FoxLand’s Amazing Christmas World-Wide-Web Jargon Bingo
Happy Christmas from FoxLand.
Next year, at your next meeting about your website, application, platform or world-changing service, whip out FoxLand’s Amazing Christmas World-Wide-Web Jargon Bingo and play!
In the meantime, have a great Christmas and New Year from all of us at FoxLand.
20 December, 2009
FoxLand goes to town
After three fantastic years looking over London from the Hampstead hills, we’re now preparing ourselves to head down town. From Monday 2nd November we will be based at 74 Berwick Street in the heart of Soho. We’ve loved our time in Hampstead — it’s a beautiful, mellow and slightly eccentric part of London, but we’re looking forward to join the hubbub of life that is Soho. We will also now be much closer to many of our clients, friends — and (dangerously) the Apple Store.
The beautiful image was originally from an 1861 edition of The Illustrated London News and was digitised by MAPCO.
Take a look at the full image on the MAPCO website where you’ll find many other beautiful maps and images…
29 October, 2009
Inayaili is an “amazing female role model for web designers”
We knew she was great already, but we’re still proud that Inayaili has been nominated as one of 40 amazing female models for web designers at Line25.
New Land
We’re thrilled to announce that Calum and his wife Sally gave birth to Casper Sammy Land on the 15th of July. They’re all doing fantastically well and are enjoying every moment. Calum is loving his paternity leave (possibly a bit too much according to his twittering) and is already indoctrinating Casper with obscure Liverpool Football Club lore. While Hampstead is a much quieter place with his absence, we’re all looking forward to him being back next week (although I think he is possibly less enthused).
28 July, 2009
Welcome to the new FoxLand
For the win
At long last, we present the new FoxLand. We’ve completely rethought our identity, message and website. Our old identity and website were built very quickly when we first launched as a company in 2006, and while it served us well, we felt it was too restrictive, did not accurately represent us, and was, well… too red.
The website is in beta, and there are still a few rough edges out there. If you come across any, or have any problems, please do get back to us. In particular, if you are using Internet Explorer 6 we’d love to hear your experiences. We’ll be tweaking and updating the website over the next few days and weeks, improving it and adding necessary features.
As part of our website redesign we have completely rethought our case studies, in particular our featured examples. Currently we just have featured case studies for The Prince’s Charities, BSI and Macmillan Cancer Support, but over time we will add more.
Over the next few weeks we will add journal posts talking about some of the reasoning, thinking and inspiration behind our changes — so stay tuned.
14 July, 2009
A Fox cub
It gives us great pleasure to announce that on 4th March 2009 Andrew’s partner Meadbh gave birth to a beautiful little girl called Charlotte Sóirse Metrustry-Fox aka just Sóirse. Mum, dad and daughter are all doing really well and are ecstatically happy.
Sóirse is already following in dad’s footsteps and we’re sure it won’t be long before she’s typing her first bit of code. In the mean time she’s keeping mum and dad busier than our clients ever have.
17 March, 2009
FoxLand welcomes Inayaili to the team (belatedly)
We’re a bit late, after all she joined us a couple of months ago, but we’d like to welcome our newest recruit, the wonderful web designer Inayaili (thankfully she’s happy being called simply Lili). Inayaili came all the way from Faro, Portugal to join us and she is still getting used to the “freezing” English weather and London’s public transport. She loves making beautiful, clean, hand coded websites, and, as she says, it is done “always with a bit of love”.
One of the main reasons that appealed to us about her was that she is thoroughly engaged with the web, its citizens and where it might be going next. Inevitably then you can find her all over the internet – on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Friendfeed, Dopplr… everywhere!
She has also just been nominated as one of the web’s 25 hottest female web designers - a slightly dubious concept – but we’re proud anyway!
27 October, 2008
Jane Wentworth Associates launches
We’ve been busy recently – we’ve also just launched the website for Jane Wentworth Associates. JWA are a consultancy that helps cultural organisations, like Somerset House, the V&A and the Natural History Museum, understand and clarify their brands. The website will be evolving over the next few months as more case studies are included.
22 October, 2008
HoweMello launches
We’ve been helping out our friends at HoweMello with their website. HoweMello are a brand new company focussed on using copywriting and graphic design to “bring brands to life”. They have worked with a wide variety of clients, including Colors Magazine, the Tate and Donna Karan.
