Our inaugural FedEx Day

FedEx is one of the ideas we have picked up from the book Drive, by Danie Pink. The idea is to do something different and creative to show how things could work differently, to learn new things that fold back into our daily workflows, and to create flow from passion. Gmail, for example came out of Google’s equivalent. This was our first experiment with the format – and we are sure it will not be the last.

Every day at 4pm, a call goes up in our office “What’s for tea?”. George created a bot which posts to our Slack channel. When you answer AI makes a comment on your dietary choices as well as ranking all the answers and picking a winner. A great little fun tool which might have wider applications…

Can you crawl the web and identify sites that need an update or have problems with their SEO? This was the brief that Alex set himself. The answer is yes. Using a mix of AI, PHP and Javascript Alex created a mini-app which spits out a list of flagged results onto Google Sheets. This allows anyone to crawl and discover problems in their own network of sites or to discover opportunities for new business opportunities.

Ben’s plan was to create a song from scratch in one day with the help of AI, his guitar and his smart amp. He started with feeding some lyrics into AI, and editing what it came up with to get a decent song. Then he made some AI artwork and after quite a bit of back and forwarding got the image you see. Then he sang the song, played the guitar tracks and mixed it together using a smart amp with the accompanying software. Next came some drum tracks which Ben tried his best to get AI to help him with, but to no avail. Instead he made some loops and edited these into the mix. The result is an american pop-rock style track. Raw round the edges but amazing for the speed.

In web designer Agate’s own words she “rarely gets to do the content” side of things, so her day away from the day job focused on content creation and writing. The history of Latvian cuisine as well as some national recipes was the result, all beautifully packaged using Powerpoint.

Need a new character to play with? Need a series of monsters to foil for your story, map or world? Well Dave has the answer with his board game character maker. Put in the starting parameters – “I would like a female angry Dwarf wizard” and the system can generate you a character complete with capabilities, back story and even an image. Built with our normal PHP Yii stack.

Developer Neil has a secret other life as a member of two bands. One of those bands is working on completing its first album, entitled “That’s gotta be it, right?” Neil wanted to play with and experiment with AI image engines to see if he could create his own cover art for this album, rather than handing it over to our designers. And what an interesting journey he had with some remarkable outputs. Neil tried loads of engines, working out how to get the best from each, before realising that he needed the concept before getting to AI. A realisation that creatives all know and takes a while to work out.

Malc had a bold ambition. Could you create a version of a simple website navigated via a 3D interface. Using react.js and react-three engine he created the prototype below. Though really interesting and useful as a design addition the big piece missing is text rendering, which is of course a basic part of any website. In the screenshots this was achieved with bitmaps renders.

Stu and Sam worked together with the brief of creating a state of the nation report for the web industry. However very quickly they realised that this was not only very depressing but also something no one would want to read. So they switched to working out what the state of the industry meant to small web agencies like us, and what to do about it. They did this with a series of strategy tools (all of which can be found in our post) , from SWOT, to MOIST and Business Canvases. All of this was done with paper, sticky notes and Sharpie pens. 8 hours straight of research and thinking led to a series of recommendations, which while we will not share here, might have a big impact of what you see.