Category Archives: Community

Face Britain project

  • Apr 19, 2012
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The Face Britain Project - Projection onto Buckingham Palace

The great thing about working in arguably the most vibrant city on the planet is that you never know what you might stumble across on any given day.

Tonight I witnessed the launch of Face Britain Project, talking to one of the officials tonight apparently this is a world first and will make it into the Guinness Book of Records.

The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts is behind the project which celebrates young people in the lead up to the Diamond Jubilee and the London’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Face Britain Project - Projection onto Buckingham Palace

More than 200,000 self-portraits have been used to create the picture of the Queen, Children aged four to 16 were asked to produce their own self-portraits using drawing, textiles, 3D, painting, graphics, and photography.

The Face Britain project will be projected onto Buckingham Palace each night till Saturday, it runs from 8:30 to 11:15.

Get yourselves down there it may be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Street Art Utopia

  • Mar 09, 2012
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Street Art Utopia - streetartutopia.com

They declare “the world is there canvas” and the may be right judging by the images on streetartutopia.com.

This is a fantastic collection of urban street art from around the world.

Street Art Utopia - streetartutopia.com

Big Egg Hunt

  • Feb 29, 2012
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Big Egg Hunt

A most eggstraordinary event is happening around London in the run up to Easter. Over 200 very special eggs created by both famous and amazing artists have been hidden across the streets of London. The Big Egg Hunt competition is to find as many as you can to be in with a shout of winning The Diamond Jubilee Egg no less!

The website has been developed by Made in Fallon, Fallon’s in-house design agency. The site works superbly well for two reasons. Visually it is playful, colourful and the illustration style works fantastic on the Zone maps but it is the way the site has been executed that really interests me. It is a great example of what is being termed as Responsive Design. The way the site visually looks, delivers graphic assets, imagery, content, navigation, etc has all been tailored to the device or platform that you are viewing the site on.

So this has got me thinking! I have been studying, thinking some more, saving articles, pondering, and then thinking some more about Responsive Design for a number of months.

Day to day work projects at the moment aren’t allowing me to attack a piece of work in this manner so I am going to re-design and re-launch this blog as a self initiated responsive design project.

It’s exciting and daunting all at the very same time. I know there will be a ton of work to do, lots of problems to solve, a number of people who will get tired of my endless questions and pleas for advice but it will be good fun.

I would normally pull together a team of developers, UX experts and creatives on a project of this nature, for now though it will be just me, a sketchbook, iPad and my thoughts.

I’ve literally made my mind up to do this today. That is as far as I have got in the process. I know I want to record every development, I will post up thoughts, images, sketches, prototypes etc up to the usual channels including Flickr, Pinterest (why not everyone else is..) etc.

I need to consider the right approach to this project, it will be slightly different to what I would term a normal website development. It is feasible I need to consider the most restrictive screen resolution first, then build into the larger template and canvases. If anyone out there has opinions or experience in this approach then get in touch I would love to hear from you.

I will try and write as many posts as I can on the thought processes and developments. It may take a while in-between work and family life but will make a great case study to look back on.

I’m off to do some more thinking…

If you’re interested in finding out more about Responsive Design, the links below provide some interesting reading.

Media Queries, Web Design Ledger, Mayfield Digital, Line 25

Twitter 2012

  • Feb 24, 2012
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Twitter Statistics 2012

We all know Twitter, most of us related with design, advertising, media etc probably have twitter accounts. But how many of us realise what a phenomenon it really is?

Twitter originated only 6 years ago in a brainstorm session and was originally titled twttr inspired by Flickr.

“…we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.” – Jack Dorsey

Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM. In 6 short years there are now 175 million tweets a day!

There’s even more, the full glorious info graphic is at infographiclabs.com for your visual delight.

 

Prototyping Interfaces

  • Feb 23, 2012
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Lovely teaser trailer for a upcoming film that documents a group of students grad project as they explore, concept, create, make and play with a diverse range of software and hardware to create new possibilities of interaction.

The students have a website in development prototypinginterfaces.com (just a holding page at the time of writing this post) and they’re hoping to get a book publishing deal.

60 Seconds on the internet

  • Oct 04, 2011
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60 Seconds on the internet

Nice infographic that takes a 60 second snapshot of internet activity over a range of sites, applications and social channels. Large version can be viewed here.

The Geosocial Universe

  • May 23, 2011
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The Geosocial Universe infographic

A very nice infographic to start the week off!

I have discussed the rise of mobile platforms before on this blog (A mobile future) and this infographic takes a look at all the major digital networks and their current mobile user base. View more from JESS3 the original creators.

I have been researching mobile platform penetration for a couple of projects and pitches I have recently been working on. This also forms part of a series of future thought pieces I am creating concerning the development of the online experience that is evolving beyond the notion of a web site or single destination to include multiple touchpoints.

Here’s a couple of interesting points I have recently found:
• According to eMarketer the tablet market will grow 400% by 2012
• Mobile internet devices out sold computers in 2009 by 144 million units*
• It is predicted by 2012 more smartphones will be shipped than PC’s
• There are around 650 million 3G/3.5G subscribers worldwide**
• By 2013, people using their mobile device to search the Internet will overtake desktop Internet users for the first time

What does this mean?

Well, as consumers continue to expand their media consumption across a variety of devices and platforms marketers and advertisers will need to rethink measurement approaches and marketing strategies in order to engage with different audiences and deliver on their needs and behaviours.

* Source: Gartner, Jan 2010. Information week Dec 2009.
** Source: ChinaCCM.com

The Fearless Revolution

  • Mar 17, 2011
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Alex Bogusky one of the world’s most awarded creative directors surprised many when he quit what he called, “the best job on the planet,” at his own agency CP+B to create his latest venture The Fearless Revolution.

This new venture sets out to explore new agreement between consumers and corporations.

A nice film exploring the principles behind the The Fearless Revolution and who wouldn’t want to go to work at the Fearless Cottage – great name!

iPad Letterpress

  • Mar 16, 2011
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LetterMpress: A Virtual Letterpress on Your iPad

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.

Facebook 2010 Yearbook

  • Feb 14, 2011
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facebook_2010_yearbook

Found this nice little infographic on Digital Buzz Blog while having lunch today. Quite astounding that 1 in 11 people on the planet are now on Facebook! The figures are incredible when you think about them, nearly 8 new accounts are registered every second!

I wouldn’t even like to think how much the server and network system costs to keep going each month.

The infographic was originally crated by SocialBakers.