#but i simply wont touch because of the google doc links

[greyeyedmonster-18]

(i am once again asking for more fandom fests to use interfaces other than google docs/forms/sheets for their sign ups and prompts.)

[engdashboard]

NILM Links

NILM: 

NILM 2015 - Imperial MSc Group

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU_tXNnTVBQ

UCL-Energy seminar: 'Modelling Urban Energy Systems: Disaggregate activity-based models of demand'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGyTQyfRUU

Build Sys 2015 - Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC60fysLScg

Is deep learning the future of NILM?

 Source: http://ift.tt/2yoGSo0

Does disaggregated electricity feedback reduce domestic electricity consumption? A systematic review of the literature

http://ift.tt/2xFKvSN

Disaggregation of domestic smart meter energy data

http://ift.tt/2yoyHYD

Smart Meter Disaggregation

Source: http://ift.tt/1KBjlPd

Jack Kelly http://jack-kelly.com/ http://ift.tt/2yovaJP

http://ift.tt/2xFqgo5 http://ift.tt/2yoyJzJ http://ift.tt/2xFnakb http://ift.tt/2yoA8WS https://nilm.blog/

A competition for energy disaggregation algorithms

Source: http://ift.tt/2dNDb0p

27 Sep 2016 | nilm, competition

Now that I’ve (finally!) submitted my PhD thesis, I can focus on designing and implementing a competition for energy disaggregation algorithms. EDF Energy have kindly given me post-doc funding from now until the end of December 2016 to work on the NILM competition.

The broad plan is to first consult with the NILM community and create a specification for the NILM competition which works for everyone. Then I plan to implement a web application which can run the NILM competition.

Right now, I’m writing a survey on the design of a competition for energy disaggregation algorithms. The aim of the survey is to systematically collect feedback about the design of the competition. I plan to launch the survey soon. Prior to the launch, I’m really eager to hear feedback on the survey itself. For example: is the survey missing any vital questions? Do some questions not provide sufficient options? Do some questions not make sense?!

Please note that, prior to the launch of the survey, my aim is to get feedback on the design of the survey itself. So please don’t actually submit any answers yet! Feel free to select options and click “next” but just please don’t click “submit” at the end of the survey. I’ll write another blog post when the survey is ready to accept answers.

It’s probably best to provide feedback about the survey in public on the relevant thread on the Energy Disaggregation Google Group. If you want your feedback to be private then, by all means, email me directly at jack.kelly@imperial.ac.uk!

And please do get in touch if you have feedback on any aspect of the proposed NILM competition.

17 Feb 2012 | PhD, smart meters, introducing smart meter disaggregation

This blog entry is part of a series of posts introducing the topic of smart meter disaggregation.  In previous posts we’ve looked at the wider reasons for wanting to reduce energy consumption and we’ve taken a brief look at smart meters.  In the following blog post, I want to introduce the concept of smart meter disaggregation, also known as “non-intrusive load monitoring” or NILM for short1{#footnoteref1_thfpd27 .see-footnote}.  The main aim of smart meter disaggregation is to infer two things from a smart meter signal: 1) which appliances are active in the signal and 2) how much energy has each device consumed.  This blog post will summarise the arguments for disaggregation and we’ll look at some of the main challenges.

Why might disaggregated smart meter data be useful to anyone?

Let us assume that people are motivated to improve their energy management. Do they have a sufficiently quantitative understanding of their energy consumption to prioritise correctly?

Prior to the availability of mains energy supplies, most individuals would have had an intuitive, quantitative understanding of the amount of energy consumed by the household. If the stove needed more fuel then someone had to manually shovel solid fuel into it; you couldn’t help but notice how much energy was being consumed. In this situation, most individuals would have an intuitive feel for how much energy it took to, say, heat the living room for one evening or cook one meal.

In today’s industrialised societies, we do not have such a concrete, tangible understanding of the amount of energy we use. It is a miracle of civil engineering that the energy equivalent of 3 tonnes of coal2{#footnoteref2_ozpa89k .see-footnote} is delivered into our homes every year without any noise, any manual labour, any dust, any inconvenience for us.

When we turn on an electrical device, it just works, without any indication of how much energy it’s consuming. Hence, when faced with rising electricity bills, we struggle to prioritise correctly when deciding which devices to turn off or replace.

