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Ikea tries something different

Checkout Ikea Sweden's new storytelling site for their PS range of eco-friendly solutions (thanks to Adverblog for the heads-up). The site mixes, beautiful cutout-style animation with video and audio in a really successful manner.

Through a rather bizarre setting of flying objects, the user is encouraged to make a selection and watch a short video about the object through its designer's eyes. Each of the settings is different and appropriate to the 'story' being told.

Not being fluent in Swedish makes certain elements within the navigation difficult, but you do get the general gist of what's going on. Upon a second viewing, I discovered the slide-up navigation on the bottom which stopped me from returning to the 'weird flying objects' scene each time - much easier!

Article - Ad Declines in Mass Media Seen as More Than Just Economic (Wall Street Journal)

Very interesting article on The Wall Street Journal this morning where the CEO's of Disney and News agree that consumer behaviour is playing a large part in the downturn of ad revenue online and not just the economic woes we're currently seeing. Advertising, as we know it is changing.

I challenge you not to click

I really don't want to be the spoiler, so watch the clip and see how you go. For me, the temptation was too great.



If you are tempted, here's the site.

The Christian Bale remix

If you've missed Christian Bale's tirade on the set of Terminator Salavation, then you've been living in a hole. You've got to feel for the Director of Photography on this one. Anyway, there's T-shirts, appreciation societies, petitions and so on, and YouTube is swamped with clips - none funnier than this, the 'Bale Out Remix':

Australia - the bit that broke off

Great little video done for Kea - a New Zealand-based talent community. Good example of some really simple (cheap) animation being carried by a clever idea, great copy and humour.

Define yourself with only 5 brands

5brand is essentially a blog that allows people to submit a list of 5 brands that they believe define themselves. These are then listed with your name, occupation and where you live. It's largely full of Brazilian and Portuguese entries at the moment - think sports apparel and football.

A good portion of the entries are by copywriters, designers and marketers so brands like Apple, Sony, Virgin and Converse seem to be regulars.

It's harder than you think, really.... it is... I hate being put in a box...

A publisher's nightmare...

Sick of banners intruding on your browsing experience? Look no further than Add-Art, a free Firefox add-on which replaces adverting on websites with curated art images. I'm not sure it's going to be popular with advertisers but hey, interesting concept.

Design your own cover

FHM are running a campaign (FHM Recovered) through Ninemsn at the moment, allowing users to create their own cover and go into the running to have it published in the May issue of the magazine, as well as winning $5000 and one weeks internship at Holler - the campaign creators.

You can create your masterpiece online in 'amateur' mode or download the templates in 'professional' mode. There's a gallery to vote on and some nice sharing tools - post the covers to different networks.

I think it's been well done but lacked some of the impact of other similar campaigns going around. Take for example the recent campaign for Puma - I am 60 - both play on similar ideas around customising an image with uploads, nice flash tools and some copywriting wit, but one is easily more successful than the other. Check it out and judge for yourself.

The GE Smart Grid

GE has put together a beautifully designed site plugging their 'Smart Grid' (read greener) solutions. The pretense of the site is to display to consumers the value of GE updating the 20th century power grid with 21st century technology.

Choose one of three main sections; CO2 emissions, alternative energy or smart meters to learn more. Each section's content is beautifully illustrated and animated using Papervision 3D. The graphs really come to life and the content is compelling.

And for the real kicker, check out the augmented reality section (see image below). I hadn't had the chance of actually playing with this until now, having only seen demo videos floating around the web. Print out a PDF they supply, turn on your webcam and have some fun - very cool use of emerging technology.

Great new microsite (Amnesia Razorfish) for Smirnoff titled, "It started with a mule" set in 1940's LA. Save Ginger and win a trip to Hollywood is the general premise. Great visuals, nice integration of video and product.

Go swimming with Google Earth

How good is this? Finally Google Earth has an ocean - one that you can actually 'swim' in. Launched yesterday, Google Earth 5.0 now allows users the ability to submerse themselves in the world's oceans, exploring the ocean floor through video, images and 3D mapping. You can read more about this on the official Google blog.

