po-bo

What is shopping?

http://www.brandnext.com/

Brands are changing, we no longer  just partake, but also take part. Wolf Olins

Is Apple about to switch typefaces to Myriad? And go 2D?

This might be the Mac-geekiest thing I've ever seen. Sharp-eyed reader Morgan W has a flickr pool of signs around the Apple campus in Cupertino, and notes that three of their newest building signs (at Bandley Five, Six, and Eight) have an updated logo with no 3D effect, and use Myriad for the font instead of Garamond, which the old signs used.

Every second.

Rossignol quotes an article called Shaping The Future which talks about the possibility of flash memory being cheap enough in a few years to have enough to easily record a video stream of everything you see for a whole year on a single card!

I was talking to Tero the other day about memory becoming cheaper and how mp3's or photos at fairly high quality aren't getting getting any bigger, but we still agreed that people would find ways of filling even enormous capacity memory.

Perhaps recording every second of every day of our lives as video is what that will be. Makes that old grainy cine film of my parents wedding kind of seem like some priceless ancient artefact.

Because you're worth it...

Design Week publish their salary survey for 2007. Apparently, things are "a bit more complicted" since the last one in 2005!? plus it was nice to see digital and interactive designers topping the what's hot list.

You can read the full article here.

The Museum of Lost Interactions

Did you know that  Richophone, invented in 1901, was a "multi-player based game found in prestigious hotels and cafe's in and around London. The game was played from special Richophone booths, where players connected to the game through a system of telephones. The prizes to be won were very generous."

Neither did I, but the Museum of Lost Interactions has an interesting collection of forgotten items all the way from the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to the multi-player game, there's Acoustograph, used to request musical compositions down telegraph wire. Sounds like Napster or iTunes, doesn't it. This one was invented in 1925.

Now, I find it difficult to believe these are real. It sounds too much like a April's Fool, but then they say that reality is weirder than fiction. You make your own mind up.

Global Brands go Web 2 dot 0

An amusing take on what popular brands / logos would look like in that "rounded shape/reflective/obsessive use of the word BETA" web 2.0 st.yl.ee. My pick of them is attached, but do have a browse through this thread.

Cingular offers MySpace mobile service

US carrier Cingular has announced plans for a new mobile service that will allow customers to interact with MySpace. Customers will have to pay $2.99 a month extra to cover data charges, so that they can send and receive MySpace messages, update MySpace blogs, read and post comments, browse and search for friends and most importantly for MySpace users, upload photos - Video is ommitted intially, but the ability to upload vids will come in 2007 apparently.

There seems to be a bit of skepticism about such a service; where is the value in this, when tech savvy mobile users can already email, SMS and IM friends as well as post to blogs and send photos to Flickr. However, having one application which does this is beneficial, especially for the non-tech heads/general public. Also, consider the number of MySpace users and their habits and how they use the service. I don't have any figures to hand (Isn't MySpace in the top 3 or so most visited websites), but I bet a large number solely use MySpace as a means of contacting their friends. By making the site accessible from other devices and from wherever is surely good value and certainly should make Cingular a bit of cash from their data revenues.

There's a world going on...

Some beautiful prettification in Gloucester Road underground station by the lovely Chiho Aoshima (well I assume she's lovely by the looks of what she's created down there). Put more art in public places please!

Line Rider

Line Rider is a pretty cool, if seemingly unremarkable Flash "game" based on a little guy riding what looks like a sled over a landscape of lines which you can draw yourself. It's quite addictive once you start getting the hang of how it works.

What's interesting though is the way that various people have used it to create hugely complex landscapes for their rider to go through; video'd the ensuing ride and put in on YouTube!

line rider tumbling
the death of a line rider
line rider is smooth with a triple flip
line rider die at the slopes (this one's the best)

I love things like this that seem so simple and yet leave enough room for people to go creatively  crazy with them.

Which reminds me of this article I read a while ago about MySpace which amongst other things contends that one of the reason for it's huge success is that combination of simplicity and flexibility.

Downloading things for free? Legally? Never!

The Creative Archive Licence Group is a body that allows free access to film archive footage from various entities, chiefly BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute, etc.

If you sign up, you can download archive clips to do whatever you want with (so long as it's non-commercial). All sorts of stuff is available; news clips (international and local), Open University lectures, wildlife footage, time-lapsed photography, etc etc, and you can alter it however you want.

Given the quality of the source material, hopefully this will encourage some inventive, funny, thought provoking pieces cropping up on YouTube, rather than the usual morass of teenagers arsing around pretending to be whacky.

