That Yellow Website (or fish slice)

Our Digital Inclusion Lead, Dave, reflects on colour, content and clutter

It’s a bit of a rule these days that, once you’ve completed an online training session, you’ll get a bunch of helpful links sent to you afterwards. They’ll encompass the places, people and resources that you covered in the session, allowing you to ‘cut out and keep’ all that valuable information for a later date.

At Mhor, we’ve pretty much always done this, because we recognise that listening and contributing to an online discussion in an active and committed manner takes up your whole brain, so there’s no room for memorising all the content or copy/pasting a resource list on the fly.

But at a session not too long ago, I was on the receiving end of one of these lists and, reader… I found it pretty overwhelming! A ton of context-free, bright azure hyperlinks, presented without description or narrative, many of which had similar names or resolutely failed to ring any bells with me. I felt stranded. Lost.

Self-reflection is everything in community work, so I chewed over this for a while. Surely a links list was the right thing to provide? People can’t be expected to take in new information in real time while also building up a directory of all the things discussed, and even if they did, they’d end up with the same directory everybody else on the call needed – so make one in advance and share it with everyone, no?

It took an unrelated conversation with a Mhor colleague to ping the light bulb: “It was that website… I cannae remember the name… it’s a yellow one!”

I am a colour person, I’ve learned. If I’m raking in a drawer for the fish slice, I’m looking for its ruby red handle. So, er, if I’ve forgotten that it broke and we now have a green fish slice, I’ll be haplessly rummaging in that drawer for a good two or three minutes, often lifting the very fish slice I need out of the way several times to find the elusive red herring. Meanwhile, the pancakes are burning. I dunno, it’s how I’m built.

So when I remember a website, or a book, or just about anything, I remember its colour, meaning if I’m going to be presented with a resource list from training, I want to see the logo, the brand hue, to be reminded of the style and vibe of the thing, you know? What did the person mention when they discussed it? What is it good for, and what won’t it do for me?

And so, when I was building a training course for our session in the Circuit programme, it had to be bright and bold, grouped clearly into categories, showing logos you can click on and a description that matched what I said on the call – not chapter and verse by any means, but enough for people to hang their hat on and have their memories jogged. Making this in Canva took much longer than an email or plain A4 sheet with pasted links, but I hope it will be a genuinely useful bit of kit, calling back to the lively conversations and burgeoning alliances we’ve been building in the nexus between digital inclusion and young people with care experience.

But more than that, I hope I can keep learning from, and questioning, my past efforts. I just can’t guarantee unburnt pancakes.