Brand America is changing

Interesting article on Smashing Magazine detailing the shift in design, content and technology focus of the White House website since Barack Obama's inauguration.

Perhaps the most noticeable change is the lack of prominence given to the White House logo which plays second fiddle to the site's navigation and content feature. Coincidental? I think not.

Toyota - 'Why not?' campaign

Toyota has just launched a microsite to support it's "Why Not?" advertising campaign. The slick 3D interface asks users to contribute environmental innovations in six areas - safety, water, land, air, community and energy - and at the same time learn about Toyota's efforts in these areas.

"The goal in creating this 'virtual world' was to open a dialogue between Toyota and people across the country - while making it fun to use at the same time," said Mike Wilson, chief creative officer, Dentsu America (global creative agency). "Over time, the suggestions of users will 'grow' the landscape of the site."

Having a look through some of the ideas already submitted, shows how much time and effort people are willing to invest in ideas around sustainability and innovation. There's propositions that take 5 minutes to read while others are so short and obvious that you find yourself asking why they haven't been done already.

To reward people's efforts, Toyota has put up a week-long VIP tour of Toyota's plant in Kentucky and the opportunity to meet with top innovators in New York City as a prize.

Every wondered what's being said out there...?

Spy can listen in on the social media conversations you're interested in. Type in a word or phrase ('snow london' entered in the example above) and let it search Twitter, Flickr, Blogs, FriendFeed and others to deliver an interesting snapshot of current dialogue taking place.

Kiwi Safaris site launched

Hunting in New Zealand is as much about the experience as the trophies. For this very reason, the new Kiwi Safaris website had to be visually rich, beautifully written and always current. It's simple, was put together exceptionally quickly and is delivering great results already.

Champion Hoodie Remix Competition

A quick shout-out to all aspiring streetwear designers... Champion have just launched Hoodie Remix - a contest site where you create, share and vote on custom-designed hoodies. Ultimately, the winning hoodie will be produced as a limited edition piece and the glory will be yours!

I loved the customisation tool in this site - not anything too different from other sites around but just very slickly executed.

Hyundai - 'Edit Your Own' Campaign

Hyundai have just launched a very impressive site for their new Genesis Sedan and Coupe. Running alongside a series of TV spots (launching during the Superbowl), the site puts the viewer inside the car for a 'hot lap' and then challenges them to edit their own version (using Adobe Premier Light) online and share it with friends. Worth checking out - beautifully executed.

Super Bowl XL Commercials

Time to check out the commercials from this years Superbowl - there's a couple of gems in there worth watching. I particularly liked the Emerald Nuts spot - odd but interesting!

Know your audience

Only in Waverley would your average 'don't drink' notice use such an icon!

2009 AIMIA Nomination - Bradford Insulation

Our site for Bradford Insulation has been nominated in the 'Best Enterprise' category for this years AIMIA Awards. We picked up a couple of pieces of silverware in 2007 so a new addition would be pretty cool. Check out the site and see what all the fuss is about.

Burger King's “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign

How many friends would you abandon in real-life for the chance at a free Whopper? Not many I'm guessing.

Well, Burger King developed a Facebook campaign around this idea where users were encouraged to dump 10 friends to receive a free Whopper. Unfortunately Facebook regarded this as running afoul of their rules as each dumpee received a notification that they'd been axed from someones friend list.

Douglas Quenqua of the New York times presentes an interesting position on this: "As social networking becomes ubiquitous, people with an otherwise steady grip on social etiquette find themselves flummoxed by questions about “unfriending” people: how to do it, when to do it and how to get away with it quietly." Keep reading...

Data visualisation by Gapminder

What is Gapminder? In their words it's about "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view." For me, it's a beautifully presented, easy to use time-based graphing tool. Checkout this graph I built to show the number of internet users (per hundered people) in the US, Japan, UK, China and Australia over a period from 1998 to 2006.