Studies on residential energy users show that the vast majority are poor at estimating either the consumption of individual devices or their total aggregate consumption. Residents often underestimate the energy used by heating and overestimate the consumption of perceptually salient devices like lights and televisions (Kempton et al, 1982). Residents’ failure to correctly estimate energy consumption leads to higher total consumption.

How significant is occupant behaviour in determining total energy usage? Energy use can differ by two or three times among identical homes with similar appliances occupied by people from similar demographics (Socolow, 1978; Winett & Neale, 1979; Seryak & Kissock, 2003). These large differences in energy consumption are attributed to differences in consumption behaviour. If the home provided better feedback about which devices used the most energy then users could tweak their behaviour to make more efficient use of appliances.

Studies have investigated which types of energy feedback information displays (smart meters) are most successful in altering behaviour. Fischer (2008) found that “the most successful feedback combines the following features: it is given frequently and over a long time, provides an appliance-specific breakdown, is presented in a clear and appealing way, and uses computerized and interactive tools.” (my emphasis). Darby (2006) reports that direct feedback normally reduces energy consumption by 5-15%. Disaggregated data is also of use to utility companies as it helps with load forecasting.

Providing consumers with disaggregated consumption data can play a part in decreasing primary energy demand.

What actions can be taken to reduce energy consumption?

Say we’re successful in creating a useful disaggregation system.  How could people use this information to reduce cost & CO2 output?

replace appliances with efficient versions

change behaviour

reduce total consumption (needn’t reduce comfort)

shift consumption to times when grid’s CO2 intensity is low (when the wind is blowing)

Two frequently asked questions about disaggregation

Before going any further, let me tackle two questions which you may have at this point:

1) Why bother doing disaggregation; wouldn’t it be easier to measure the power consumption of individual appliances using smart plugs? {#why-bother-doing-disaggregation-wouldnt-it-be-easier-to-measure-the-power-consumption-of-individual-appliances-using-smart-plugs style=”margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; font-weight: bold; “}

Smart plugs can be inserted between an appliance and the mains socket; the smart plug can then measure the power consumption of the appliance. Yes, it would be conceptually easier to use smart plugs for all appliances in the home.  But it would be far more expensive: each smart plug costs at least £25; and most homes have around 20 appliances.  So it would cost £500 per house. And tedious to install.  And some appliances are hard-wired into the mains.  This solution simply won’t scale: by 2019, every house will have a smart meter; yet only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population would be at all interested in installing smart plugs for every appliance.

2) Won’t every appliance be connection to the Internet in the not-too-distant future? {#wont-every-appliance-be-connection-to-the-internet-in-the-not-too-distant-future style=”margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; font-weight: bold; “}

Maybe; maybe not.  Even if every appliance on the market tomorrow were able to connect to the Internet, it would still take decades before every appliance in the country was replaced with a network-connected appliance.  However, it’s worth pointing out that adding a few network-connected appliances will make the disaggregation problem easier because the state of those network-connected appliances can be empirically measured and hence wont need to be estimated by the disaggregation system.

The basic aim of smart meter disaggregation

Let’s look at some real data to get a feel for what smart meter disaggregation involves:

The top trace in the graph above shows the signal from my Current Cost home energy monitor over the course of an afternoon.  The top trace shows the total, aggregate consumption for my entire house.  The value of sample at time t is the sum of the power being consumed by every appliance active at time t . The bottom trace shows the pure signature from four appliances, recorded using a smart plug.  The data displayed in the top and bottom traces were recorded simultaneously.  As you can see, the kettle and toaster signatures appear very clearly in the top trace.  The washing machine and tumble drier signatures are also visible in the top trace but have been somewhat distorted.

There are two ultimate aims of a disaggregation algorithm:

Infer which appliances are active within the smart meter signal

Infer the quantity of energy used by each appliance

The main challenges

If we were only interested in disaggregating a small set of simple, two-state appliances like toasters and kettles then the disaggregation challenge would be fairly straight forward.  What makes disaggregation a juicy computer science problem?

