Noisy Decent Graphics

Danny MacAskill: Way Back Home

Amazing tricks, but also a stunningly beautiful video.

 

Some stuff for a Friday

It's World Toilet day. Or something. Domestos have done a thing where you can 'track your flush'. It's good. But what I really like is this little bit of design.

Telling you how many emails you will receive, that's smart. And nice.

This site highlights extraordinary moments from Google StreetMap.

Actually, it's ordinary moments that look extra ordinary when singled out. Loads of mooning and fights and stuff, but the ones of zoos are mental.

 

This is pretty old, but - the world's biggest crossword.

 

And lastly. Rainbow.

 

Have a great weekend.

 

DEXTR – A big screen Twitter client

We shipped a thing yesterday. Dextr, twitter for your second screen. Or maybe just massive Twitter. However you want to look at it is fine.

I love it. It's fab. Playing around with all these new screens is fun.

Tom has written about it in more depth over here.

I love this sofa

Perfect example of the designer enhancing existing behaviour.

More details on DesignBoom.

 

The History of The Colour Wheel

Wonderful post about the history of the colour wheel. Via Jen.

 

Single Input Login Form

I think this is a good idea from Amrinder (read the full story here).

I spoke to Iain today and he thinks it's worth trying too.

So let's try it.

I'm going to try and persuade Engineering tomorrow. Wish me luck.

 

Advertising matters

This is a good post for a Friday.

A correspondent has sent this in. Brilliant, isn't it? Advertising matters. Oh Lord, I don't know where to start.

Much like Doddsy's famous blog you can read that different ways depending on the emphasis. There's the simple - advertising matters - and to lots of people it does. There's the rather old fashioned sounding - advertising matters. And then there's the factual - advertising matters. You know anti-matter, grey matter etc.

All that fun! And we haven't even started on the typography.

Have a great weekend.

 

Le Book

Next Thursday I'll be speaking at Le Book. Talking about Nike Grid with Adam from Nike. We're on at 10.30am and we'll be moderated by the legendary Ben Hammersly.

On the same bill is Paul from Anomoly and Cheryl from Converse too. Should be a good morning.

It's held at The Lindley Hall, Elverton Street, SW1.

Not that forward anymore

Don't forget this in two weeks time. Tickets etc here.

Spell check needed

Seeing as lots of you have been asking

You can see all the Nike Grid data viz films here. We're making one film every day for two weeks from the game data. And we're taking today's data and putting it into a film which will run on Channel 4 as 12:05 tomorrow.

That's pretty cool I reckon.

 

XX??

Last year I kept seeing X's all over town. With your help we worked out it was promotion for the (now Mercury Prize winning) band The XX.

But what about these? Looks like exactly the same font. Lots of people tell me it's not The XX, but I reckon it is.

What do you think? Send me your reckons.

Maps, martinis etc

A bit more about the maps and stuff from Stamen, well worth a read.

Let us not forget two important things.

1. The recent presentation by Google of the bestest things on the internet had a slide that simply said "anything by Stamen".

2. The Rite Spot in San Francisco make an awesome martini.

 

Beware the awards hunter

Talking of w+k, I remember seeing this box of old awards there about a year ago. Look what they turned it into.

 

It's called Beware The Awards Hunter.

Awesome

By antimega

Nike Grid 2

The second Nike Grid started last night and runs for two weeks.

You may remember I was Creative Director on the first one with w+k, I thought I'd written about it on here, but I can't find the post. To save time there's a quick overview written by Doug E Fresh. The second one is bigger and bolder and has been aided by Dan Hon joining the team at w+k. So we've plundered his gamification skillz to make the gameplay better and to allow new ways of playing such as team play.

We haven't started from scratch with the look and feel. We built a really strong identity last time and we were keen to evolve that and to make something that still feels like it could go further for Grid 3 and grid 4 (should they happen etc). Last time we kept it to one colour plus black and white, this time we've added more colours, partly to make it feel bigger, partly to help with visualising team play.

 

Also new this time is the involvement of Stamen. They have worked with us to created a map, using Open Street Map and some awesome data viz stuff which will go live throughout the game. Here's the first of several videos we'll be using to tell different stories throughout the game.

We're using Facebook as a way of logging in, I don't have much to add to this expect that it reinforces my increasing affection for Facebook. I'm starting from a low base, but Facebook increasingly is The Internet for people and the fact that it lets 'them' do all the stuff 'we' do on Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare in one place is a Good Thing. OK, maybe not a Good Thing, but a Thing.

This project seems to be a lovely mix of several things that feel very current. It's a game, but it's not just a game bolted on to a brand. The game is integral to the brands heritage - running. It's got lots of Post Digital thinking, we're not using tech for the sake of it, we're using it to amplify the experience. It utilises Magnificent Bits Of Infrastructure that are lying around (I've worked on another project that does that too, heh) this time in the form of phoneboxes.

It would be wrong of me to talk about stats this early into the game, but as with last time the depth of engagement people have with this is insane.

And there's lots of interesting stuff happening on Twitter and Facebook.

As ever, I'm a very small part of a big team of talented, dedicated people working night and day to pull this off. And not just at w+k, at Nike, AKQA and MindShare.

As I said, Nike Grid is on for two weeks and started yesterday. So there's still time to sign up and get running.

 

Double barrelled trends

 

This is a screen grab of what's trending on Twitter in the UK right now. Does anyone know how Twitter work our what's a two word trend and what's a one word trend?

For example, Ian Holloway is trending because of his superb rant about Wayne Rooney (watch it, it's hilarious). But why isn't that listed as Ian AND Holloway? Presumably because that's pretty simple to work out that the words are trending togetehr.

So how do we explain Bilbo AND Baggins trending separately?

Someone? I've always wondered.

BIMA nomination

Newspaper Club has been nominated for a British Interactive Marketing Award which is fantastic news. We're in the Media & Entertainment category. Presuably more for the entertainment than the media.

Photo from   jørngeorg 

In other Newspaper Club news we've announced smaller colour runs and you can now print as many pages as you like from 4 to 64 as long as it's a multiple of 4. That's a pretty big deal. You can now print 300 copies of a 4 page full colour newspaper for just £1.46 a copy. There's a full list of prices here.

Photo from By m8roberto

And a chap called Roberto has made a lovely newspaper full of patterns made using processing.

Here ends this short annoucement.

I ran here today

Gorgeous stuff from over here.

 

T-mobile / Orange ads

I like this. The ads aren't amazing, but the way they run them together is nice.