Going Underground?

As a Londoner through and through (SW14 represent!) I have spent a good deal of my life on public transport. As much as I always complain about trains breaking down and various signal failures, I still feel incredibly blessed to live in a city like London that has such a wide variety of transport to choose from. When I was at school it was all about Southwest train services in and out of Clapham Junction during the week, and trips around and about southwest London on the 33, 337, and occasional N10 buses on the weekends. 

Today it is all about the underground.

I haven't spent this much time on the tubular since... well this time last year, but with an increased amount of time on the tube each day you begin to look at travel in a different way. In particular I've begun to look at the iconic underground map more closely. I think in recent years the map's artistic beauty, with its coloured straight lines, has taken over it's practical use as a guide of London, which it was never intended to be.

The people at London Tubemap have in light of this, taken it upon themselves to redraw the underground map as we know it. 

The new map is a much more fluid approach to London's over and underground geography. And while is doesn't paint the travel zones that the traditional map does, I think it would make for a much better tool for London's tourists who often use the traditional map as a 'accurate' representation of the city. 

Two perspectives: 

What do you think? Should Transport for London consider a change to a new map with a more accurate representation of London's geography? Or should they keep the traditional map alive?

Technological Transformations

I write this post from an Android handset. As trying new things has extended from my personal life (leaving university, living on my own etc), to my work life as well. I shall explain:

Three weeks ago I started a job as a marketing assistant at an interactive media production company that also have a smaller sister company that makes mobile phone applications. I work primarily for this sister company. My previous experience in marketing was at a music label where I did a digital marketing internship last summer. The world of mobile phone apps it seems is a different beast altogether.

While my main interest when it comes to marketing is music, I was not going to pass up a good opportunity to have a job in which I could learn in and develop my marketing skills. But mobile apps is something that I'm definitely still learning more about everyday.

While I can't say that I'm unbiased towards our apps, as a user of them for the first time on my first day of work, I felt that as a user I really did enjoy playing the game app Nano Panda that the company developed. It works on a similar format to other popular game apps, but it has pandas and atoms (did somebody say awesome?!)

While I'm definitely not trying to sell you anything, if you get a chance, try out the free version, it is genuinely a lot of fun.

Aside from playing and marketing the game, I've also learned a lot about how apps (of both the mobile and online (i.e on Facebook) variety) work. Today I spent the day in a studio listening to and providing help for a voice artist in making demo sounds for an internal project. These sounds will then be passed to animators so that the actions of the character match the correct sound. Sounds simple, but the work that these people do to make these apps exciting and innovative is incredible. I feel like I need to do their work justice when it comes to the marketing in order to make everything "worthwhile".

With most jobs like this there comes a perk and this one is no different. My company phone has not only helped me understand mobile apps and phone technology, but weirdly is also helping me with my depth perception issues.

Double win?

I used to be quite closed minded about new technologies: mp3 players, blu-ray, touch screens.etc. but I really think I'm beginning to embrace these things (except maybe blu-ray, I still fail to see the point when DVD players still exist).The fact that I can write this post in a 'Blogger' app proves to me that this type of technology really is the future and that the innovative minds that I work with are going to the ones that take us there.