Looking Into the Past is a Flickr pool that lays two picture of the same location, but from different times, over each other. It’s a fun and creative way to see how scenery has changed over time. You can see how structures have been built, modified and demolished.
Jasonepowel, the group admin, has this note about the group: This group is for images you make where some part of a modern day scene is overlapped by an old photograph. For example, you hold up an old photo so that you can see its place in the modern context.
I recently read an article in UX Magazine of all places, questioning the need for presenting wireframes to clients. This article seems to take the stance that wireframes are the blue-print for visual designs and can have negative repercussions when they are discussed with the client.
The author states that: [Wireframes] provide guidance for the rest of the design process …for the designer. They can, however, be problematic or useless for the client and in some cases they’re simply a waste of time…..Put another way, many designers generate and present wireframes to clients not because they know it’s a good idea in a specific case, but because they’ve seen or heard of others doing so and they therefore think they’re supposed to as well.
In my professional experience wireframes should not be treated as blueprints for designs. Project managers or project leads that treat wireframes like this will get uninspired, over engineered designs.
Wireframes are a granular way for developers to see the functionality and interactions that need to be developed. If they have any questions, they should be able to refer to an annotated wire frame to get their answer. Wireframes are crucial to designers, to educate us to what needs to be on the page but even more crucial to the developers that are building the page.
From a visual standpoint, wireframes are just a guide. As I design a site I ask myself questions, “Does this have to be a traditional tab or could it be a pill-slider? Could this text be represented by an icon? ”
The wireframes serve my purpose as a list of what has to be on the page and give me contextual hierarchy. The interpretation of what is on the page is (usually) left open to the designer. When it comes time to go through a review process, I try to show an early take on the design next to the related wireframe. This educates the client to that fact that there is still a design process remaining after the wireframes are finished. They can see, and approve, a wireframe and then see the evolution of that wire into design. They realize that wireframes are not visual design.
Educating your client about the process is cricual to getting successful results and a happy client. The article is interesting mostly because of the conversations that it sparked within the user comments: http://www.uxmag.com/design/where-wireframes-are-concerned.
Artist Ross Racine is an artist who does freehand drawings of fictional, planned communities from an aerial perspective. I like his work because all of the pieces are photo-real yet contain patterns and an level of symmetry that wouldn’t be found in the real world.
I am reminded of various data visualization techniques when I see Racine’s execution of the work and think about each item being a household with living, breathing families.
Investigating the relation between design and actual lived experience, the works subvert the apparent rationality of urban design, exposing conflicts that lie beneath the surface. These digital drawings are a comment on the fears as well as the dreams of suburban culture.
You can see more of his work and get info about the artist here.
I just bolted up out of my office chair and ran 6 blocks, down crowded Manhattan streets, to a store I rarely go to for a brand whose products I’ve never owned. I did this all because a recent online campaign and if that is not successful marketing, then I’m not sure what is.
Last week Burton Snowboards launched an interesting social campaign. For 10 days straight they will broadcast 24 hours a day from their Vermont headquarters. The hook is that randomly, over the web-cast, they will be giving away thousands of dollars worth of prizes.
Come for the webcast, but stay for the prizes. Giveaways will range from t-shirts and stickers to custom Series 13 boards, season passes, shopping sprees, and special trips—this is one webcast that you won’t want to miss.
From prizes, team interviews, and haircuts, to challenges ranging from sending faxes and searching your local shop for hidden treasure, the entire webcast is sure to insight a riot. The exact details concerning size and scale of giveaways and promotions are still secret at this point, but all clues lead to big doings.
What I find successful about this marketing campaign is the level of activity that the consumers are participating in. I found out about it because my friend, psychosaif had been following them on twitter for the past 3 days. The moment they announced the location of the NYC giveaway he instant messaged me and told me what to do and where to go. After running to the store (and finding out I was the 2nd person) I got back to the office and looked them up on twitter.