What is shopping?

http://www.brandnext.com/

Brands are changing, we no longer  just partake, but also take part. Wolf Olins

Is Apple about to switch typefaces to Myriad? And go 2D?

This might be the Mac-geekiest thing I've ever seen. Sharp-eyed reader Morgan W has a flickr pool of signs around the Apple campus in Cupertino, and notes that three of their newest building signs (at Bandley Five, Six, and Eight) have an updated logo with no 3D effect, and use Myriad for the font instead of Garamond, which the old signs used.

Every second.

Rossignol quotes an article called Shaping The Future which talks about the possibility of flash memory being cheap enough in a few years to have enough to easily record a video stream of everything you see for a whole year on a single card!

I was talking to Tero the other day about memory becoming cheaper and how mp3's or photos at fairly high quality aren't getting getting any bigger, but we still agreed that people would find ways of filling even enormous capacity memory.

Perhaps recording every second of every day of our lives as video is what that will be. Makes that old grainy cine film of my parents wedding kind of seem like some priceless ancient artefact.

Because you're worth it...

Design Week publish their salary survey for 2007. Apparently, things are "a bit more complicted" since the last one in 2005!? plus it was nice to see digital and interactive designers topping the what's hot list.

You can read the full article here.

The Museum of Lost Interactions

Did you know that  Richophone, invented in 1901, was a "multi-player based game found in prestigious hotels and cafe's in and around London. The game was played from special Richophone booths, where players connected to the game through a system of telephones. The prizes to be won were very generous."

Neither did I, but the Museum of Lost Interactions has an interesting collection of forgotten items all the way from the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to the multi-player game, there's Acoustograph, used to request musical compositions down telegraph wire. Sounds like Napster or iTunes, doesn't it. This one was invented in 1925.

Now, I find it difficult to believe these are real. It sounds too much like a April's Fool, but then they say that reality is weirder than fiction. You make your own mind up.

Global Brands go Web 2 dot 0

An amusing take on what popular brands / logos would look like in that "rounded shape/reflective/obsessive use of the word BETA" web 2.0 st.yl.ee. My pick of them is attached, but do have a browse through this thread.

Cingular offers MySpace mobile service

US carrier Cingular has announced plans for a new mobile service that will allow customers to interact with MySpace. Customers will have to pay $2.99 a month extra to cover data charges, so that they can send and receive MySpace messages, update MySpace blogs, read and post comments, browse and search for friends and most importantly for MySpace users, upload photos - Video is ommitted intially, but the ability to upload vids will come in 2007 apparently.

There seems to be a bit of skepticism about such a service; where is the value in this, when tech savvy mobile users can already email, SMS and IM friends as well as post to blogs and send photos to Flickr. However, having one application which does this is beneficial, especially for the non-tech heads/general public. Also, consider the number of MySpace users and their habits and how they use the service. I don't have any figures to hand (Isn't MySpace in the top 3 or so most visited websites), but I bet a large number solely use MySpace as a means of contacting their friends. By making the site accessible from other devices and from wherever is surely good value and certainly should make Cingular a bit of cash from their data revenues.

There's a world going on...

Some beautiful prettification in Gloucester Road underground station by the lovely Chiho Aoshima (well I assume she's lovely by the looks of what she's created down there). Put more art in public places please!

Line Rider

Line Rider is a pretty cool, if seemingly unremarkable Flash "game" based on a little guy riding what looks like a sled over a landscape of lines which you can draw yourself. It's quite addictive once you start getting the hang of how it works.

What's interesting though is the way that various people have used it to create hugely complex landscapes for their rider to go through; video'd the ensuing ride and put in on YouTube!

line rider tumbling
the death of a line rider
line rider is smooth with a triple flip
line rider die at the slopes (this one's the best)

I love things like this that seem so simple and yet leave enough room for people to go creatively  crazy with them.

Which reminds me of this article I read a while ago about MySpace which amongst other things contends that one of the reason for it's huge success is that combination of simplicity and flexibility.

Downloading things for free? Legally? Never!

The Creative Archive Licence Group is a body that allows free access to film archive footage from various entities, chiefly BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute, etc.

If you sign up, you can download archive clips to do whatever you want with (so long as it's non-commercial). All sorts of stuff is available; news clips (international and local), Open University lectures, wildlife footage, time-lapsed photography, etc etc, and you can alter it however you want.

Given the quality of the source material, hopefully this will encourage some inventive, funny, thought provoking pieces cropping up on YouTube, rather than the usual morass of teenagers arsing around pretending to be whacky.