With another successful Americarna event done and dusted we thought it a good opportunity to look back on one of the more interesting campaigns that we’ve been involved with - the Miss Americarna 2008 competition.
At the inaugural event a year earlier the organisers had simply handpicked a girl to appear as the public face of the event, in 2008 they wanted to encourage more participation both from the applicants and the public. A competition presented a great way to achieve this and also raise awareness of the event 6 months out so it was decided to advertise for contestants and then allow the public to vote using the website and SMS based texting. Proceeds from the texts would go to the SPCA.
Above: Bill Gates looking envious of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley movie . Today this situation is massively reversed, with Bill having much more money, and Microsoft still the undisputed leader in sales, and market share.
I recently watched the 1999 film, Pirates of Silicon Valley which is based around the creation of the personal computer. The plot is heavily focused on the rise of both Apple and Microsoft (and Xerox’s blunder) and the inspirational but flawed leaders, who set out to conquer the world with computers that are for everyone. The two main characters are of course Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I thoroughly recommend this movie, even if your not a geek it’s worth seeing, because there is no other movie like it. Oh and by the way, the trailer online doesn’t do the movie justice, and has a number of scenes, that were not in the final movie.
I was fortunate enough to attend the first Wordpress Wordcamp NZ last weekend.
It was an energised, fun packed weekend with speakers and participants from a diverse range of backgrounds - lawyers, teachers, journalists, authors, designers, developers and geeks. All were passionate about their blog/CMS of choice - Wordpress.
Having rarely blogged or used Wordpress before, I was shown its power, flexibility and the huge range of plugins available. As a developer, its important for me to get under the hood, so I will be spending some time with digital wrench in hand.
Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car.
The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman
Customisation is nowhere near a new trend, however it is being taken a great deal more seriously in recent times. People are getting acquainted with online software, drawing it’s resources from a fixed, and distant server, looking and working exactly the same from home, from work, and from their smartphone at the airport.
Be they contacts, bookmarks, notes, to-dos, emails, or personalised news we get accustomed to the instant updatability we experience in our Facebook profiles, and tweets. Add to that, that the major players in internet (and corporate) life are constantly at war to win our own homepages, the place we begin our journeys on the internet most of them understanding that where you start your ride greatly determines the channels you will take.
And whoever controls public attention, controls a great deal more than just web-traffic, and you get all the cool new, widget-based approaches. Here’s a showcase of them, all worth exploration.
Logo-spoofing has always enjoyed great popularity among designers, and the generally geeky (in the most positive sense of the word!) public. A show of fun, critical thinking, and a little deviance (well respected among the creative) may culminate in a T-shirt displaying well-known corporate brand with a twist, like say the Starbucks logo saying “starsucks” instead. In recent times however, this fun practice has both increased, and shifted in theme towards the recession. Here’s a basic collection of what can be found in a session of google / flickr searches.
I really have to be tight-lipped about this, otherwise the blog may self-destruct.. But the Jazz around the Momentum Headquarters is that we’re working on something very cool. I can’t tell ya what it is. I can’t tell you how we’re doing it. But I can sneak some previews out for you, if you agree to be remarkably discreet about them, for instance hide any prints under boulders like the english did with the first editions of the Rights of Man (Tom Paine).
Here’s a tasty mix of some of the UI elements involved in CENSORED !
Developing the new Momentum website was quite an undertaking, and as such, much of the midstream development, and concepts had to be sacrificed for the project to take up it’s current form. Hehe. But all that work doesn’t have to be wiped from the history books completely, so I thought I’d show you some of the tasty bits & pieces we made early in the development process..
I believe that every good User Interface design begins with icons.. Right? So we got a nice 3×3 info architecture going, and made these simple, metallic icons, and then..
I was fortunate enough to attend the first Wordpress Wordcamp NZ last weekend.