Burton is maintaining conversations with consumer all across the US/CA in real time. Winners of the contests are interviewed via the web cam and broadcast to all of the viewers. Chat rooms, available on their website, are full of consumers talking about the interviews and begging for clues to the next giveaway. The dedication of their fan-base is astounding. Whatever the total cost of the giveaways, having your target audience be glued to your website 24/7 and still remain captivated is priceless.
Wooster Collective is always a huge source of inspiration for me. While my personal tastes tend to steer away from high concept street art, there are always gems to be found. One such gem is this post about the evolution of graffiti on a wall outside the home of Serge Gainsbourg.
Using After Effects and Lightwave 3D, animator Arnaud Jourdain composited thousands of photos taken over a 5 year period into a beautiful animation showcasing the evolution of the art on the wall over time.
The moment I saw this piece I was reminded of another similar undertaking, Graffiti Archeology, a project of Cassidy Curtis that also attempts to capture the evolution of graffiti. Curtis describes his project as:
Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present.
While both of these projects share a similar concept, they are unique in execution and purpose. Jourdain’s execution is his artistic interpretation of the wall. His camera movements and angles do not showcase each individual art piece in the way that Curtis does. Graffiti Archeology is more of an academic approach to cataloging the art pieces, though his shapes and cropping are very graffiti inspired (especially for the 90s!). I think that using motion, rather than clicking through images creates a more seamless experience of time lapse, but the dramatic camera movements adds personality to the artwork that might not have been there previously.
Both projects are fantastic ideas and are definitely worth checking out.
I recently stumbled upon the work of Rachell Sumpter and instantly wanted more.
Her mastery of color, detail and imagery are stunning and don’t remind me of anyone else – a rarity whenever I am first introduced to an artist. While her website gives no information about herself or her work, her paintings seem to depict technicolor, Native American, dreamlike experiences.
ACNE Digital recently teamed up with Lowe Brindfor to launch SAAB’s new Change Perspective campaign. The campaign so far consists of a TV spot and a corresponding website.
In this truly integrated production we’ve once again collaborated very closely with ACNE Film and delivered a slick TVC as well as an interactive website. The idea is to work with a set of symbols used by Saab for years and to show how Saab try to to look at things from a different perspective. It’s basically all branding and no product where curiosity is raised in the TVC and answers given on the website.
What I like most about the web experience is that the all of the usage of 3D, flash, and video has a purpose. Rather than follow the gratuitous usage of interactivity trend that most microsites follow, it seems intelligent and fun here. Instead of just cool transitions between sections, 3D and video is used here to tell a story.
Inside each section of the site, the user gets to drive through the space from a new, different perspective. The story does not progress until the user initiates the next step. This interactive and clever way to reveal the story makes for a memorable, fun experience that resonates with the user.
Browsing through the site users can play around with different toys, take part in quizzes, and even breakout the audio to listen in a jukebox form. Overall it’s a fun, playful site that enforces the message that SAAB has a different perspective on things. Surprising educational and simple.
You can check out the online experience for yourself here.
Last week was a whirlwind of late nights, traveling, and tech conferences for me. I attended both Adobe MAX in L.A. and Yahoo’s Hack Day developer conference in NYC in the same week.
This was my first year attending these conferences, so I didn’t know what exactly to expect but had a great time at both.
Adobe MAX was considerably more developer focused than I had anticipated, but there was still lots of cool emerging technology and creative centered talks to keep my attention. While many of the talks I attended devolved into presenters typing actionscript projected onto a wall, several talks stood out as being inspirational, insightful and educational.
Lee Brimelow gave a great talk about augmented reality and showed several examples of real world applications. Joshua Davis gave a very inspiring presentation about the evolution of his work, his process (Tinker, tinker, and more tinker) and his unfortunate encounters with print shops. I’m pretty sure everyone involved left that talk eager to go experiment on their own.
Some other highlights for me were being introduced to the Mega Phone platform, getting a behind the scenes of the new Guiter Hero website, gtting a glimpse of Photoshop’s content aware technology and of course, Roundarch’s very own talks surround the Tesla model S.
The MAX Bash, watching the sneaks and meeting all sorts of cool, intelligent people are what really made this conference worthwhile.