Challenge 1: mutliple states

The first challenge is that many appliances have multiple states, and the state sequence differs from run to run.  For example, here’s the power consumption of a single washing machine, run five times:

The large 2.3kW spikes are the washing machine’s water heater.  The vast majority (all?) washing machines in the UK only have a cold-water input and hence must heat water using an electric heating element.  Sometimes the washer turns the heater on twice.  Sometimes three times.  Sometimes six times.  This variation makes it a little tricky to model complex multi-state appliances like washing machines.

Challenge 2: variation between appliances of the same class

Here’s the power consumption from five different fridges:

(Five fridges.  Data from REDD)

Challenge 3: different forms of occlusion

Consider the task of trying to locate a fridge signature in an aggregate signal. In what ways might the aggregate signal be affected by other appliances? Can we guarantee that the fridge signature will always be visible in the aggregate signal, no matter what the other appliances do? Or do we need to be aware of situations where the target signature might be obscured from view?

Best case scenario: no occlusion

If the background is constant then the fridge signature is clearly identifiable:

Distorted but main discriminative features not occluded

If the background is not constant then the fridge signature will be distorted but this distortion need not occlude the main discriminative features of the fridge signature. In the example shown in the figure below, the fridge signature is still visible: the +100 watt on-transition and the 100 watt off-transition are visible (because the background does not change at the precise moments the fridge changes state), as is the beginning of the downwards ramp.

Main features occluded

The figure below shows a square wave background which is very similar to the square wave in the figure above but with one important difference: this time, the square wave changes state precisely in sync with the fridge signature (at 6 and 106 seconds). What effect does this have?

Consider a disaggregation algorithm searching through the aggregate signal for the +100 watt on-transition and the -100 watt off-transition. The +100 watt on-transition has now become a +150 watt transition (because the fridge turned on precisely when the square wave turned on) and the -100 watt off-transition has become a -50 watt transition (because the fridge turned off precisely when the square wave turned on).

Worst case scenario: Totally occluded but fridge signature could be present

Here, the background has been generated by subtracting the fridge signature from 120. In the wild, it is extremely unlikely that the background will perfectly occlude the signature like this but it is possible.

Fridge signature cannot be present

Compare the aggregate signal in the figure above (where the aggregate signal is a constant 120 watts) with the aggregate signal in the figure below (where the aggregate signal is a constant 50 watts). In the former, the fridge signature is totally occluded but we cannot rule out the possibility that the fridge signature is present. In the latter, we can say with total certainty that the fridge was not active during this time period because the aggregate signal stays as a constant 50 watts, whilst the fridge on its own consumes around 100 watts. This distinction between “definitely not present” and “not visible but could be present” may be important to bear in mind when designing the disaggregation algorithm.

Challenge 4: variation in mains voltage

The mains voltage in the UK is nominally 230 volts but can range from 216 volts to 253 volts which is -6%, +10% of the nominal 230 volt supply voltage (specs). Assuming a linear load, we can expect the power consumption to vary from by -12%, +20%.

Challenge 5: Some components generate identical signatures

For example, several devices include heaters (e.g. kettles, washing machines, dish washers, tumble driers etc). These heaters tend to be hard or impossible to distinguish in the aggregate signal. This is for two reasons. Firstly, heaters all tend to draw close to this maximum power available at the socket (for the UK, this maximum is 13 amps × 230 volts = 3 kW ). Secondly, heaters are the archetypal “pure resistive load” so every heater draws 100 % real power and 0 % reactive power

1.{.footnote-label} Other synonyms for “non-intrusive load monitoring” include “non-intrusive appliance load monitoring (NIALM)” or “non-instrusive appliance load monitoring system (NIALMS)”.  We’ll stick with the simplest acronym to pronounce, NILM

2.{.footnote-label} Average UK household energy consumption: 20500 kWh gas + 3300 kWh electricity = 2.38 MWh total energy = 8.568×10^10^ Joules. Heat content of coal is roughly 3×10^7^ J/kg. \( {8.568\times10\^{10}\mathit{Joules} \over 3\times10\^{7}\mathit{J/kg}} = 2865\) kg coal.

Thursday, 25 February 2016

Is deep learning the future of NILM?

Deep learning has recently revolutionised a number of well-studied machine learning and signal processing problems, such as image recognition and handwriting recognition. Furthermore, long short-term memory architectures have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying recurrent neural networks to time series problems, such as speech synthesis. In addition to the impressive performance of these models, the elegance of learning features from data rather than hand crafting intuitive features is a highly compelling advantage over traditional methods.