Stats: Traditional Media Use Stabilizes as Online Rises (eMarketer)

New stats show that while traditional media is still king, we're seeing some big shifts in the way people consume media. That said, not all forms of new media are delivering the same buoyant results:

Blogs are up 11% over 3 years, social network sites are up 9% and shopping websites are going through the roof, while RSS feeds and podcasts are slowing.

Check out the data from eMarketer

Pipl - the people search engine

When we think of search, we think of Google. But even Google has limitations to what it can find. Take people for example, it'll return a list of indexed results containing names or relevant details, but these are not specific and are often mixed amongst totally un-people related results. Enter Pipl which has just overtaken Spock (the former default people search engine) in ComScore’s December numbers.

It's pretty scary as to what it can find - see image above. One search under my name brought back a table of images with 3 of the 19 being me. Big brother is watching.

When is it time to jump into yet another social network?

Interesting article on Mashable about the proliferation of social media and which networks we should join.

While you're considering this, why not check out where your username is being used - very interesting.

Consider this

"Doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in surgery." True story.

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

"Social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie".

Here's 10 ways in which 'social media' will change in 2009, including the ever elusive ability to generate revenue.

6th Annual Future of Digital Advertising (and a bit more)

I went along to the 6th Annual Future of Digital Advertising conference put on by AIMIA and the IAB at the Powerhouse this morning. Unlike many conferences of late, the quality of all the speakers was great with some really insightful and challenging thinking being shared by all.

Particularly liked Iain McDonald's (Amnesia founder) presentation on the 'Digital Consumer' and how brands need to carefully reconsider their approach to connection especially when using social tools. Check out his rant about the day here.

Make sure you also watch Joe Crump (Razorfish NY Creative Director) talk on 'Digital Darwinism.'

“The age of Digital Darwinism has arrived. An age of blindingly fast pace, technology is leapfrogging, television is failing, and the brand landscape is changing more than ever before.”

Here's the presentation Joe used in Canne:

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: | a)

Where've you been?

We've been here all along... just been lazy! Why? Many reasons.

So why start blogging again? Well... it's getting harder and harder to track, spread and curate good content with an overwhelming mass of good stuff being published daily. We've all got social networks we use but how hard is it to know who's reading/watching what and why, so a central location for my/our thoughts seems to make sense.

Website / Guardian Unlimited

This rocks. Check out the redeveloped Guardian Unlimited website. Each section is completely independent with dedicated context-sensitive IA and amazingly tight and sexy adherence to the overall grid. Wicked site and so so tight.

Blog / The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

I was going to link to these, but thought they'd be good to reproduce in their entirety. They're taken from Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog, an employee at the BBC. They form part of the BBC2.0 Project.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

Website / The Identity Archives Project

The Identity Archives Project is a keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identities for designers, brand managers and marketing professionals. The aim is to grow the database (no need to register) so that it becomes a complete and valuable tool for the brand identity design community.

Video / Photosynth demo - AMAZING

This will blow you away... guaranteed. A video demo of Photosynth, the likely product to transform the way we experience digital images - think spatial and relationship modelling of all things visual.

Article / Learning to love the pixel: exploring the craft of icon design

Makes for an interesting read - talks about crafting something relevant, usable and attractive as opposed to simply 'prettying things up'. Read the article

Video / Digitas show-reel and future of advertising

Interesting QA session with digital agency execs. The Digitas show-reel runs from 03:30 and Chris Clarke the Global CEO of Nitro gives an interesting vision from 10:00.

Watch it at Scribe Media

Article / What Does Rich Mean?

Interesting article that has a tendency to get a little convoluted at times. "Amid the current hype of Web 2.0, rich has become the de facto buzzword suggesting fresh, sexy digital products, often marked by glossy buttons with AJAX-driven behaviors. But what does rich mean to a UI (user interface) designer who wants to craft intelligent, compelling, and memorable interactions?"

Check it out at Boxes and Arrows

Article / Experience IS the Product...

