I’m sure this won’t be the first article you’ve read on the subject, and probably won’t be the last, so I’ll spare you the customary blog drivel and try to keep it short and to the point.

Anyone reading this will of course be familiar with the term ‘Design by committee’, and i’m sure these three words will conjure up a variety of memorable experiences for most, and memorable for perhaps the wrong reasons?

The problem is outlined in the very fact that the word Design is positioned just two letters away from the word Committee – surely a crime in itself?
I can recall a handful of projects that have literally had the life knocked out of them at the hands of this thing we love to hate.
Don’t get me wrong, design should not be an insular process, far from it. We rely on feedback from others in order to develop our work. In fact our work would suffer far more if it were completed without any outside influences.
It only begins to get messy when committee members involved have different understandings of the word ‘influence’. For some reason, being involved in a project, and having an influence will often mean nothing until somebody’s idea/thought/vision is realised in the final design. I am being made increasingly aware of this struggle, and have come to realise that battling it has (needs to) become part of a designer’s job.

..My next post: ‘Designer as artworker’!

If you do nothing else today, just make sure you check out this awesome Tipp-Ex viral on YouTube. I wonder how many different clips they had to record!?

As a developer, when someone wanders over to me and asks how I’m doing, follows it up with questions about my weekend plans (even though it’s Tuesday), before finally getting to the point of starting a request with, “Could you just…”, or, “How easy would it be to…”, I know the project I’m working has succumbed to feature creep. Any change, requirement, and yes, feature, that isn’t part of the original project plan adds to the “creepiness” of your finished solution.

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We were invited to attend a technology session held at the BBC last week. They were outlining recent changes at Future Media & Technology and more importantly the technical direction the organisation were taking. They also explained what the new structure means for suppliers like us, sharing key contacts, key processes and platform developments.

It was a very good session as they explained changes for the organisation and consolidation of key groups and technologies. Emphasis was placed on the reuse and repackaging of content. The key deliverable was to deliver a fully dynamic, platform independent web publishing infrastructure. It was a great opportunity to meet other suppliers and just see how they were working with the Beeb.

Welcome to the new Latra website – which, for various reasons, has been a while in coming! For those of you who don’t know us, we’re a digital design and build agency based in London, specialising in helping clients deliver digital projects from concept to completion. We were called Design Central for about 10 years before rebranding to Latra at the beginning of 2010.

Please explore the site to see the work we’ve done and what we’re up to now, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’ve got any feedback or a project that we can help you with.

The Latra team will be updating this blog with our thoughts about all things digital – what we think about the latest trends, the latest gadgets and information about our work and clients. To kick things off, check out my post about locationally-contextual-information where I look at the new trend of social geo-location, Pav’s post about feature creep, and see what Manjit got up to at the BBC Future Media Commissioning day.

And if 140 characters is your thing, you can follow us on twitter.