Interactive HTML5 Music Video from OK Go and Google.
The boys from OK Go have only gone and done it again! This time teaming up with Philobolus and Google for their new interactive music video that showcases web technology HTML5.
Check out this ace experience for yourself here (use Google Chrome). Simply enter a message of your choice, and watch the band & dance troupe dance out your message via a series of browser windows. Very nice!
Google are fast becoming a dab hand at producing HTML5-flavoured videos. Last summer, Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin came out with “The Wilderness Downtown” (my personal fave) an HTML5 experience created for the Arcade Fire’s album. It is linked with Google street map and a Postcode of your choice to create a truly personalised experience.
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Design Inspiration – Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin is this weeks design inspiration. He is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies. His work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology.
The Sheep Market.com is a quirky data collection of 10,000 sheep by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Koblin then herded the sheep together to form an interactive online archive that is a bit of good old fun.
Aaron’s best know work is most probably Flight Patterns – Data from the U.S. Federal aviation administration processed to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density.
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Our Choice: Interactive Infographic book for ipad
Mike Matas co-founder of Push Pop Press introduces Our Choice, the new ebook by Al Gore that includes infographics and data visualisations that readers can physically interact with. Our Choice brings global warming data to life.
“Al Gore’s Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming.
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Make & store your own Infographics with Visual.ly
If you’re into infographics, you’ll love Visual.ly, a place to find and make data visualisations with all kinds of web based data.
The website aims to be a library for graphically organised information on the web, as well as a community for designers, researchers, and everyday web users.
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Future Everything Conference 2011
“If you don’t design the future, someone else will”
The Future Everything conference this year was excellent. The conference focused on the latest developments in creative and digital technologies, and presented provocative and inspiring ideas from a variety of speakers.
Here are the highlights from my personal favourites…..
Why do geeks go camping? – by Sue Thomas
“Nature and Cyberspace brings together a complex legacy of thinking and writing about the natural world with contemporary views of computers and the internet drawn from texts, personal interviews, surveys, and of course the web itself. The result is a narrative of the many ways in which people from different countries and cultures use their experiences of nature to situate and comprehend their experiences of cyberspace.”
The Evolution of Web Design
Web design has come a long way since the very first website published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. This wonderful info graphic by KissMetrics takes you on a journey from the very beginning all the way up to present day. It presents the tremendous progress design has made on the world wide web over the last 20 years.
Can you remember when scrolling text was the hight of technology? or when Flash took over the web?
Click here to take a peek and have a good old reminisce.
Top 5 Web Related Design Blogs….
I don’t know about anyone else, but my RSS news feeder is close to meltdown at the moment due to the sheer volume of design blogs I subscribe to. Blogs are a great way to keep on top of industry news and current trends. However, its oh so easy to get carried away and end up with over 100 blog posts to get through a day. So to make things a bit easier for anyone thinking of subscribing, I’ve complied a list of my very favourite blogs (other than Alt. ofcourse) to follow. Enjoy!
#1 Mashable – is an amazing source for news in social & digital media, technology, and all things ‘web’. Keep an eye on this for breaking web news, trend analysis, and website reviews.
#2 Creative Boom – this online magazine is also a free network community which aims to inspire and support creative industries across the UK. It is split into regions which is great as It keeps me up to date with news and events specific to Manchester and the North West.
#3 Think Vitamin - is a great resource for web professionals, as well as a great insight for beginners. It aims to keep readers up to date on the most useful web topics of the day as well as delivering inspiring links and images.
#4 A List Apart – “For people who make websites” A list apart is a magazine which explores design, development, and the meaning of web content. Topics include “code”, “design”, “content”, “process”, and “user science” to name a few. This blog has something for everyone.
#5 BBC Click – is a short weekly broadcast aired across the BBC News channel. Its main focus is on developments in Technology. To save you from having to stay glued to BBC News 24/7 they post every episode on their blog to watch when it suits you. Thanks BBC!
Donald Norman – Emotional Design
The book Emotional Design (why we Love or Hate Everyday things) by Donald Norman, is certainly worth a read. The fundamental idea that Norman asserts in this book is that attractive products work better. He believes that the emotional side of design may be more crucial to a products success than its practicality. He suggest that beautiful products make people feel good, which in turn puts people in a open frame of mind to be creative and find solutions to the problems they face. Could this theory apply to modern web and digital design?
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Bjork Biophilia- comes to Manchester
I was massively excited today to find out that Bjork will be coming to this years Manchester International Festival, for the world premier of her Biophilia live tour. It promises to be a multimedia experience involving music, apps, the internet, installations and live shows. The performance will question “where do music, nature and technology meet?” and explore how sound works in nature, from planetary systems to atomic structure.