Great article talking on the value experience delivers to consumers.

"Flickr is driven by explicit experience strategy. Two in fact, written right there on its About Page:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos."

Website / TuneGlue

TuneGlue is one of the latest online offerings venturing into relationship visualisation. In this case, TuneGlue maps the links between various artists and genres of music from Last.FM and Amazon. Type in the name of your favourite singer or band and the mini-app generates threads of similar artists, albums etc. From here you can drill down to albums and tracks.

All the data is pulled from the EMI owned Last.FM which adds credibility to the offering and once again shows the faith and commitment EMI have to the digital space - read their press release on the issue here.

A similar offering named LivePlasma has been around for quite a while and although not as slick, does a better job of visually representing the relationships. The addition of size to the generated nodes and multiple linkage paths gives depth and relevance. Try searching for the same artist and see what happens.

Website / Endless Shoes and Handbags

Endless is a recently launched (still Beta - like most web 2.0 offerings) new shopping site from the US - restricted to US localities at present including their prisons! The differentiator for this site is the inclusion of a nice set of search tools including visual devices such as a colour picker and drag-able sliders for setting price ranges. It's not the most visually appealing site in the world and the 'Endless' brand really confuses me (why endless - what's the tie, why the crap logo etc.) but the functionality and sensationally tight CSS control makes up for it.

Website / Dave Werner Portfolio 2006

Great portfolio site - something different. Check it out at http://okaydave.com/

Website / Apple redesign (Flash imitation)

Apple has redone their site with some really nice flashy components without using Flash. Checkout one example at: http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Game / NAB and Socceroos

Clemenger Blue has worked with Digital pictures to design and build a 'video-real' Flash 3D game for the Socceroos and their involvement in the Asian Cup. It plays on the idea of goal celebrations and as such is titled Celebration Dance: Help our Socceroos perform. The game feels more like a consol-based piece with nice game-play, stunning graphics and quality sound.

Article / The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster

Interesting design-take on the whole 2012 debacle on Design Observer. "The logo is an example of the sort of design you get when politicos and business people try to be hip. What we’ve ended up with is a logo commissioned by middle-class suburbanites who do ‘gardening in polo shirts.’ In other words, it’s a laughable attempt at ‘cutting edge’ design."

Revolting Logo Causes Revolt

Who says people don't care about brands. I haven't seen anything like this kind of reaction since the BT rehash in the 80's. I just cant see what Olins was trying to achieve, can anybody help me unravel the mystery? I'm sure Creative Review and others will be dissecting it. I don't believe it will go away either knowing the English press.

COLORIA - Colour names

I use this site for when i can't think of a good colour name.

http://www.coloria.net/bonus/colornames.htm

Website / Radio 1 Musiccubes

The Radio 1 Musiccubes website has been around for a year or so now. Put simply, a user creates a 'tower' of their favourite music genres, with everything from Hip Hop to global beats. The tower created directs them to radio programmes dedicated to their chosen sounds. The nice twist on this is the ability to paste the 'towers' into blogs - pretty cool idea.

According to Creative Review, the site has been a huge success with over 30 000 Musiccube towers built.

Website / Newsvine relaunch

Newsvine has been completely relaunched with a whole suite of new features and functionality. The homepage now allows a user to completely alter the page layout and featured content with easy-to-use drag and drop functionality. Headlines and weather are localised, groups clarified, a nifty 'Live' ticker (actually cool for a ticker) included on the hoempage, news as pics as well as all the other existing good-gear.

Website / ETSY (intuitive shopping)

Not another online store... this one is different.

Although the craft nature of the products for sale may not interest most of us, the useful search tools may. At ETSY (no idea what it stands for), users are given the power to search by color with a color-picker, fabric watches or by geographic area with a map. The Flash enabled colour picker works by the cursor activating a visually rich colour grid of bubbles that link to colour categorised products for sale on the site - fast to load and nice functionality.

