Something about this holding screen made us laugh and feel vaguely inspired at the same time. tumblr tone of voice is a-ok.
Tis the season to be jolly and as we approach December 25th, Float has cranked up the production of bespoke Christmas cards for our clients. One of our favourites this year was for Artis, the creative education company, who have a fantastic brand with which to be playful, creative and fun.
Check out their Christmas card. Turn the sound up!
Say wat?! this sounds like something from a William Gibson story but it is in fact happening today at the University of Illinois. “Smart Skin” is being developed that is applied to the the skin and provide computational power and communication potential.
“Already the researchers have shown that a prototype device, applied to the human throat, can distinguish simple speech on the basis of muscle movements when the wearer mouths the words without speaking aloud. They have also used electronic skin to control a video game.” Clive Cookson from the FT
I just got sucked into this Rutt-Etra-Izer app. It’s a contemporary implementation of the classic Rutt-Etra video synthesizer from 1972 and incredibly addictive.
“The RUTT/ETRA Video Synthesizer was one of the first commercially available computerized video animation systems. It employed proprietary analog computer technology to perform real time three dimensional processing of the video image.” source
The developer says “The demo allows you to drag and drop your own images, manipulate them and save the output. Images are generated by scanning the pixels of the input image from top to bottom, with scan-line separated by the ‘Line Separation’ amount. For each line generated, the z-position of the vertices is dependent on the brightness of the pixels.”
It’s open source and very cool. Have a play
Float lives at Great Western Studios which is awash with creative practitioners from all disciplines. This upcoming exhibition caught our eye. ”John Wild will present an interactive installation that explores the relationships between trauma, memory and architecture within the digital age.
A photograph of 10 Ruston Close, formally 10 Rillington Place, will be both projected within the gallery and simultaneously made accessible online. Each time the image is viewed, either online or within the space, a single pixel will be removed from the image. Over the period of the exhibition the image will decompose directly in response to the number of views it receives.
Loving this mesmerising music video by Cyriak for Hooray for Earth’s “True Loves”
This data visualisation from online schools surfaces a dashboard of stats to feed your curiosity for what’s happening right now as more people connect to the Internets.
“The Internet has changed the way we live—that’s obvious. But what we think people forget is how big and important the worldwide web really is. Do you know how much time people spend on the Internet every day? Do you keep track of how many times you tweeted last month? “
RIM have been working with RBS to create a short video insight into the app. We provided digital strategy, user experience and design on. There are a few cut-aways to the app. in use and it’s great to see its value being realised by the business. Check it out below or on the Inside BlackBerry business blog.
Enjoyed this twitter reader that takes the idea you’ve probably experienced..twitter overload. We once scribbled an an equation about the unfollow coefficient i.e. when someone tweets too much, they get axed. This app does a similar thing by visualising your tweet stream ranking your followers on frequency of tweets. “It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.”
We are super happy to launch the Artis website. It’s a site full of beautiful details and fun interactions that complement the energy and enthusiasm Artis bring to schools. Read the project detail and view the end result. We hope you like it.
I’m always copying a piece of text from one website to stick it into wikipedia or search, so was pleasantly surprised by this web service called aperture that appeared when i highlighted some text. It is a step on from those horrible, seemingly random linked tooltips that you find scattered on some webpages.
We love the work by Trafik, they have a wonderful take on interaction and design doing the difficult thing of simplicity perfectly, even if it is hugely complex behind the scenes. This interview, from what looks to be a decent inspiration resource site, has the founders talking about their work and process.
I particularly like this quote by Julien “We always began imagining interactive projects by saying, “People will interact like this…” But, in fact, they always do something completely different. So it’s always extremely interesting and exciting to create a brand new playing field built around rules that we define.” It’s something that we’ve found as well and can lead to whole new areas of experimentation.
The Sunday Times run their Rich List every year. Surprisingly I wasn’t on it but to hook in the common people they’ve got plugged into social and produced this rather nice Social List.
You connect to 4 arbitrary social networks; Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and FourSquare and then their machine does some number crunching to spit out a tasty infovis that charts your social standing.
The idea is reminiscent of Klout’s influence reporter and Avenue Empire, “The Social Media Exchange - buy and sell your friends and own anyone on the social web!” without the commerce aspect and more curtain twitchy in conception. The tech is worth a play with however as it is connecting up several API’s into a responsive UI and rendering dynamic charts on-the-fly (without the use of Flash).
