So you reckon you can run as fast as an Olympic Marathon runner do you?

Well after watching this you might think again. For the 2011 New York Marathon people in New York were given the chance to see if they could keep up with Olympic Athlete Ryan Hall over just 60ft.

How on earth does someone keep this pace up for over 2hrs?

Stop the presses.
Microsoft finally produce a good advert for a great product!

Credit were credit is due I think, Kinect is pretty amazing (it sold twice as fast as the iPod when launched) and since being hacked is being used for some amazing things way out of the gaming sphere.

Check out kinecthacks.net to see how people are pushing the technology.

My good friend Henry Iddon has been a busy boy of late, he’s been photographing across the globe from the wilds of Kendal, Mont Blanc in France, Iran all the way to China covering an incredible diverse range of subjects. He’s created a great portfolio of work which can be seen over at henryiddon.com.

He’s a multi talented chap is our Henry, he has been a member of the Great Britain Speed Skiing Team (pb 176kmh), has been involved in mountaineering exploits in Europe, Asia and Alaska, and has had success at an elite level as a racing cyclist.

He’s a thoroughly all round good bloke as well.

His personal work is held in collections by ; Kraszna-Krausz Collection, National Media Museum, UK; The North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University; Scottish National Screen Archive; George Eastman House, Rochester, USA; State Library of New South Wales, Australia; Banff Centre for Mountain Culture, Canada; Centre for Contemporary Photography, University of Arizona, USA.

Great digital evolution of the humble car brochure. Executed as an app (for iPhone and Android) that recognises traffic signs and transforms them into features of the new Punto Evo.

Take a picture of a regular road sign and the app recognises the sign if it was a QR code, it then associates each sign with a feature of the car directly related to that sign. The app also doubled up as a game where the user could find and win hidden prizes.

If you can get over the really cheesy voiceover it’s a nice idea!

Quite simply a really nice idea well executed.
The idea is still king, we shouldn’t forget this.

Credit for find must go to @bohellberg

I can’t wait to have a play with this new iPad app, LetterMpress: A Virtual Letterpress on Your iPad from bonadiescreative.com

This is a great project on two levels.
I think I am probably one of the last group of people to have had a traditional graphic design education. My initial introduction to design was using type gauge rulers, learning about pica m’s, drawing serifs and sans serifs with Rotring pens etc. lots of work training the eye to understand positive and negative spaces, lots of type paste-up work and using small letterpress machines. So I love rolling up the sleeves for a bit of hands on design work.

Also, before seeing this project I hadn’t heard of Kickstarter but what a fantastic idea!
If you don’t have funding for your dream project then Kickstarter enables you to reach out to the wider creative community to get them involved to help fund your project. Great projects from across the globe that before would never have seen the light of day are being funded and developed by very generous backers. Actually the generosity in these hard times is pretty staggering.

In the case of LetterMpress the project has received more than double it’s required funding within half the allotted time.

A great concept, great platform coupled with great support and backing.

Ever wondered how on earth some projects have been created?

If you’re a creative, designer, developer or techy working in one of the many creative disciplines then no doubt you will spend a good deal of your time researching campaigns, sites, virals, social media etc from your peers, competitors and rivals.

In my experience of working in agencies there are normally two responses to viewing other peoples work. The first and most common (if creatives and designers are involved) is unfortunately to go straight for the jugular and start pointing out flaws, describe in detail how badly it’s been executed, wonder if they didn’t have the budget to finish it or explain how you would have done it differently and obviously better.

The other response is to sit in awe, to call colleagues over, send an email and to say under your breath “I wish I’d thought of that” or “how on earth have they done that?”.

North Kingdom frequently fall into the latter category, they appear to have won just about every major award possible and now they’re giving everyone an insight into how much work they put into their projects. They’re obviously working with considerable budgets but there is no denying the amount of work and detail that is executed at every level.

If you have a bit of time to kill then I suggest you give their site a visit and have a good study of the behind the scenes.

Recently I’ve blogged a lot more about mobile devices, software, apps and in particular gesture driven technology and interfaces.

I am a fully signed up fan, champion and user of these devices and spend more time than is healthy researching and future thinking how all of these converging technologies and platforms will change what we currently perceive as digital.

All major hardware and software companies are now developing for mobile devices and the market is expanding at an incredible rate. You obviously have Apple with the iPad and Samsung with the Galaxy but both Blackberry and Microsoft are now taking serious considered steps into the tablet arena, and we know how much market share these brands currently enjoy.

MIcrosoft partnering with Samsung have developed the Surface technology into a very powerful platform. Microsoft also recently signed a deal with ARM and demonstrated it’s Windows OS running on ARM mobile chips.

Apple are taking the best elements of their iPhone and iPad OS and interface and integrating them into their latest Mac OS X Lion operating system. We also know how copied Apple are so expect other brands to follow (cue Microsoft).

There are lots of developments behind the scenes too, the likes of Google with the development and merger of AdWords and Analytics, Apple also introduced the iAd platform and with these developments brands will find more clever and innovative ways of connecting to audiences and consumers.

So what does this mean for the end user?

Well if you couple the above (which is only scratching at the surface of what’s happening) with the advances in browser standards, HTML 5, WOFF, JS, etc then websites will go through a huge change in the next 2-5 years. This will be prompted both by technology advancement and user experience and behaviour patterns.

Make no mistake this is already happening! The debate on Web ‘v’ Internet currently rages.
Get ready, the future of digital is changing right before your eyes.

Post Digital? – Rubbish.

Nice site for the new year.

I’m not going to comment on the content or intentions of Nike Better World but I like the mix of JS and HTML 5. Nice use of parallax scrolling and non intrusive navigation.

I did think that this would work really well on the iPad but it doesn’t? I thought that the design and nav would be perfectly suited to multi touch scrolling. Not sure if the iPad version of Safari isn’t handling the code well, or there is a different style sheet for mobile browsers (if the iPad Safari is classified as such?) I will have to investigate further, a real shame.

However I think we’re going to see a lot more if this style of publication/website design that is very image and layout led this year and beyond.

Great Interactive bus shelters throughout San Francisco invite commuters to partake in four games based on Yahoo! mobile apps, as part of a neighborhood-on-neighborhood competition. The neighborhood that scores the most points at its shelter wins a block party with OK Go!.

Really nice campaign. People have really taken to gesture driven interfaces and devices (think iPhone, Android, iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab etc) and mainstream acceptance means the possibilities for great interactive campaigns are almost limitless.