Article / Helvetica turns 50

The Helvetica font is celebrating its 50th birthday. You've probably seen it a thousand times today.

Website / Oz in 30 Seconds

Get Up, Action for Australia, the political lobby group have launched 'Oz in 30 Seconds', an online contest for filmakers to create television commercials that promote a better, fairer and more progressive Australia. Winning ads will be aired on commercial television and online (YouTube etc) in the lead-up to this years federal election.

From the site: In 30 seconds, show us a slice of your vision: perhaps it's a call to action on an issue close to your heart; or maybe an idea that brings us closer to the Australia you want to live in; or your take on a major policy or event, rather than the spin you've been fed.

The concept is based on 'Bush in 30 Seconds' which ran in 2003 and generated over 1000 submissions and 2.9 million ratings from viewers.

Check it out at: Oz in 30 Seconds

Website / Lonley Planet TV

LP have launched Lonely Planet TV allowing people to share their video experiences from around the globe. The site offers similar functionality to YouTube and plans to purchase the best content available for broadcasting and commission filmakers based on their submissions.

Great idea destined to be as popular as their Thorn Tree and Blue List offerings.

Opinion / Posting icons

The proliferation of blogs and UGC sites has seen the explosion of icons at the footer of pages/articles/comments. Seems to me that this will hit a critical mass at some stage soon with only the fittest surviving.

Website / Super Pitch

Clever and amusing game (viral piece) targeted at the Ad industry full of in-jokes and character stereotyping (agency and client sides). The game puts you in charge of creating a presentation to one of three fictional clients. Take the Super Pitch challenge and see if you've got the talent to land the deal.

My only criticism is the amount of time-investement required to get the pitch rolling. From a brand point-of-view, Magnecote seems to be well represented. I'd be interested to know how the campaign performed. The game was developed by Hadrian's Wall in chicago.

http://www.magnecote.com/superpitch/

Website / The Cool Hunter

I love this site - http://www.thecoolhunter.com.au/. Have lists of cool, design, lifestyle, travel, music, books, gadgets, art, fashion, bars, clubs, shows, street, food/dining, house and transport sites and snippets delivered to you as a blog. Very addictive.

Photoshop / Brushes - 22 PIXELS: By Artists for Artists

Huge resource site with textures, renders, brushes, fonts and plugins.

Motion / Nice flash experiment

Simple experiment / nice idea - well executed / check it out

Photoshop / CS3 Review

The much anticipated, Intel centric, CS3 has arrived. This review is pretty exhaustive and worth a read if you're interested: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/photoshop-cs3.ars/1

11th Annual Webby Awards Nominees & Winners

Some nice stuff included this year - a few Aussie-built (from Soap, Deepend and Carat) sites as well.
Webby Honorees, Nominees and Winners truly represent the best of the Web. They are but a small percentage of total entries and have been chosen by members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences based on a number of creative and functional criteria. See the list

Another colour tool - Colourblender.com

Another nice colour reference tool - color matching and palette design
http://www.colorblender.com

How 'Get The Glass' was built

Interesting process that first dealt with 3D and then moved to modelling and photography for better results. They also show some testing for pieces such as the dice and water. Visit the site

Pleix Films

Very very cool and creative music videos.
Be sure to check out the 'BIRDS' vid taken at super fast shutter speed.

http://pleix.net/films.html

Next generation site

This is SUPERB! Very well thought out and executed. I'll be interested to hear Christian's views of how it was all done. Very "Invincibles" but to achieve this on the web and to get a client to fund it is a real piece of work.

http://www.gettheglass.com/

[V] Channel

Is Nice!!

http://channelv.com.au/V/

Two Thousand

Two Thousand is "a weekly snapshot of sub-cultural Sydney"

Article / BigPond's fantasy island revealed (SMH)

"Telstra BigPond throws open the doors to its island playground within the 3-D online world of Second Life.

It becomes the first major Australian corporation to create a presence there, following a stampede of international companies who have started to use Second Life as a promotional and commercial tool." > more