Between our work partnering with startups and with plenty of aspiring startup ideas ourselves, we’ve had one eye on the scene in America for years. This video clip from the super switched on Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham is a view into the “Office Hours” sessions they hold with the startups they fund. It’s a good reminder of the essential questions you need to be asking yourself when working on a startup venture.
It doesn’t get going until about 6 mins in, so take the time and enjoy.
Fuller notes and commentary can be found on Tech Crunch
The mesquitta enigma is doing a good thing and cycling from lands end to john o grotes for charity. We sponsored a patch on his custom jersey. cycle tom. cycle like the wind.. check he makes it on his blog le-jog.
Being Adam & Joe fans this is still making our sides hurt. It’s hard to imagine a time when this isn’t funny. THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T BE LIVING HEREEE
you have to check out this part of google’s i/o keynote about the upcoming music experiment “3 dreams of black”. It’s the follow up to the arcade fire “wilderness downtown” using web GL and javascript courtesy of mr. doob’s 3.js library to create an interactive music environment.
the video below shows how impressive it is. as he says, we’re “painting with geometry”, applying shader effects, collision detection and spawning animals and shapes in real-time to change the environment. tasty.
We gave up waiting and got the PlayBook shipped from the states to Float Towers. Now we can see the app. we designed for RBS. hurrah.
The packaging experience feels a little cheap but the device is super sweeeet. Time to charge it up and get playing..if only it would pick up our wi-fi network. dang..
We’re stoked siteinspire has picked up on our BIG RED BUTTON and given it a site of the day.
The button has been getting some heavy button-pressin-action. fire up your own and let us know what you think
The Amazing Tribe have headed off to be part of RIM, good luck to them, we’re looking forward to seeing what they come up with. If they embed some of their vision of future screen ideas, see video below, it’ll make for some interesting experiences.
Global Android Activations, Oct ‘08 - Jan ‘11
The other night we went to Ben Hammersley’s talk at the brilliant Royal Institution in Mayfair. The overarching (overbearing?) theme – The Robots Will Kill Us All – AI and Post Digital Geopolitics - actually turned out to be relatively lighthearted considering – mostly thanks to the erudite delivery by Hammersley.
We kicked off with checking out some emergent behaviour from self correcting, simple systems - how they make themselves more attractive to one another to swarm into an emergent group – see swarm-bots.org and the rather portentous video of a swarm of bots making off with a child above.
We moved on to find out how the collective might of these bots is being applied in the world of finance. Take the innocuous sounding Hyde Park Global - one of a few who have developed genetic algorithms whose fitness is to produce more profit. There are no traders per se because the stock market is being played by AI – and these newsflow AIs get about a 20 minute headstart on the human trader capability. A few years ago NY saw a flash crash where these AIs started to freak at one another and began selling spontaneously. It was this moment that these AIs made their debut into the day to day vernacular, popping up above the parapet to become known to the layman.
Most interestingly and positive was the learning that Google is working with the World Health Organisation to predict flu epidemics: they can spot unusual behaviour and searches in their mass of data right across the world. WHO can now react to this nascent intelligence.
Hammersley has been consulting with the Foreign Ofice to explore changing concepts of ‘what is a country’. Focusing on how powerful groups grow out of like-minds who swarm with others to form intelligence. Many of us now know far more about others who we’ve never met from another country than our own immediate neighbours. You only have to consider Al Qaeda for a moment to understand the relevance of these discussions…..
A lot has been written about Web 2.0 suicide - enough of pet Facebook updates. So what are people doing with their new found time and headspace?? Stage right - The Creative Pause: “the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether. The seed of the break-through “a-ha!” moments.”
And see how receptive you are to The Sabbath Manifesto - laid out to help people to slow the pace down a bit. It firmly advocates the resistance of technology and commerce on Sundays…..
Check out some of the following commentary:
Revolution is a strong word (see Egypt, Libya et al) – so we won’t revert to hyperbole - but Kindle’s Singles are good - roughly 10,000-30,000 words long they are accessibly priced long-form essays. Amazon has laid out its self-publishing platform for any independent content creators to publish their works as e-books. Joshua Benton, Director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab talked about the “disaggregation of the author and the publisher - a way for an individual writer to kind of go around getting the approval of a glossy magazine editor or getting a newspaper editor’s approval to get something to an audience.”
“Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson - Johnson reveals how innovation comes into being in many different shapes and sizes.
“You Are Not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanier - real insights that address the status-quo.
Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team plundered the data warehouse at work to access details of ten million pairs of friends to set about visualising a social graph representing the loyalty of friendship. At the point of rendering his academic take on the graph he was rather taken aback by the result….check out his blog to get the full story behind it.
This makes for really stimulating reading - start with Shanzai - the tag for inspired Chinese fakes. Western brands are still overwhelmingly the aspirational choice for those with disposable income in China. However, local manufacturers are responding with tailored products to better serve day to day needs by adapting - or even bettering the functionality of the original design e.g. the adapted iPhone lookie–likies with two SIM card slots and a torch. Brands are starting to reference these imitations and learn from the fakers themselves to drive their own NPD. IDEO Patterns…
Director and actor Robert Lepage pioneered the use of technology in modern theatre - woven right through the narratives and set. His latest play opens at the Barbican this week. “I am accused of imprisoning myself in technology, but technology is a tool that allows me to explore things. We’re dealing with an audience today that is very sophisticated. I’m not saying that we have to become more cinematic or more televisual, but we have to find a way to invite that audience into the theatre.” For more information…
Ken Robinson on Passion at the School of Life – 13th March
Sir Ken Robinson is a leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He believes that everyone is born with extraordinary capability and we need to find that magic spot where our natural talent meets our personal passion. Ken says “Whilst we content ourselves with doing what we’re competent at, but don’t truly love, we’ll never excel. Finding purpose in our work is essential to knowing who we really are. For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed.” For further information…
Snapped at the “Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography” exhibition at the V&A. It is a fascinating/inspiring exhibition and well worth a visit. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/shadow-catchers-camera-less-photography/index.html
It is indeed upon us and with barely five days to go til Christmas Day, we’re spending most of our time negotiating the snow, ice and final project deliveries of 2010. Working on seasonal briefs is always fun and recently we brought some excitement and spice to the Christmas e-card of the law firm, Bircham Dyson Bell.
Vimeo just launched their “couch mode” a.k.a Vimeo TV. It’s a heady blend of HTML5 and CSS3 so you’ll need Safari or Chrome to experience it. Their move to use these technologies is a sign of the times as the use of Flash for video appears to be in decline.
You can browse a curated selection of videos and special collections although it is not apparent how to get a video onto the couch channel. Aimed at the sit back user with an ambient passing interest as much as the avid viewer, discovery is limited to the collection stream as you cannot dive into a users videos, only back and forth, but I’d expect that is in the works. Notable also as it marks a foray onto the different screens of the connected household.
If i had the right cable this would be hooked up tonight. check it out.
Life at a startup like Float is hectic. In fact life for anyone in the connected-plugged-in-always-on-geo-located-uptime-guarantee digital community is hectic. Information overload is easy and if you burn it for too long then burnout is going to happen.
At Float we have a culture that encourages people to break away from their day-to-day to make sure they get time to think. Time to ponder, stare out of the window and let the mind wander. Like music; it’s the silence that matters just as much as the notes.
This article by Scott Belsky about the importance of making time for “Deep Thinking” is an interesting take on it. Enjoy the read and take a break.
The latest Float vibes spotify playlist is complete; Float vibes II. August - October 2010.
It’s a compilation of the tracks that kept popping up over the last three months. The communal jukebox at Float means anyone here can stick something on - but also turn it off. These are the tracks that made it. Thanks for the tunes from all the talented folks that have been at Float and added to this set.
Enjoy “Float vibes II” you can add us to your people list too. As there isn’t a notification system in spotify yet, let us know so we can add you back :]
Enjoying this transition on the apple homepage. simple, effective. classic apple.
Google Instant is fantastic, it makes searching almost magically addictive.
As I struggled to remember the name yesterday of ‘that’ site, which shows ‘those’ sites which are rated by our industry which begins with the letter F (it was FWA, fact fans), I wondered what the Instant results were for each letter of the alphabet on google.co.uk.
Well, the list is below and it’s almost a snapshot of life in Britain. When it comes down to it what we all really like to do is go shopping, watch TV, check on the weather, instant message our friends, check our email, play XBOX Live and watch LOL cats on You Tube.
Interestingly, You Tube is the only site featured twice, for Y and U.
