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Vodafone puts 28,800 Facebook members in 1 car
Vodafone has rolled out an interesting use of Facebook in the Netherlands called Facebook vs Hamilton where they are challenging F1 champion Lewis Hamilton to a race on September 13th against 28.800 Facebook users who are competing against him in a virtual car. It is a timed race to see which is faster – downloading the profile photos 28,800 facebook members or Hamilton driving around a 2.7km track in his Mercedes F1 race car.
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Cloudy with a chance of music videos
Singer/song-writer Lissie has release a new music video on her web site that is controlled by the current weather conditions in your location. When you get to her site it will determine your current position or you can choose yourself and the background of the video will change according to the current weather outside. If you select a new location while the video is playing a TV weatherman will provide a new forecast as an intermission while the video transitions to the new location’s weather. I think creating this type of unique digital experience is a smart investment for artists trying to break into the main stream media consciousness and you only have to look at OK GO’s YouTube sensation ‘Here It Goes Again’ to see the possibilities.
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Great mobile app development tools
We all don’t have the luxury of a dedicated mobile development team so you need to find tools that will let you quickly and easily prototype your ideas and then actually get them built and posted. Over the past 6 months I have found two tools that can really help you out as you try to bring your grand mobile vision to life with a skeleton crew and a phantom budget.
Briefs
When I design for mobile, especially iPhone, I am a fiend for testing and tweaking my designs based on workable prototypes. The challenge for me has been that I just don’t have the time to learn all the features of Apple’s developers kit to be able to sit and work through my prototypes on my own which meant I had to do it in Flash and test it on my screen or put static comps on my phone. Neither solution was close to idea since the usability wasn’t right when I did it on computer and comps on my phone were in the right environment but had no interaction. Then I found Briefs which is a toolkit for packaging your mobile concepts into prototypes that run live on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
A brief is a single binary XML file that contains the structure and layout of your concept. All resources, including image data are bundled inside of a single .brieflist document. The structure of a brief is broken down into scenes and actors. Using a hierarchy of these objects, one can define an entire application flow and position controls into a designed layout. Right now you create the app by downloading their Starter Kit and doing some extremely simple coding where you define the stages, the graphic location and the position of any buttons. There will be a version in the App Store soon.
I have used Briefs a lot and it has been an essential part of my design process as it allows me to test user experience models and designs on anything from pencil sketches to full blown designs. If you are designing for the iPhone I would high recommend investing the minimal time it takes to get up to speed on it.
Mobile Roadie
Mobile Roadie is an interesting tool is a Web based app development framework that gives you all the tools to create and maintain iPhone and Android apps. Depending on your needs you can get Core, Plus or Pro packages with each tier adding more controls and options with the Pro package giving you almost complete creative freedom to create an app that looks exactly the way you want it to. Since it is a mobile framework the content is downloaded into the app which isn’t the standard experience but it does give you the flexibility to update the structure and content without having to push a whole new app that the use will have to download an update for. t is a really good solution for any designer, agency or company that doesn’t have the budget to hire an entire mobile development team but needs to create a mobile app presence.
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Dollar Rede$ign Project
I came across the Dollar Rede$ign Project today which is an interesting exercise by a number of artists to look at how to redesign the US Dollar. I especially liked the work of San Francisco based design studio Dowling | Duncan who made a number of interesting changes including using different colors for different bills, keeping the width of the bills the same but varying the height to make it easier to identify how much money you have and changing the orientation to a vertical format which the way the majority of people hand over their money. They also chose imagery for each note that directly related to it’s value so the $1 is the first African American president, the $5 is the five biggest native American tribes and the $10 is the bill of rights. They then overprinted the imagery with infographics and pattens relating to that particular subject matter. You can vote for your favorite between now and September 30th when the poll closes and a winner and two runners up will be named.
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Yours truly in the latest Adobe Success Story
I’m happy to announce that some of the work my team and I have been doing is featured in the latest Adobe Customer Success Story for CS5 that went live yesterday. Click here to watch the video now.
