or not AND whatever we look like without the need to justify it.

Over Christmas I’ve been a busy bee, not just with work but with some personal bits and pieces too. So after someone called the You Know Who website “Pretty”, I’ve been thinking of ways to refresh the brand and the site so that it’s not so “girly” and a bit more focused.

The first stop was the logo, now with a name like You Know Who you can’t really go too serious, it doesn’t fit – that’d be like having ‘Buckingham Palace’ written in Comic Sans, the two just don’t go. About 3 years ago I redesigned the logo to be a bit more fun (the old was Kabel and Kabel Bold, that’s how adventurous I was back then!) but recently I’ve been looking at it and realising it doesn’t “balance” very well, there was something about it that was a bit visually jarring to me so I sat down and looked about refreshing the logo using a mixture of ligatures and hand drawn curves to give it a bit more flow visual interest.

And… here it is:

Not a million miles apart, I got rid of the gimmicky question mark as it never became a “stamp” as I had hoped I would use it, it just never made sense to use part of an “o” with a question mark in it as it wouldn’t be recognisable. I bought some characters much closer together, joined up others and generally gave it a bit of a tidy. I’m happy with the result and in the end, no drastic new fonts or change of logo entirely as I had originally anticipated.

I make no excuses for the fact I love Abercrombie and Fitch and more recently, Hollister. For those of you who are not familiar with either store, they are essentially the same company just selling slightly different style clothes, Hollister claims to be “laid back Californian style”.

Whilst walking around my local Hollister store, and having had the experience of Abercrombie and Fitch on 5th Avenue NY last year and London recently, I thought it was interesting to look at their branding and the user experience of their stores. Abercrombie sell their clothes for an average of 1/3 more than Hollister and as I started to dig deeper into the brand I started to find noticeable differences to how the quality of Abercrombie next to Hollister would be perceived regardless of the fact there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the quality of their clothes.

Abercrombie opts for a neat Serif font with secondary fonts in Sans Serif, Hollister opts for the complete reverse. Serif fonts always seem to me to carry a certain quality of a brand, used properly of course. San-Serif are normally seen in brands we deem more fun or personable, such as “eBay” to use just one example. Hollister opts for simple brown paper bags and corrugated cardboard style tags whereas Abercrombie goes for bags with fabric handles and raised ribbed grey paper on boxes and clothes tags.

The colours used in both brands are always limited, as with any good brand. Abercrombie opts for dark greys, crisp whites and a contrasting red, while Hollister sticks to it’s more earthy look of brown, dark red and a pale powder blue. Looking at the two comparatively I’m sure many of you would instantly be able to guess which had the higher price tag purely down to what you are seeing with the branding.

The user experience of actually going into one of these stores is terrible but somehow a pleasure all at the same time. If you are not lured by the smell of the store in the first place, you would be hard pressed to actually find one if you didn’t know it was there, you will rarely see a big shop front emblazoned with their logo, for either store. Instead both opt for subtle small signage that could easily be missed by passing traffic.

Once you are actually in, good luck in trying to find what you’re looking for. There is no order to anything except jeans, male clothes are mixed with female clothes, it’s almost completely dark bar a few dimmers on the edges of the shelves (don’t touch them, they hurt) , you’ll be dodging beautiful people dancing to blaring music and generally feel completely lost. You turn a corner to enter another unorganised section only to be met by a plant and an armchair blocking your way, it’s like being in a maze, a dark maze with beautiful smelling clothes all around you. You see mannequins dressed amazingly and shout to an assistant if they have “ONE OF THESE IN A SMALL” with accompanying British ’shouting sign language’, inevitably the answer always comes back “No we don’t have those now, they were last season” to cue more frustration of trying to find something similar amongst the piles of clothes that you can’t see properly. NB. I actually got a sweater to the checkout last weekend convinced it was blue only to find it was brown. The clothes are sized in American aside from a few items which are thankfully XS, S, M, L but generally you’ll also be battling with converting 1,3,5,7,9 to your standard UK size.

The whole user experience is generally quite frustrating and you can see everyone around you thinking the same thing, yet we all walk around picking up clothes and spending money (lots of it at that) amongst this terrible customer interface, why? I’m not sure. Maybe you feel like you’ve invested lots of effort and time into finding something and you’d get lost trying to put it back anyway so you might as well buy it? I have no idea, everything about these two physical stores shouldn’t work but yet they do.

The online stores, by comparison, are neatly laid out, the UI is kind of intuitive bar the english/american translation of clothes making you pause to think for a bit, one of the worse thing they are guilty of is using a lot of inline frames for content which makes using it on an iPhone a no go.

This might seem like a bit of an odd post for me, and in a way, it probably is – but I thought the comparison in the branding, the price difference and the world of contrast to their online stores was worth exploring.

Can you think of any other brands that go against everything we know and yet somehow work?

Here we are again, we are at the end of another year and as Big Ben chimes in 2010 tonight, our heads are full of sparkling ideas and hopes for the New Year. My good chum Elliot Jay Stocks wrote about 2009 and his goals for 2010 which inspired this post.

2009 has been a bit of a difficult one for me on a personal level, it started off fantastically with me getting engaged to my best friend and partner Stuart in Central Park, NYC, my favourite place in the whole world. Roll onto April and I lost my Grandfather unexpectedly. He was such an inspiration to me from a business point of view, I grew up with him and Dad talking over various aspects of their business while I ate ‘Dippy Egg and Solidiers’ next to them. I listened and grew up with entrepreneurialism in my blood plus a lot of my Grandfathers wisdom along the way. Not having him to call for advice or a chat after April has been tough, very tough.

From the business point of view, this has been the most successful year to date, although I didn’t write down any goals as such, I always had in my head what I wanted to achieve.

• I wanted to take on some iPhone User Interface Design and this I have done, more than I ever anticipated. I have Daniel Kennett to thank for taking that first leap of faith with me on his iPhone App “Clarus” at the start of 2009.

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Little rant for October, as this is happening more and more. You get an enquiry, you invest a lot of time into the potential client by sending numerous long emails regarding the project, best ways forward, best practises, budgets, and so on. You then find out through the web grapevine, that they have commissioned somone else, for whatever reason, and they are now in full swing. This in itself is of course, not a problem, but when you spend so much time going back and forth with a potential client, it would be nice to get an email saying “Sorry, won’t be using you for XYZ reasons but thanks for your time” – I think that’s just good business and good etiquette.

Screenshot of email dialogue between me and a potential client who I then didn't hear from again.