In the past year, deep learning methods have also started to be applied to energy disaggregation. For example, Jack Kelly demonstrated at BuildSys 2015 how such models outperform common disaggregation benchmarks and are able to generalise to previously unseen homes. In addition, Lukas Mauch presented a paper at GlobalSIP 2015 describing how sub-metered data can be used to train networks to disaggregate single appliances from a building's total load. Most recently, Pedro Paulo Marques do Nascimento's master's thesis compared a variety of convolutional and recurrent neural networks across a number of appliances present in the REDD data set. Each piece of research demonstrates that there's real potential to apply deep learning to the problem of energy disaggregation. 

However, two critical issues still remain. First, are the huge volumes of sub-metered data available which are required to train such models? Second, are the computational requirements of training these models practical? Fortunately, training can be performed offline if only general models of appliance types are to be learned. However, if learning is required for each individual household, surely this will need to take place on cloud infrastructure rather than embedded hardware. I hope we'll get closer to answering these questions at this year's international NILM conference in Vancouver!

Posted by Oliver Parson at 18:56 

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[samanthathompsonphoto-blog]

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

Both Alex and I have worked together to create a website for our company, using the inspiration for researching how other gallery and agencies promote themselves on line. We have written this blog post together to showcase our steps, decisions and thoughts. 

Creating the website

We have individually researched both photography agencies and galleries, more specially looking at how different creative agencies and galleries present themselves online. From this research we were able pick up techniques about the different ways they display their content on their websites. It is now time to create our own website to create a platform to showcase our company’s idea and using the techniques we have learnt from other company’s websites to enhance our site.  From our research looking at Agencies and Galleries, we have understood the different ways to talk about what the company is and how they document exhibitions or the works of photographers. These are all parts which we want to include in our own site so we will take the knowledge learnt to help us work out what works best for us to create our website.

 The first step for creating our company and website was to come up with a name for our company, a name which was engaging and original, something which showcased who we are. We wanted to show in our name that the company was a duo and a collaborative company created by the both of us. From research on other agencies like Wyatt-Clark and Jones and Webber Represents we thought it would be interesting to play around with joining our surnames. So we began playing around with Thompson and Tilley, working out if this worked, we felt like it was important to have Thompson as the first name and then Tilley as we felt it has more of a flow, with this we really felt like it was bold and had a nice ring to it. Now that we liked Thompson and Tilley, we wondered if we needed anything after the words. Webber represents uses represents to communicate their agency and also so does DNB represents which allows the viewer to make connections from the name that they are agencies. But because we wanted to keep it open, as we want to use the company for different purposes and bring together different areas of the photography industry we felt like putting represents after the name would limit ourselves to being simply just an agency. We then tried putting associates after Thompson and Tilley to make it Thompson and Tilley associates, but from talking to different people, like Daniel and Kal our lecturers they thought it sounded a bit too legal and sounds less like a creative company. So we thought that Thompson and Tilley on its own would allows us to change and adapt the company as it evolves with out being tied down by the company’s name, with this name we have the freedom to develop the company in any way we choose.

 To show that we are a collaborative company we wanted to make sure that the joining of our names was prominent and deciding between being called thompson and tilley or thompson & tilly, but from seeing this written down the title the ampersand we felt emphasised the collaboration between us. The other aspect we had to think about was how the name could be shortened to allow us to be easily promoted instead of writing the full name each time. We came up with different options which we listed below:

 t and t

t & t

t + t

 T and T

T & T

T + T

 From this experimentation we thought that the lower case letters allowed the the abbreviation to be less harsh and flow, this then made us think about whether to use capitals on the website which is something we will need to experiment with to allow the website to be consistent throughout so we will have to try the name with and without capitals and choose which one we prefer to then use this throughout the whole website to keep it consistent.

 The email address

 the next step before creating the site was for us to create an email address to use a linked email address for the website, but also having a linked email so that we can contact people in the future from this address as form of promotion for our company but also to emphasise that we are a duo. We thought it would be useful to create an email account with google mail so that we could use this address to access google docs and google drive in the future. We created the email account  thompsonandtilley@gmail.com but even though we wanted to use the ampersand  we could not use this symbol on the email so we thought that we can use both and twitch and change between the two if we cant use the symbol. We chose to have .com account for international purposes a lot of the agencies and galleries have developed the business beyond the UK, so we thought it would be sensible to create the .com account as we do not know where our business may expand to, we do not want to limit ourselves.