She will be here for 3 weeks, performing 6 intimate shows between 30th June to 16th July. Needless to say I’ve snapped up a ticket pronto, so I look forward to experiencing whatever digital delights she may bring along with her. For more information or to grab yourself a ticket click here.
Watch this space for a full review after the event…..I can’t wait!
Paul Rouke – “Usability and UX 101″
Paul Rouke is a usability professional, who has his own Manchester based usability and web development agency ,PRWD. Paul has over 10 year experience in user centred design working with clients such as Royal Mail, Speedo and British Gas to develop their websites.
Today I attended a talk at the MMU Business School where Paul Rouke introduced his thoughts around usability and user experience and shared tips and best practice that can be used when working on web projects. The talk was specifically aimed at e-commerce sites.
Paul discussed three key ways to measure usability and user experience.
Effectiveness- can the user reach their goals?
Efficiency- how fast can the user achieve them?
Satisfaction- was it a good/bad experience?
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Recorders – Manchester Art Gallery
If your going to be in Manchester between now and 31Jan 2011, the Manchester Art Gallery is certainly worth a visit.
Recorders is a new exhibition by electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, which is currently at the gallery. The artwork is responsive to the actions of the people around them, and is dependant on the participation of the visitors to exist and evolve. What’s great about this exhibition is that it doesn’t feel like your average experience in a gallery.
“In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.” – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
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Andy Clarke: Hardboiled Web Design
“Andy Clarke is a King Midas of CSS-powered creativity. And this book may be his greatest gold classic yet. If you’re among the restless, enlightened and daring few who embrace the future of web design, brother slash sister, has Andy got a book for you!” - Jeffrey Zeldman in Hardboiled Web Design
Today I attended a talk where Andy Clarke introduced his new book and concept behind hardboiled web design. The book highlights methods of implementing CSS3 into our designs NOW, even though CSS3 is not yet web standards, rather than holding back and painfully waiting for this to happen. CSS3 is already fully supported in the web browser Safari, and the majority of features are supported in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. The least support lies in Internet Explorer where no features what so ever are supported in IE 6,7 or 8 and the bare minimum supported in IE9. Andy suggests that most web designers and clients currently are too hung up on sites looking the same across all browsers that they aren’t designing to their full potential. They design for the least capable devices first then add extra features on top as an almost after thought for more advanced devices.
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Tactile Touch Screen Technology for the Blind
“Touchscreen devices have revolutionised mobile communication, but without the actual physical keys of normal phones, they have created a multitude of problems for blind and vision-impaired people.” BBC Click
Accessibility in web design is about making sure a website is accessible to all users regardless of any physical disability or the way in which they use the internet. The introduction of smart phones and their touch screen interface has thrown a few spanners in the works to say the least, in particular for those who are visually impaired or blind. With no physical buttons to locate using touch, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to navigate through the screens using some phones original features alone. Its all just one large smooth shiny surface. There are currently clear tactile over lays available to clip over the screen to help ease this issue of accessibility and help users hit the buttons more accurately, mainly for use when texting, however this is simply not enough for some users. iphone boast the best built in solution with apple’s voice over feature which will talk you through the lay out on the screen so you can familiarise yourself with where the buttons are located using touch and sound. Apps are also available to download but at a heafty price, for example ‘talks’ app for nokia phones will cost around $270, ouch!
However, there is good news!! The future for touch screen accessibility is really exciting. Disney research labs in pittsburgh have developed TelsaTouch which is a new tactile technology which allows the user to experience a broad range of tactile sensations on touch screens. It uses electrovibration methods which can vary the amount of electrostatic friction between the fingers and the touch screen, which allows users to feel different textures. Amazing stuff!
Thats about as much as my brain can comprehend, so for more information follow the this link……
FutureEverything: Drew Hemment
FutureEverything is an arts, music and forward thinking festival which hits the city of Manchester each year. Today I attended a talk at the BBC by the founder of FutureEverything – “Drew Hemment: The best way to predict the future is to invent it”
I was excited to hear that they are interested in new ways of thinking about and visualising data, and also like to explore new ways of interacting with and connecting with people in different cities. Since information and interactivity are the types of area I’m interested in exploring during my post grad studies, I would definately like to discuss my work with them once a project is underway. Good news is they seem really eager to allow people to become involved in what they’re doing and welcome innovation and new ideas. Awesome!
Digital Nostalgia
Absolutely loving this stunning information graphics – illustrating the developments in disk storage space from the 1980s to current times. The circular representation of time works brilliantly and enables the reader to see large amounts of information in a compact space which is easily digestible by the eye. Beautiful
Check out more in the digital nostalgia series and other work by Paul Butt at Behance Network
Post No.1 – welcome
Hello and welcome to the first of many blog posts capturing my thoughts, inspirations, ideas and encounters during my post graduate studies.
Enjoy!