20 October, 2008
Basecamp to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6
37signals, a company that builds web-based applications, are to phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) for their products, including Basecamp (the project management tool we use extensively to run our various projects).
In many ways we support this move. IE6 came out in August 2001: that’s almost 7 years ago. While it was a real step forward at the time it has since seriously lagged behind other web browsers. It now is responsible for creating an inordinate amount of design and development problems for people who work with the web, as well as having a wide variety of security issues. It will be a great day when the web development world can finally move on. Unfortunately we believe it could easily be another 5 years before this might be possible — there are simply too many people using it.
The percentage of people using IE6 varies widely depending on the type of website and their audience, but looking at the statistics of websites we manage, it is approximately between 15% and 35%. Clearly a very significant proportion still use IE6, and one that can not be ignored. While websites do not need to look exactly the same in each and every browser, but they should not break or fail to work.
The move by 37signals has created various issues for us:
We do not want to overly concern our clients about what web browser they use. Most people neither know nor care about what browser they are using – and why should they? We would always encourage clients to upgrade their browsers to the most recent because of the security risks, but for medium to large organisations universally upgrading their browsers can be a very complex task.
The situation could also impact on our credibility: we have recommended Basecamp as a tool, and if suddenly some of our clients have problems using it, it would reflect poorly on us. Having the situation ‘taken out of our hands’ by 37signals puts us in an uncomfortable position.
Information for clients
We recommend that clients upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. If this is difficult due to the restrictions of IT departments, then glitches or problems with Basecamp will probably occur. Hopefully these should not cause significant or ‘fatal’ problems. Please contact us if you have any questions or experience any errors.
8 July, 2008
Global grinning: Acme Climate Action in the news
The Telegraph newspaper on Saturday had an article about the forthcoming Acme Climate Action book. We’re working with Provokateur on the accompanying website.
Looking for great people
Busy as ever, we’re again looking for new people to join us. Our advertisement is on the ever reliable 37 Signals Job Board. This is what we are looking for:
FoxLand is an emerging brand and user-centred design agency based in London. We are seeking an ambitious web designer to bolster our creative team.
You will have excellent design skills, be adept at CSS and XHTML (and comprehend Flash) and have a near obsession with current web and design trends. A knowledge of PHP/MySQL would be an advantage.
You must be happy to work as part of a team, be comfortable in front of clients and be willing to roll up your sleeves and help with everything.
In return we are offering an ideal environment for you to use and develop your skills and experience on a range of exciting and creative projects.
Please send your CV to iwantthatjob@fox-land.co.uk
19 June, 2008
The Prince’s Charities Community site launches
We are delighted to announce the launch of The Prince’s Charities Community website. The site brings together the work of The Prince’s Charities – a diverse group of not-for-profit organisations of which The Prince of Wales is president. This work spans a broad range of areas, from giving young people in the UK an opportunity to change their lives to helping an Afghan village maintain their traditional pottery skills.
We worked closely with Clarence House and the charities to develop a site that educates visitors about the work of The Prince’s 19 charities and social enterprises while also providing them with an opportunity to get involved.
The site focuses on the people and organisations that make up the community behind the charities. It features profiles of charity employees, supporters and beneficiaries, as well as inspirational stories, blogs, news and events. Visitors can show their support by signing up on the site to join this community.
A fantastic project to be involved with, we developed the site from the ground up – from initial design concepts through to a full PHP/MySQL CMS backend. Many thanks to all who helped us to put it together.
4 June, 2008
Dyslexia Teaching Centre site goes live
This week saw the launch of the new Dyslexia Teaching Centre website. We designed a bright and colourful online presence for this site and built it using WordPress so the DTC staff can update it themselves with the latest news, events and publications surrounding London’s dyslexic community. The project also gave our very own Christian a chance to dust off his camera and produce the imagery for the site. Our thanks go again to our partners over at Zebra Crossing for their help on this project.
29 May, 2008
FoxLand goes all a Twitter
While we have had mixed feelings about Twitter in the past, we’re working with a client on a super simple news feed system (wanting to avoid a blog or full news system) and we realised that Twitter would be ideal. With that in mind FoxLand has finally climbed on board, as have Christian, Calum and Andrew.