 An aspect we would eventually like to create in the future is to have individual email accounts for when we work have specific clients and have different roles with in the business, therefore we hope that eventually we can use the email addresses:

 alex@thompsonandtilley.com

 sam@thompsonandtilley.com

 We thought it was a really interesting point to use our short names as it allows us to become unisex and to play with our perceptions as people wont know if we are male or female. This is something we can also play with when emailing clients and people in the industry with our joint email address in the near future and really allow ourselves to be universal by using our short names.

 Planning the website

 Before we created our website we thought it was important to plan out the different aspects we wanted to include so that when It came to creating the website we new the content to include. From our research looking at different websites we were really interested to mix the websites from galleries and agencies together to create our own website which combines the two.

 Home

 We wanted to use our home page to create a strong first impression for our online audience, we want to show the viewers strong images on the home page to introduce the company in a powerfully. Also on this home page we wanted to show news on them to show the viewers first hand what we do and what the company is. On the home page we want to play around with layouts and design to show the viewers our desin skills, emphasizing the creativeness within the company.

 About

 A section we thought was important to include was the about section. Which will say who the company are and we thought this would a good opportunity to be able to summarise the company in a couple of sentences as we don’t want to overwhelm with information and we want to be able to communicate with the audience exactly who we are in limited words. On this page we also want to include our values and what the aims are for the company to really sell our services and engage with the viewer. The next section we wanted to include was a biography section about the founders of the company, in other words a little section about the two of us, as we want our collaboration to be one of our selling points we really want to emphasise this to the audience by allowing them to understand a little bit about each of us and and understand who we are.

 Also in the about section we would display our contact details, including our joint email  so the audience know how they can contact us and get in touch. Something which we thought was interesting when research websites was the inclusion of the company’s location, but obviously at this moment in time we don’t have a location which is something we would want to include in this section. We did however, contact Linsey from the student enterprise team and also a staff director for the south bank collective, she is based in the Clarence centre for enterprise and innovation, so we have contacted her to see if we could possibly use the Clarence Centre as our location to showcase what ideally we would like to have on our website.

 Workshops

 The next section we want to include on the website is a section which showcases the different events and interactive workshops held at our gallery space or that we hold in the industry as another way of engaging with our audience. At first we weren’t sure what this section should be called as if we called It ‘events’ it may come across that the company photograph events and may not be immediately obvious what we want to communicate. So we came up with the idea to call it ‘workshops’ to help the audience understand that the company hold workshops and put on workshops. Also the title ‘workshops’ allow the section to be open so that we can include in this section future symposiums, talks and workshops that the company hold and are involved with. So far we have put on a photobook workshop which is something we are going to include in this section as an example of the types of events we have done allowing the audience to engage with the workshop and the content but also to show our experience.

 Exhibitions

 Exhibitions is another aspect we wanted to include on the website to showcase exhibitions which collaboratively we have curated and eventually this can be a space for the exhibitions which are being held at our gallery.  So far we have collaboratively curated the Fassi exhibition for the South Bank collective which we want to include here to showcase our experience. What we think is important is that we include photographs to represent the exhibition and to not bombard or bore the viewer with to much text. The images however need to be professional to add to the consistency of the website and showcase work we are proud of and want to represent us as curators. Another aspect we have picked up from research is that galleries use their sites to promote future exhibitions to build an audience for an exhibition before it opens, fortunately we are both curating our own exhibitions for our degree show so we can put this on the website to promote our upcoming exhibition and to engage the audience to our work.

