A Source Of Inspiration

Warning: serious time waster ahead !

Fuel Industries from Canada has been releasing several online games at Candystand.com. Most of them are refreshed versions of classic games, but still a great fun. Here they are, the latest ones:

1. 10 Pin Pro-Tour Bowling
2. Awesome Blossom
3. Billiards
4. Calculation Solitaire
5. Extreme Air Hockey Challenge
6. Free Cell Solitaire
7. Golf Solitaire
8. Klondike Solitaire
9. Match Point Tennis
10. Mah Jongg
11. Pyramid Solitaire
12. Target Bowling

One interesting addition is the localized branding for the gaming portal of Wrigley’s candies, available now just for US and UK, but with other releases coming soon. While advergaming is greatly focused at traditional games (PC or console) or related to experiences such as Second Life, sometimes we find these fresh developments at sites like CandyStand or MiniClip.

On a recent post, i listed several websites using Papervision. Well, there’s a new one,a truly inspiring work by WeAreGt, to promote the new Audi A5.

Link: http://www.rhythmoflines.co.uk/

Source: Cpluv

Remember this one the next time you claim that advertising doesn’t entertain or tells stories to consumers.

The brilliant minds at W+K and the motion wizards at Psyop created a documentary based on Happiness Factory commercial that recently won a silver lion at Cannes (below the initial expectations that were aiming at Gold).

Real Coca-Cola employees were interviewed and their responses used by the animated factory workers for this film, which is running in Atlanta’s World of Coca-Cola.

Look Ma, now with ads:

Do you digg or bury it?

Source: FutureLab

The rock festival posts are not over yet! But this time, it’s from Richard Turley and the process he went through covering the Glastonbury Festival for the Guardian.

Photo: Martin Godwin/Guardian

The article speaks about the troubles, fun and hard work his team had to deal while setting up the design in the middle of one of the biggest music festivals in the world. And i found myself totally agreeing with Richard when he says

How do you capture the feeling of your senses being numbed by the heavenly punishment of dirt, music, art, people, performance, rain, insomnia, cider and exhaustion whilst being simultaneously kicked out of the sleepy trudge of day to day life?

This same process and feelings need to be applied to the current state of web design, getting rid of the gradients and round corners, and injecting some fresh energy to stand from the web crowd. Having read Transcending CSS lately, it became clear that webdesigners must force themselves to design beyond the grid and push new boundaries in their projects.

Or as Ferrell McCollough visually puts it:

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen might just have a stroke listening to Richard saying “…if you embrace a very loose approach to the design process, then some things are always going to be beyond your control. And when you abandon most of the rules, how do you define a mistake?”, but i’m sure others such as Jason or Andy Clarke would agree.

With a prophetic self-criticism, he ends:

Newspapers are going through a paradigm shift in the way they are read and disseminated. Over the next 10, 20 years or so, at a speed dictated by technology, readers will drift more and more to receiving news via digital means. News design will adapt to that. Flash or its equivalent will become the tool of choice as packages of graphics, images, text, audio and video will be put together, which will be an incredible opportunity to really affect how people receive design. These are the last gasps of print based news design. But that’s not something to be sad about. Whilst we’re still doing it, let’s have some fun.

Source: http://www.designobserver.com/archives/026488.html

I’m back to work, but the stories from last week rock festival are not over yet. The nice folks at Torke Stunt did a cool ambient/guerrilla marketing stunt, with a rugby team delighting the short people that didn’t stood at the front rows.

Challenge
Optimus is a mobile phone company based in Portugal. Our task was to create a brand experience targeted to young people within a big music festival context.

Solution
Under the brand’s tagline:”Experience it”,a service called “Broad Shoulders” was created. Ten big men offered their Broad Shoulders for people to climb in order to see better the concerts or just to find a lost friend amongst the crowd.

Results
This service was greatly accepted by young people, creating word of mouth in the three days of the music festival as more people were asking for the Broad Shoulders service.

Things have been rather quiet around here since i took some days off to put my body and soul on the best rock festival in Portugal: Super Bock Super Rock (aka SBSR). From a traditional advertising point of view, events like these are a great chance to interact with a young audience and reinforce their message, with beer brand Super Bock sponsoring the festival in the 13th edition. And what about the rock festival web neighborhood?

Since it’s a better task than trying to review the concerts (I’m a humble amateur music critic), i propose a short tour by the websites of bands that played at act II of the event, leaving out the bands with only a MySpace profile, that is becoming a trivia instrument in music marketing.

So, here is the web-gig:

Day I

The Gift

thegift.pt

Starting with a portuguese band, with a website featuring the usual sections such as info, tour dates, video or wallpapers: There’s one interesting addition by providing a Creative Commons page, where the are listed the authorized uses of their materials. With an active forum and allowing users to shop merchandise the band from Alcobaça has an overall coherent presence on the web, and i could only wish Sónia (the lead singer) would post more often on the blog. And as much as i like their music, it would help if there was some easy way to turn off the background music.

The Klaxons

klaxons.net

Another regular music website, with press-releases, band tour dates and with a weird name - Jazzanauts - for the mailing-list. The design is based mostly on the
collage/grunge look, that i suspect is another shared asset between Simon and Lovefoxxx.

Bloc Party

blocparty.com

You can always expect good taste from a band using great typography in their brand (the font looks like Avenir, from Adrian Frutiger). With a high-contrast homepage (yellow on dark brown), they give us a large video player, with several video clips that would be a great experience on a Joost channel. Bloc party were also one of the initial bands profiled on Virb, the uber-cool social network.
Speaking of social network, Bloc Party has one killer feature, the Marshals, were fans are invited to post their own reviews to concerts. It’s kind of a forum, but more focused and superbly designed.

Arcade Fire

arcadefire.com

The only word i can say: amazing. Ok, i’m a bit suspicious since i’m a long time fan, and sometimes even post at the official forum ArcadeFire.net. But anyway, the Montreal folks (where else could they come from), have some beautiful illustrations on the official website with regularly updated scrapbooks and some fine photos by the members. Arcade Fire web crew did also some notable viral stunts, such as releasing a website with a toll-free number where you could listen to tracks of the album Neon Bible, or leaking over 100 songs on MySpace under fake band names to find the most popular songs for the new album.
At the Lisbon gig, they picked up a video on YouTube with a demoniac possession as an entry of their show, that was featured before at the release of Neon Bible and was now replaced by another weird video of popular culture.

[Read more …]

With the new Flash Player 9 came runtime improvements, a new Actionscript 3 scripting language or other features such as fullscreen player.The releases of Flash SDK allowed the open source community to build some fantastic APIs and engines, with Papervision3D establishing himself as the “de facto” 3d engine for flash development.

The project was initially released by Carlos Ulloa (from Hi-Res London), John Grden (from BLITZ) and Ralph Hauwert (from UnitZeroOne) under the MIT open source license and offers linear texture mapping and optimized rendering speed and quality for 3d within the Flash Player.

One of the lead developers, Carlos Ulloa, has just released his personal website and lots of people were introduced to the beauties and potential of Papervision 3d (besides the usual Flash geeks that already awarded the engine at Flash In The Can). While Carlos’ work is one great example, let me introduce some other notable Papervision 3D projects:

• Carlos Ulloa personal website
  
• iTunes user interface
  
• A twitter module in 3d
  
• PaperVideo
  
• FlickrVision
  
• Papercloud
  
• Improvise.ru (Brahma)
  
• FlyGame demo
  
• Puma F77
  

Have fun!

update: John Gren has just released the Papervision Flash Components for Flash CS3.