Mint Digital

On Wednesday at 2gether08, we première our new show. It’s already generating buzz.

“I laughed so much, I almost integrated with Flickr.”
says Jon Gisby

“Take some Tweets, throw in a Poke or two, add a Digg and a Recommendation, and voila - ‘Web 2.0: the musical’ - enjoy!”
says Adam Gee

“2.0 out of 2.0. I loved it.”
says Matt Locke

Filmmaker Masood Khan and junior doctor Farrah Jarral are setting off on Osama Loves, a mad adventure to prove that not all Muslims are ‘extremist nut jobs’.

Over 50 days, they seek out 500 people called Osama and ask them “What do you love?” They hope that by using the name of the world’s most infamous Muslim, they will reveal the sunnier side of Islam.

The mission, and the resulting documentary, is produced by Mint’s TV arm Menthol. The website is made by Mint Digital and as such, it is the first of our TV/web crossover commissions.

It is a very exciting project. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Good luck, Farrah and Masood!

Some days it feels like clients don’t understand all the effort we put in. Other times they really do, and it makes the appreciation all the sweeter.

Tam at DocFest wrote this lovely email:

Congratulations Mint geniuses!

On behalf of Festival Director Heather Croall and the entire Doc/Fest team, I would like to say thank you for all your hard work, thoroughness, persistence, cool-headedness and patience.

Thank you to the software development team who make everything seem effortless. We are in awe of your conceptual brilliance and phenomenal problem solving skills.

Thank you to the design team [our friends, Designers Republic] who make us look so good: true talent and unparalleled attention to detail.

We love our website. It is a great testament to Mint’s visionary leadership and renegade team spirit.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With much respect and appreciation.

Tam Nguyen
Festival Producer

Looking around the Mint Imperial (our luxurious Vauxhall office), you might think that Mints don’t get fashion. The average Mint looks like he hasn’t been shopping since C&A closed its doors.

Luckily we do know about web apps. Last week, we launched Style Insider, a web application for the seriously fashion conscious on behalf of River Island and Graduate Fashion Week.

The site is fabulous. As well as providing all the latest news and behind the scenes content from Graduate Fashion Week, Style Insider offers tips and advice to fashion students looking to break into the industry.

Best of all is the UGC Style Insider Challenge. River Island shoppers photograph their own look and upload the picture. Users vote for the most stylish or individual look, leading to prizes for the most popular entries.

We’ve having a summer party for everyone at Mint, their friends and anyone else who wants to play. If you want to get involved, email thedaddy@mintdigital.com.

Sometimes Tom likes to work in private.

I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:

• Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
• Don’t worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea its most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
• When somebody compared UGC to McDonald’s and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McDs), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
• What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);

Just in case anyone is looking for something to print off and read in the park, here are two articles that have inspired us Mints recently:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky
Is Mint trying to solve this problem or make it worse?

Sign Up Forms Must Die by Luke Wroblewski
We’ve been designing flows along these lines for a little while now. It is nice to see someone voice this approach.

After 4 months of intense work, we have just launched the Weplay beta. Weplay is a sports network for children, something like Piczo meets TeamSnap. The client is a startup backed by Major League Baseball, Pequot Capital and Creative Artists Agency. By transferring our technology, and working closely with the outstanding development team at Weplay, as assembled by Luke Melia, we helped Weplay hit a very aggressive launch target.

Weplay.com is one of the biggest sites Mint has built. It includes a complex model of parent to child permissioning, a state-of-the-art UI, and a very robust security model to ensure the online safety of the children who make up the sites core demographic.

Press:
Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes (New York Times)
Who Plays? Weplay (ABC News)

The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.

Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the “Doctor Who: In Parallel” idea.

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Yesterday Utku and I popped down to the Future of Web Design conference in West London to learn things, meet people and set off fire extinguishers.

Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong lineup of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.

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We’ve just launched the Lonely Planet Desktop Countdown.

It’s a neat little app that counts down to your holiday. Every day it offers you a local tip and tells you the weather in the place that you are travelling to.

The app is part of the promotional campaign for the Lonely Planet Encounter city guides. Over the next few weeks, the Desktop Countdown will be promoted on coffee sleeves at 14 locations in London, banners on Yahoo! Weather and on London Underground posters. The total reach of the marketing campaign will be to over 3.6 million people. We snapped this poster at Vauxhall tube, round the corner from our office.

From a technology point of view it is pretty cool. It is the first time Mint has used Adobe AIR. AIR is Adobe’s platform for creating desktop apps. It brings the web closer to our desktop. It blurs the boundary between online and offline. In short, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities.

Have a read of 6 Adobe AIR Apps to check out to see what other uses people have been making of AIR.

I’m at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.

The Labs are made up of 10 teams, 5 mentors and 1 Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. 5 BBC commissioners arrived today.

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We have got a vacancy for someone to dream up and develop mass-participation web ideas.

More details here.

Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it’s always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.

What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk on Saturday was particularly interesting. I’ve been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.

Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It’s great to see someone else talk about ideas we’ve been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.

We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!

Anyway, a great conference all round and I’ll be back next year (if it’s on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.

Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high performance rails apps. I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.

“Prove it,” you mutter cautiously. Actually, for an entire day, the proof is right on our website—today, we’re celebrating the annual CSS Naked Day!

We’re obsessed with making great things, even the parts you don’t think about. We use modern techniques and web standards to build our sites, and that makes them more robust on new and old web browsers alike. On CSS Naked Day, you can see the results: our website stays usable and content-rich even when you strip away the styling. This is especially thoughtful for users with slow internet connections (the content loads right away, and the styling shows up later) and for visually impaired users who depend on audio screen readers, not shapes and colors.

Hundreds of forward-thinking web developers are joining in, and demonstrating that websites should work well at their most basic level—content. Among the Mints, Phil Nash’s blog and my personal site are also stripping down to promote web standards. Here’s to another year of pushing the web forward!

Mint has just returned from a long weekend in the Dorset countryside. We split into 3 teams and spent 4 days competing to build the best web application.

As well as drinking loads of booze, we created some pretty cool apps.

Oh!Creative is a platform for freelance designers to showcase their work. It also allows people commissioning that work to manage their work flow and scheduling.

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All Mints together (first time for 18 months!)

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Mint has pulled off an almost unprecedented one-two for the Content 360 competition at MipTV. ‘One Month Movie Marathon’ is shortlisted for the Ogilvy category. ‘Kissing Against the System’ is shortlisted for the National Film Board of Canada.

Furthermore, Mint collaborated with Different to create ‘Dr Who: In Parallel’. This multi-platform concept won a place at BBC Innovation Labs.

(Originally published at NextNYers.)