 Artists

 An important section we want to include is the section which shows the artists we represent, obviously we don’t actually represent artists at the moment but we wanted to use this as a platform to showcase what we would like to do and display on our site. We want this section to be called ‘artists’ and not ‘photographers’ as from research it is clear that agencies are moving beyond just representing photographers so by being open and calling it ‘artist’ this can allow us to be flexible with what sort of artists we represent in the future. In this section we are going to pretend to represent ourselves and our colleague Charlotte Hartley as we feel there is consistent style between our portfolios. Also the three of us move in and out of the fine art world with our practice so this is something which links us all together and definitely an aspect in photography we really enjoy and would love to include in our agency. We are going to write a summary of the artist and then show their portfolio and plan to present a projects section to allow the audience to really get to understand the work of the photographer, which is another aspect we have picked up from research and how important it is to navigate the viewer around their portfolio and for them to learn about the photographers entire practice. We are also going to include a link to the photographers own site to allow the viewer to see more work and learn more about the photographer, so for the purpose of showing how we want our website to look, we will include a link to the artist’s photography websites.  However, this is just to show one examples and the websites are not included as part of our submission. At the bottom of the artist page we want to include a link to the latest news of the photographer to help promote the recent work and projects of the photographer.

 News

 A news section is an aspect we have found really successful for other companies during our research as it provides a platform for the audience to keep up to date with the photographers and the companies work. This is a section we also want to include to allow our audience to keep up to date with the photographers we represent as another way of promoting their work, but also to show what exhibitions and events which are coming up to build an audience for these different activities. At the moment we plan to show on this news section a bit about our graduate show as this is something all three of our photographers are apart of. Through using interviews as part of our research, in the future we would love to include this in the news section, hopefully allowing our audience to understand that we are really interested in engaging with different industry professionals and sharing the knowledge we learn to benefit the reader. Although at this moment in time we can not include the interviews we have done on our site as we did not ask permission from the interviewee’s, but this has definitely inspired us for the future.  Alongside the News section we would love to create a newsletter which we can send out to our clients and audiences to future promote the work of the photographs and the company, hopefully this will allow us to create a relationship with our viewers.

 Social media

 We are also going to include links to our social media platforms and have decided to create a twitter and an Instagram site as another way of engaging our audiences and promoting our company. We have decided to only do two social media platforms as we want to do these well done and keep an active online presence on both of these platforms to build our audience up. Although, from our research we have found that other companies use more than just these two platforms but we feel it is really important that we do our twitter and Instagram pages well instead of having loads which aren’t as active and as engaging. On Instagram we want to play with the platform as an online exhibition promoting our curating skills and the work of our photographers. On the Twitter we aim for this to be a platform the interaction with our audiences and use this for more social updates and creating an audience for our events as well as an audience for the new work of the photographs which will go along side the News Section.

  The website

 Theme

 We had planned out exactly what we wanted as content for our company’s website so the next step was the make the website. The platform we decided to use to create our website on was squarespace, both of us have previously used Wix so we were interested to explore with a different program to gain insight into how other website platforms work. We were also advised to use Sqaurespace for its clarity and is apparently easy to use. The first step for creating the website was to create the domain name, luckily for us thompsonandtilley.com was available and allowed our company to be consistent with our email account. For the domain we couldn’t use the ampersand (&) and so had to use ‘and’ but this was ok as we were hoping to be able to use both depending on the platform. We then had to decide on a theme to use which was hard as there were so many to choose from. Luckily, we both wanted the site to have a plain white background so that the website becomes an online exhibition, using the white background to frame the photographs on the site. The white background is also another way of showing that our company curates exhibitions so we hoped this would communicate our role as curators and represent us as an online gallery. We also new that we wanted the navigation bar to run across the top of the page so that it is easily visible on every aspect of the site allowing our audience to easily navigate around the site. Both of these aspects narrowed down our search and we kept swapping and changing between themes to make sure we had the right fit which we were both happy with. The final theme we chose was Jasper which provided a platform which we could personalise and make our own, but what we liked about it was that the navigation bar was across the top which makes it easy for the audience to navigate from page to page. We think its really important to think about the audience’s experience of the site and making it as clear as possible for them.

 Font and text

 The next step for the website was choosing the right font to use throughout the website and we experimented with the font on the title thompson & tilley, which was on the top of the website. It was really interesting testing different fonts and the effect each one can have on how the company’s name is read, some were very harsh and bold and others were in capital letters. What we thought worked well was a thin and light font to allow the writing to be gentle and soft, something which we hoped to communicate throughout the website but also as a company as we are both gentle and soft characters. In the end we went for the font Cormorant which was thin and light but bold enough to still be read clearly. With this font we then played around with capital letters or lower case but it was clear that using lower case characters emphasised the soft and gentle atmosphere we wanted to create and communicate to our audience, this is also something we decided to use throughout the website to present a soft approach throughout the website but also to make our website style unique from the other websites we have looked at. Another aspect which added to this gentle approach was using light greys and light blue text to be less harsh than black but to still stand out on the white background. All of these decisions come down to making a good first impression and we had to ask ourselves the impression we wanted to communicate to our audience, buy using all these soft and delicate fonts and styles we hoped that this would flow throughout the website and create a neutral and delicate atmosphere for our websites visitors.

