Around 2 years ago this August, Mikey, Sean and I began conceptualising our ideas for outheard.tv.

Our idea was quite simple; to create a website for sharing gig videos. On top of this, we wanted to group videos from events together – meaning you could browse up and down videos from the breathtaking gig you attended last weekend.

Quite quickly we realised that we’d need to ask users to tag the event in their video once they’d finish uploading it. The technology and function behind this decision was solid and worked brilliantly – upload your videos and tag them to the event.

However, there was one less obvious issue with this concept: The name of the process. “Upload your videos and tag them to the event and DJ” reads more like back-end logic than a punchy tagline. Our problem – I think – was that we’d missed a little trick that helps so many apps communicate their message today – the metaphor.

To name a few smart use cases:

• Twitter with tweeting.
• Dribbble with shooting.
• Pintrest with pinning.

After a coffee or two I began thinking more holistically about our little idea. Before connecting the dots, I began to shuffle around the front-end design of the popular events feed and quickly produced something that looked like a reel of thumbnails – running from right to left. Right after, it clicked. These were showreels – little clips of video from the event.

Extending the metaphor not only worked wonders in helping us communicate our idea more effectively, but it also helped shape the fundamentals of our user interface designs. In a just few short words we could ask users to add their videos to the Ministry of Sound showreel.

Now users, DJs and events have their own showreels. Our tagline for sharing gig videos packs neatly into a little sentence and the core idea of tagging videos to an event has been nicely branded, through extending the metaphor.

Over the coming months we’ll be working hard to ship the new showreel release of outheard.tv and I’ll be documenting the process over here a bit as we go.

The University of Liverpool’s Management School publishes a bi-monthly newsletter called ‘The City’. With a special emphasis on the alumni, the newsletter covers topics such as big business news and regional economic comment, through to local start-up achievements.

This month they did a tiny piece on yours truly. Other highlights include Richard Branson’s visit during this year’s GEC, as well as recent achievements from the brilliant Sife Liverpool.

You can download a copy here.

With a pile of books and a text editor, around five years ago I started my journey into the world wide web. Since then, I’ve managed to make myself a little place to work and have recently co-founded a place for connecting and sharing with other, like-minded dance music fanatics.

I’ve worked with a bunch of big companies, small companies, good people, bad people, interesting projects and not-so interesting projects, but something has been missing all the way through my little journey. This something has been pushed to the bottom of my to-do pile with the same disregard as my end of year tax return. What you ask?

Writing.

Today I’m putting an end to this ungodly trait. Whether it’s just for myself, or for the dogs, I’m promising to write more about the things that I love and the things that I’ve learnt.

I owe Mitch Joel a big thank you for motivating and inspiring me with his excellent 6 Pixels of Separation – if you’re not blogging, please grab a copy.

Anyway, here’s to just another WordPress Perch Ghost blog.