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.

We’ve been doing a lot of work recently for London Youth Rowing (LYR) – a ground breaking sporting initiative that aims to develop young people through physical activity and make rowing accessible to all. We created a new look for LYR and designed and built their new website. The site is content managed (WordPress) and is also designed to interact with the CRM tool Salesforce.com.

As well as designing their online look, we have also been responsible for other design work – in particular the branding of an LYR initiative called Row East London! This is an initiative aimed at improving the fitness, health and well-being of young people in the ten East London Olympic and Gateway boroughs. The initiative was launched last week on 17th March in the company of Olympic medalists and Kate Hoey MP. The launch took place at The National Junior Indoor Rowing Championships (NJIRC) – which is the largest indoor rowing competition in the world with over 1,900 participants. Photos of the launch event, with the Row East London logo featuring prominently on t-shirts, can be viewed here.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the site for COPE – the Committee on Publication Ethics. COPE are the “the kitemark of medical journals” – working towards high ethical standards and safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record.  In other words, they “help scientific journals to get their houses in order”.

We developed the brand for COPE and designed and built the site from the ground up. COPE wanted the site to be a forum where publishers and editors of peer-reviewed journals could discuss issues related to the integrity of work submitted to or published in their journals. Also required were different levels of membership to the site, each with varying degrees of access and functionality.  To cope with this (excuse the pun) we built the site using the modular content management system Drupal.

The site launched successfully and has received great feedback from COPE members – of which there are 3022 to date. A big thank you to the COPE team and, in particular, to COPE’s Jeremy Theobald and Linda Gough for their hard work and dedication on what has been both a challenging and enjoyable project.

At FoxLand we’ve been talking about the Blackberry Storm a lot recently. We like our iPhones here, but it’s not perfect, and with it now being the no.1 phone in the US, we’re looking for competition and new ideas. We have also recently been working with a client on an iPhone application and other mobile-focussed websites, so we have a great deal of interest in what is happening in this area.

RIM are a strong, respected and much-loved company with fanatical users (much like the other fruit-seller), and they have released a string of highly regarded phones over the years while also breaking out of their corporate niche with phones like the Pearl. Therefore, RIM’s first foray into the touchscreen market, the Blackberry Storm, promised much. The feature that had us particularly intrigued was the unique take on the touchscreen, that included a ‘clickable’ screen. This creates a multitude of ways of interacting with buttons and text, and also has the potential to avoid ‘accidents’ (it is often far too easy to accidently click on items you didn’t mean to on the iPhone). 

Sadly though it looks like RIM have failed in their revolution, and while it is early days and there may be a software fix coming, it looks like they have a major problem on their hands. From reviewers to developers to bloggers, the reviews vary from lukewarm to scathing. The highly regarded and usually pretty mellow David Pogue at the New York Times has put the boot in with his review:

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up activating something else in the list.

I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.

So, what to do? As with the iPod before the perception is that companies seem to want to copy Apple without trying to create their own concepts and ideas. RIM are known for their fantastic phones that work brilliantly with email and use real keyboards. They could concentrate on that and push and innovate that whole experience. Many people will always prefer this to the touchscreen, even if it is ‘clickable’. What they shouldn’t do is even look like they’re trying to play ‘catch-up’. For example, earlier today as I walked past the Vodafone shop, they had a giant version of the Storm in the window showing the user experience (see image above). This is exactly the same as Apple who show giant iPhones in theirs and O2’s shop windows. Unfortunately for the giant Storm, the quality of the video looked terrible, the user interface poor – and worst of all, the screen had not been set up correctly – the image was squashed.

Update: See Stephen Fry’s mini take on the Storm (via Twitter)

Update 2: David Pogue follows up his article with some reader responses

Update 3: Jeff Ventura’s article about the issue includes this great quote:

The BlackBerry Storm, in my opinion, is a wonderful illustration of how Apple’s innovation and market appeal can force a smart company like RIM to invest millions of dollars in a product that’s way outside its core competency.  You don’t see Apple trying to create a full-on enterprise/e-mail device, do you?