I thought I should add a link to this blog on my portfolio, it was feeling a bit left-out.
And, you know, a nice text link back from here will please those greedy search engines (at least I’m honest).
Anyway, I couldn’t figure out where the link should go, so I did a little redesign of the homepage, ran it past my mum, she liked it, hit upload, happy days.
I’ve had this idea for a little project knocking around the old brainbox for a few days. I guess it was inspired by a quite few things…
Firstly – saw this agency site (can’t remember which one it was though) anyway, for their people page, every member of staff was holding up a separate placard, each with a word on. All the words strung together made a sentence.
This got me thinking, a) it’s quite a nice little visual device for expressing a message from the company, and, more importantly, b) you don’t often see people endorsing their digital messages (comments, IM, email, blog posts, twitterings etc) with a picture, or expression. People can be very different online, they’ll type things online that they would never say face to face.
Secondly, Russel Davies’ Dawdlr. “dawdlr is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: what are you doing, you know, more generally?” – Takes the twitter concept, but forces people to put a bit more thought and effort into it. 90% of twitter is total bollocks - 99% of mine is ;)
Thirdly… I guess every 2.0 communication tool, but Twitter in particular.
So my idea is to create a similar short message tool, people can say whatever they want in a textual message, but are forced to capture a web cam photo at the time of posting. I’m hoping it might make people think a bit more about what they’re saying and give a bit more expression to the messages. You never know, it might just be a fun way of sending people messages.
So I guess if twitter is throw-away broadcast, and dawdler is twitter for the long now, this, whatever it may be called, would be for the profound thought, or more passionate message.
Again on the theme of pleasurable interaction, I’ve always really liked physics simulations, like this, could play with them all day.
Anyway I had this idea for a physics-y interface. Basically the site would be a sphere, then each level of content would exist inside its own sphere - in a nest like.
Apart from the bits that were links, you’d be able to jumble everything up and chuck it around. Everything would be dynamic and react realistically.
Only really suitable for shallow / experimental sites, but reckon it could be quite cool. Wheres the maths book!
So I had this idea ages ago for an amusing rathergood style webtoy where you get to play tunes with a ‘kitty keyboard’.
Basically, I’d record a bunch of cat meow sounds and tune them up to a piano octave, whack it into flash, then let the hilarity ensue.
It would have some kind of script music feature so that people could upload their score and all that community web 2.0 faff. Viola, a funny afternoon in the office recreating Axel F.
Amazing, imagine my surprise when a quick Google search looking for the above image revealed that its not an entirely new idea:
“The cat piano was the work of a German scholar over 350 years ago. Athanasius Kircher designed the cat piano and documented it in the Musurgia Universalis in 1650. The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince who was too stressed out. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. The piano delivered sharp pokes into the tails of the cats. Cruel? Definitely. Funny? Yeah, a little bit.” more here.
Fun times.
Hilarious!
Effective, not sure, but still, it’s probably the best thing to come out of that awful, smelly sandwich shack.
Thank you Subway, for making me laugh. This incredible piece of copy was spotted by Britain’s own Martin Lee.
Wow. Two intimidatingly amazing pieces of digital advertising in as many weeks.
First ‘good things should never end’, now this:
Pop onto the website and you can join upto 50 other people, simply messing about with the Uniqlo logo.
This is great, such a simple idea and really well implemented (a few small bugs aside). Had me and the rest of the table messing around for a good 20 minutes. 20 minutes looking at, and interacting with, a brand, geniuses!
It’s good! Unsuprisingly by the legendary Yugo Nakamura aka Yugop.
Apparently you can go and see some of the more fetching grids in Uniqlo stores, will be watching out.
Look at this, this is great.
Man designs letter, sends it on. Receiver decorates letter, takes snap, sends it on. And repeat. 26 letters.
Brilliant. See here.
Love it.
Watched this last week on the tellybox - a slightly shorter edit of the Helvetica 50 film I didn’t quite get round to seeing at the ICA. Brilliant it was, with legends aplenty, including personal favourite - the silver fox.
For me the most interesting part was an aside towards the end, mentioning that things like myspace are getting regular people (people outside the creative industries) interested in design. That people have always projected themselves as a brand; through what fashion they wear, their beliefs, social sub-culture etc.
This relates quite closely to what I researched for my dissertation (culminating in Pixel Hustle), namely what factors motivate people to create UCG. Self-promotion was one of the key motivations that came out of it, but I didn’t follow it quite that far. I concluded that people with skills to pedal… designers, musicians etc. would exploit ‘web two point naught’ to peddle their wares. But with the interweb so entwined in people’s lives, it totally makes sense that there is a drive to bring out their personality in the online space as well as the physical.
I guess it works to explain why most people will never turn into little brand evangelists with the same passion that they will maintain my/face pages. It seems the best way to use social media is to create a product that creates a positive image for consumer’s personal brands (ipod, macbook, stupid great sunglasses…) and the work is done for you.
Platforms like myspace and facebook, with tools like last.fm and flickr are popular because they are tools that facilitate a form of self-presentation/self-pimping. Anyway, no new ideas here, just perhaps the seed of a justification.
I am proud to announce that I’ve just met Spiderman, Batman and someone else (possibly Laurel or Batman’s butler).
The crimefighting trio entered (disappointingly) through the door, bearing Butterkist popcorn and a showreel DVD that looked a lot like a student project. They left as quickly as they came, leaving us confused as to who they were representing, and why they had come.
Poo more like.
Yours, Peter Parker
Saw this in the Metro this morning:
Really reminded me of something I read in the Tipping Point.
“One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances.” - Taken from here
Wondering if anyone has looked to research like this in explaining it, or just stuck to the slightly more ridiculous theory of a cursed village.