 On the site we wanted to keep the information and text minimal, to allow the photographs presented to captivate the viewer. But it is essential that we get the most important information across in a couple of sentences to not overwhelm the audience with text but keeping them involved in the companies and photographers work. On the individual artist’s pages, we also included the links to the photographers own website, to allow the audience to learn and see more from the photographer, this is another way of promoting our photographers. For the purpose of this website we have included both of our own photography websites but the sites are not updated as we want to be represented by our company’s website. However, we wanted to show exactly how we would present the photographers on thompson and tilley’s website.

 Layout

 We used the same pages as we had planned out in the website plan, but using sqaurespace presented new technical aspects we had to work with and understand in order to get our vision of the site to actually be created.  We really wanted to be creative with the layouts on the different pages, specifically for the artist’s page we chose to present bold images for the thumbnails on the page to showcase and represent the work of the photographers, drawing in the audience to look at more. On the individual photographer’s pages, we wanted each page to be specific to the photographer and allow each artist to be different from the rest. But we also hoped that making each photographers page slightly different would communicate our skills of nurturing our artists and working hard at presenting them in the right way to the photography world. Going back to the main artists’ page we felt it was important to lay out the photographers in a line with different sized thumbnails to emphasise the creativeness of our company but to also eventually when we represent more photographers this will become a collage of work, which links to the different collages used across the sites pages.

 Throughout the website we wanted to play with scale and compositions and to use this as a unique selling point for our company by showing off our design and curation skills and making our website creative and engaging, keeping the viewer engrossed.  The compositions communicate a creative presence throughout the website, we want this as a platform to play around with juxtapositions and to engage the audience in our practice throughout. To also create a creative website, we wanted to play around with scale using larger and smaller images to catch the attention of the viewer and lure them in to the site, we also wanted to not use an organised, structured grid to keep the website diverse throughout the site.  However, even though we used the website as a platform to be creative there were also elements of the website which we felt it was important to keep the same through out to create a style and consistency. The framework of the artists’ separate pages stayed the same having the text in the same places across the photographers but the compositions and sizes of the images changed throughout which was to emphasises this personal touch. We also kept the exhibition and workshop pages structure the same starting we upcoming and then scrolling down to previous exhibitions/workshops. So although images and artistic juxtapositions were keeping the website interesting and dynamic throughout, we new it was important to keep some of the frameworks the same to emphasises our style. Another aspect we kept the same was the font and the text colour and use of lower case to again create a definite style for ourselves allowing us to be creative with other aspects within In the website.

 Another layout technique we thought was important was to make sure that the audience can scroll down the pages instead of across to contrast with our image compositions, in particular for the artist’s pages the projects are collaged on the site, but then when the viewer clicks on a specific project it is simple and fluid, emphasising the photographs. By having a mixture of collages and single images to scroll down we really wanted to create contrasts and narratives between the pages, another aspect to showcase our curation, design skills and creativity.  On each page the audience scroll down we thought it was necessary that there is a section of the image below to encourage them continue scrolling. With so many people using their phones to visit websites and are constantly scrolling down social media pages or photographs we thought we would play on this aspect and to show some pages one below the other playing with this scrolling technique and engaging with the viewer.

 Logo

 We wanted to create the company a logo to use as a promotion tool and on our social media platforms, we felt like it was significant to keep the logo consistent to the website, generating a recognizable style for our company. We wanted to use the same font and text colour to create a logo which correlates to the rest of the company.

 Social media

 Creating both twitter and Instagram made us think about how we wanted to present ourselves beyond the website, so it was about keeping our style consistent on these platforms too. We had to use a mixture of ‘thompson and tilley’ and ‘thompson & tilley’ as a lot of the information wouldn’t let us use the ampersand, but this allows people to still know that is our company and so people still know there is an ‘and’ in the company’s name, either way we are still trying to communicate that we are a collaboration working together.