A Float data visualisation is on the horizon.
a is for www.argos.co.uk
b is for www.bbc.co.uk
c is for www.currys.co.uk
d is for www.debenhams.co.uk
e is for www.ebay.co.uk
f is for www.facebook.com
g is for http://maps.google.co.uk/
h is for mail.live.com (https://login.live.com/)
i is for www.itv.com
j is for www.johnlewis.com
k is for www.klm.com
l is for www.national-lottery.co.uk
m is for http://uk.msn.com/
n is for www.next.co.uk
o is for www.o2.co.uk
p is for www.paypal.co.uk
q is for www.qvcuk.com
r is for www.rightmove.co.uk
s is for www.sky.com
t is for www.tesco.com
u is for www.youtube.com
v is for www.virgin-atlantic.com
w is for http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/
x is for www.xbox.com
y is for www.youtube.com
z is for www.zara.com
We’ve just upped some new illustrations to the peas website as their mini-juggernaut keeps on trucking. We worked with the wonderfully talented Erika Rossi on these and are continually impressed with what she comes back with.
I’d like to see this come to the metro or evening standard. The social dialogue could genuinely thrive by the look of all the discarded papers strewn about the city.
“Boston News-Letter, first published in 1704. Its proprietor, John Campbell, deliberately left blank space in its pages so subscribers could annotate and otherwise append their ideas and “news” to the newspaper. These amendments weren’t aimless jottings, either. Newspapers were routinely shared after purchase, and the notes readers added in the spaces and margins were designed to edify the friend or acquaintance the reader next forwarded his paper to” quote from Jack Shafer’s excellent article
There is a war going on. A new kind of browser war. A war of next gen. functionality.
The hero of the story is Dr. HTML5. Wielding Font face loading, SVG backgrounds, JavaScript acceleration, CSS3 Multi-background, Editable content, Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering….and breathe. It is an exciting time for designers and developers who can start to execute on their ideas without the need for additional plugins.
It is also a time for caution where the old adage of doing it just-because-we-can needs to be observed or the whole thing goes up in a puff of usability fails and browser crashes with the intended objective of heightened engagment and interaction obfuscated by features. Feels like the heady days of Flash 4 all over again.
Some of the “experiments” showcasing what is possible are below.
^ Grab from the IE9 showcase “Never mind the bullets”
^ Chromes showcase for The Arade Fire’s song “We used to wait”
^ Apple’s Safari showcase
It’s that time of the year when our home, Great Western Studios, welcomes in the wider design community and no doubt some random tourists for the London Design Festival.
Of particular interest is Gareth’s Neal ‘Urban Picnic’ (pictured above) which has added some nice (fake) greenery to the atrium, happily free of tramps, fag butts and dog sh*t.
Come and take a look this week - normal opening hours are 10am - 4pm.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it cunning use of CSS3 & JS??!
Who knows but the Google ‘classic’ homepage now features an interactive and playful version of the Google logo.
It’s just like Flash! But isn’t.
So the no frills, white void that has historically been a simply designed gateway into the world wide web is now showcasing the fun possibilities of ever more interactive logos.
Can’t remember what I was going to search for now!
Today Google rolled out it’s Inbox Priorities tech to all Google apps users, and that includes us folks at Float. Intrigued as to its possibilities, I began the process of letting a Google algorithm control which clients I responded to first, and lo and behold it’s working pretty well.
It splits the inbox into three sections: Important and unread, starred and everything else. I especially like the starred section as this gives me a way of marking up emails that need responding too urgently. That’s all of them!
Looks pretty handy to us. Definitely better than Wave :)
Google though, please note - my priority at this moment is to clear my desk and head home for the weekend…
Some you win, some you lose. Still, it was surprising to see that less than a year after the fanfare of its launch Google have just announced that its support of Wave will become less than pronounced very soon. Lessons to be learnt here for all digital entrepreneurs.
If your product doesn’t connect with its audience, then it doesn’t matter who you are, what your track record is and how much money and experience you have. Wave was beaten down by user apathy, many of its features already being satisfied elsewhere (Twitter etc), and some simply not needed it seems at this point.
I like Google’s pragmatic attitude though. They tried to do something, it didn’t fully work, so they re-group and try again.
It’s not the end of their world.
Bet that title raised your heartbeat eh?!
Well, as I was browsing the Guardian website, munching through a skinny blueberry muffin, I couldn’t help but see that the Guardian/Microsoft are running a campaign promoting a Guardian optimised version of IE8.
Now I’ve not yet tested this (we use Mac’s in the office, though of course we have PC’s in the office) but I like the idea that Microsoft is pushing the performance of it’s browser for large portals.
Prey I ask though, what about my clients websites? Do they not deserve an optimised browsing experience?! Huff!
The wait is over. Welcoming Sam ‘real deal’ Baker and core collaborator into float towers today. Our new website design is about to get some steroids.
