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Today i stand on the shoulder of these two giants.
Music
Nokia Trends Lab
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How about a LCD Soundsystem powered lava lamp? Well, that’s exactly what Park Studio did for Nokia Trends Lab.
The site has some groovy music visualizations, using the Actionscript 3 SoundMixer class. And altough i don’t understand a word of Russian, it seems to be a localized version of the global Nokia Trends Lab, “a physical and virtual hub of mobility experiences”.
BeonlineB
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Magic. Anagram. Video.
Of course i’m talking about Arcade Fire’s new interactive music video.
Click around (or hover) and rejoice.
URL: www.beonlineb.com
Development: Vincent Morriset
Production: Nu Films
Source: Stereogum
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Róisín Murphy releases her new single ‘Let Me Know’ on October 8th with the brand new album ‘Overpowered’ following on October 15th. Co-written and produced by Andy Cato of Groove Armada, and mixed by Dan Carey (Kylie, Sly & Robbie, CSS, Lily Allen), ‘Let Me Know’ is a huge, floor-filling monster of a tune. The track was inspired by Róisín’s performance at legendary New York DJ Danny Krivit’s 718 Sessions in 2006 and perfectly showcases Róisín’s love of dance music coupled with a huge great melody.
RSS readers: link to roisinmurphytv video
‘Let Me Know’ features three brand new B-sides and some stunning mixes from both Andy Cato and Joey Negro. However this time they’re spread across the formats rather than stuffed on to one bumper-CD.
The Darjeeling Limited
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I’m on a music and film mood, so here’s another appetizer: The Darjeeling Limited.
Wes Anderson brings us another almost surrealist emotional narrative, with a pre-suicidal Owen Wilson partnering with Adrian Brody , and a cameo appearance of Bill Murray and Natalie Portman. My real interest is not the movie itself, but rather the exquisite soundtrack that Wes usually delivers. This time, the ethnic hindu sounds mix pair with The Kinks, the english rock band of hit single “You Really Got Me”.
In The Darjeeling Limited
Meanwhile, watch the trailer.
Sigur Ros at home
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Heima is a documentary by the symphonic rock band, a beautiful voyage through their shows in small Iceland towns.
The film was directed by Dean Deblois, previously nominated by his animation for Llilo & Stitch, and comes as a companion for their new album “Hvarf”, a set of rarities from Sigur Rós.
View the youtube video above or the HD Trailer.
If you fancy this one, you should also check their previous videos. And they blogged the whole tour.
Just Like Heaven
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Glastonbury Design Principles
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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
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 thats not something to be sad about. Whilst were still doing it, let’s have some fun.
Broad Shoulders
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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.
Super Bock Super Rock and the web
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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.