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Typeface Design 101 @ Cooper
I am a confessed typography hound so when The Cooper Union announced today that they will be offering a pioneering certificate program in typeface design in conjunction with the Type Directors Club (TDC) I paid attention. Students will have the chance to get an in-depth foundation of typography through creating their own typefaces as well as getting a broader understanding through lectures, discussions and research. That will then be supplemented with electives such as pen and brush lettering, Python programming and non-Latin alphabets. The program is divided into three terms over one calendar year. Applicants to the program are required to have an undergraduate degree or professional experience in graphic design, typography or other related fields. If you are interested the fall term (October 4-December 7, 2010) submission deadline is August 31, 2010 so click here for more details.
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The visual resume
I have continued to tinker with my idea of creating a new format for designer’s resume that leaves boring Word files behind for more color and visual layout. I recently updated the visual version of my resume with a new more compact and informative layout that lays out my whole career on one page. If you have any thoughts let me hear then and if your have your own version I would love to see it.
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A Dribbble of creative
I found Dribbble.com today which is an interesting spin on the creative portal where artists can show off their work. The difference here is that you only share a sneak peeks of your work as small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on. Membership in the site is entirely driven by our users so all members of Dribbble have been drafted (invited) by other members.
The screenshots or “shots” are organized by tags but there is no real cohesive navigation to help you sort through all the work. Once you find a piece that looks interesting you can click on it for a slight larger version that you can like, Tweet or Rebound which is a shot in reply to another shot. But for me this site has a huge miss in that there is no way to get real feedback on such a small screenshot and I couldn’t find any way to track the progress of the work. How do I know when it is done? Where can I see it? How is this site anything but a tease for small windows of partial inspiration? Maybe all of this is hidden away only for members but it felt me scratching my head. I found a few artists who were smart to see this problem and posted links to the final work in the comments but this seemed to be rare. I am working to get an invitation to try out everything on the site but check it out and see if these little glimpses do anything for you.
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Flipboard: The iPad’s social media powered magazine
Thanks to my job I have spent some time over the past few weeks with a fully loaded iPad which has been enlightening to have the chance to experiment with it and confirm my feelings about how useful it would be for me. Putting my feeling about Apple’s application creation and approval process aside I can see it’s potential but in it’s current form with the current portfolio of applications I still feel that it’s the spork of computing.
To be fair, the one thing I consistently liked about it was the size of the device useful on my train ride into New York City because the seats are like an airplane and too close together to let you open your laptop comfortably. I could surf the parts of the Internet that worked on it but it didn’t come close to being able to become a light weight replacement for my laptop. I was frustrated that I was never able to do any real work on the thing aside from starting to write a few blog posts through the WordPress application.
I did experiment and try out a lot of applications and was really disappointed to see how many of them like ABC News, Gilt and Wired were just iPhone applications with new layouts or repurposing print content with a little interaction sprinkled in. The one application I was really impressed with was Flipboard and you may recognize the development crew from the mobile sales tool called Square (new video here). The application is only for iPad and takes your data from Facebook and friend’s Twitter photos and links to create your own personalized, social media powered magazine. I love the concept because each ‘edition’ of the Flipboard application is unique based on the fact that every person is going to have a unique collection of friends. Should you have boring friends there are also a few collections on various topics that Flipboard has put together similar to what you would find in an application like Cool Hunting. So in the end this new take on the magazine that is powered by dynamic media is really interesting and starts to pay off on the potential of the iPad. I only hope more publications bring this kind of innovative thinking to their digital versions and applications.
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Kmart In-store Gaming Reviews
In an effort to make the Kmart brand more relevant to a wider and younger audience they have decided launch a new initiative focusing on the gaming community. The brand is turning to gamers to post game reviews on MyKmart.com and snippets of the best ones will find their way to actual store shelves next to the games themselves. The space on the shelf label is limited so you have to treat the review almost like a Twitter post and they ask that it is helpful, constructive, well-written and will keep in mind a broad audience beyond diehard gamers. It is an interesting attempt to extend community building beyond the digital space but with the huge amount of existing gaming communities I think this will drive marginal game sales among existing customers instead of shifting new consumers to shop at Kmart.
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