The Yahoo Hackday experience was equally developer focused, but had a more grass roots flavor to it. After a day of talks promoting the latest Yahoo! technologies(which I was unable to attend), sessions broke and teams were organized. Each team had roughly 17 hours to brainstorm, build, design and test their “hack”. The definition of what a hack is and what technology or hardware it uses was up for creative interpretation.
I partnered up with Akeem to work on developing an interactive restaurant menu. While more time to work on our idea would it been appreciated, it was great to work under the gun (voluntarily for a change) and see what other teams came up with. While our idea attracted a bit of media attention, in the end we got beat out by some other really great ideas. The overall winner of the competition was Insider Trades by team Queens Law. They describe their motivation below:
Insider trading of stocks is very valuable information. Knowing which executives are selling and buying is a very useful indicator for the millions of people who are casual investors.
For a list of all of the winner, and a recap of the competition, click here
Overall, last week was super fun and jam-packed. I had met lots of cool, interesting folks and learned lots at both conference. I’m already looking forward to next year.
I’ve been reading lately about all of the cool inventions coming out of Maker Faire Africa, a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention at the AITI Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
This spin-off of the 2006 California conference is centered around do-it-yourself innovation. What makes this year’s conference so interesting is that it focuses on the indigenous populations of Africa. Instead of the Rube Goldberg-esque mousetrap or the Diet Coke & Mentos Fountain of previous years, this year’s inventions include solar-powered lamps and contraptions to harness wind energy and make use of recycled and discarded materials.
This conference reminds me very much of an exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The exhibit, Design for the other 90% highlights advances in design and technology that help the world’s poor. The exhibit showcases some products and inventions that it proposes are the beginning of a design revolution:
“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
The exhibit is centered around the topics of Health, Shelter, Water, Education, Energy and Transport. Many of the same problems that the participants of Maker Faire Africa has sought out to solve.
Both the exhibit and the conference are introducing new people (like me) to an area of design and technology that is often overlooked. I wonder how many of us designers are actually doing work that is as impactful as this. While we might describe some of our ideas and interfaces as innovative, if we are operating in the same arena as 90% of the world…how innovative is it really?
You can check out the Maker Faire Africa site and get more information here .
Platforms are the intermediaries that deliver products. Platforms cannot exist without products, and products need platforms to be put into context and to be delivered. As our modern consumer culture becomes even more social and connected, the benefits of being a platform become even more apparent.
The case study for this is of course the Apple App Store. While the iPhone device itself is already impressive the platform that the app store allows the iPhone become is what makes this product so successful. According to the latest data from iSmashPhone, iPhone users spend at least 30 minutes a day using apps and their app market share is 40 times that of their closest competitor!
After seeing the success of the iPhone app store, numerous other phone companies jumped on the bandwagon and released their own. Companies such as Blackberry , Palm Pre, Google Android, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and Samsung have all tossed their hat into the app store arena.
What I find extremely fascinating is that this concept is extending beyond the reach of mobile devices. HP just launched a new printer that allows users to connect to the web and download apps to use on their printer. The printer touts applications for printing out directions, movie tickets, and cross word puzzles.
Here at Roundarch, we are working on some cool touch screen interfaces for a car, and the concept of an in-car app store has definitely been brought up. Even in your living room, Verzion has announced that it is bringing an app store and social media to it’s FiOS-TV.
While I’m both excited and eager to see products grow into platforms, I’m also anxious to see how thoroughly companies will adopt that philosophy. It seems that “app store” has become a buzzword now, similar in vein to “social media” and “viral”. These are words that marketing departments throw around all the time without fully understanding that they mean, or how these changes will affect the growth and foundation of their company.
The Apple iPhone isn’t just a phone, and I doubt Steve Jobs ever thought it would be. The app store was always a part on what the iPhone was. This isn’t a case of other companies playing catch-up with Apple. Rather, I’m more interested in seeing what the repercussions of haphazardly adding app stores, attempting to change their product into a platform, will be to these companies in the future.
