(…) the billboard randomly flashes things like umbrellas, bouncing soccer balls, dumbbells and thought bubbles — all waiting for some eager pedestrian down below to position his head and/or arms in just the right spot to spark spontaneous picture-taking.
Looking at what’s gonna happen tomorrow on a daily (yeah, right!) basis is exhausting. Sometimes it is good to look back and those sites that, few years ago, set new standards in terms of design, interface, interaction, technology…
A recent email thread brought back the memory of dontclick.it, a site that studies (or shall I say studied?) how users react when they are forced to lose their habit of clicking: no mouse button is required, just roll-overs. In case you’re too young to have heard about it (it was in 2005…), don’t miss it. And if you know it already, I swear it’s worth re-visiting, it hasn’t aged a bit, unlike, hum, hum…
What about you? Tell us in the comments what your favorite grandpas of the internet age are!
Just plain simple and beautiful. Visible on the Layer Tennis site.
Recommended by Edgard, who will be joining the Trendwatch team very soon. More details and his bio to come, stay tuned!
Presently i find little time to play consoles, my Xbox is gathering dust and i have not brought a game for over a year. The microsite for the PS3 game “HAZE” a first-person shooter, has reignited a flame in my heart for gaming. The website not only looks visually amazing but is a online game in its own right. The combination of powerful visuals and mind blowing sound made my heart pulsate. Like all good websites i found myself losing all perspective of time, not noticing a crowd of work colleges looking over my shoulder as i explored the site.
If the British weather continues in the same mood, i think i could be tempted to splash the cash and find my inner gamer again.
Pretty neat set of banners for the Sex and the City movie. Simulated 3D effects and micro-site feel. In case you’re not overwhelmed yet by Carrie and her desperate crew. Too bad the site itself sucks bad time.
(Achtung: Some banners in the sets are really lame, I’m talking about the ones with the NY skyline made of B&W pics)
By , 0 CommentsI’m working on a post to share with you what I’ve learned from Jason Fried at SxSW, but since it might take longer than expected, I’ll start with this image by Erik Burke that summarizes the overall idea:
We’re working in the NY office on a great cosmetic brand’s eShop site with some 2.0 components, and we’re trying to constantly follow Jason’s tip: question every single element on every single page. Everything that’s on it has to have a purpose, an added-value for the user. Otherwise it’s counter-productive and that superfluous item should be removed.
Sounds simple and obvious, but it’s not that easy. Old reflexes are pretty hard to get rid of.
Damon and I arrived in Austin, Texas, last Thursday to do our best to represent the Trendwatch Daily team and the Fullsix Group in THE Interactive Festival of the Year, SxSW (pronounced South by South West). It’s our first time here and we’re thrilled by the high quality of the speakers, from Jason Fried (Founder of 37 Signal) to Michael Lopp (Senior Engineering Manager at Apple). Topics are definitively super inspiring (Top 10 Lessons learned in e-commerce by Zappo’s CEO, Social Marketing Metrics Strategies…).
The main event was expected to be the Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote, CEO of Facebook, and we haven’t been disappointed. The auditorium was packed with a super-excited crowd, ready to listen to the 23-year-old billionaire speak about the social network site and the challenges encountered in the recent past (think NewsFeed, Beacon, Privacy, Openness…). But it didn’t go that well, because of a very weird dynamic between him and the over-friendly and egocentric interviewer, author and journalist Sarah Lacy. Questions asked were boring, and she was mainly interested about talking about herself and her upcoming book than trying to challenge Zuckerberg.
Members of the audience were quick to express their frustration, both online (Twitter and Meebo dedicated channel for SxSW) and in the room, someone shouting her “Ask interesting questions”, while even the young CEO was being annoyed by her self-oriented endless questions, answering with a mere : “OK”, “Sure” and finishing her with a “You have to ask questions”, since she kept telling uncomfortable stories about their first encounters. Which generated a huge cheer from the crowd, booing the famous journalist, forcing her to give up on the interview and, Digg-style, pass the microphone to the crowd for a (disappointingly) super short Q&A session where topics like data portability, application saturation and privacy finally got a chance to be discussed.
Tomorrow, on the menu: Going social now, Judo moves for defending your reputation online, and more taco/margaritas overdose. We’ll certainly come back to our respective offices with great topics to share with you here but also in the next issue of the Trendwatch Keynote. So stay tuned by subscribe to our RSS feed or our daily digest email for your inbox.
By the way, if you’re like my friend Sylvie who was waiting for the French version of Facebook, Sarah Lacy broke the secrecy and announced it in front of a shocked Zuckerberg that it would be released on Sunday night. Still not spotted on the site though.
If you’re in Austin and want to meet at one of the 20+ party tomorrow, leave a comment or drop us a line!
Created by Carlos Ulloa Matesanz, Ralph Hauwert, and John Grden. Papervision3D is a open-source 3D engine for flash, that allows developers to change the position, size and rotation of a sprite on its X, Y and Z coordinates.
The results and possibilities for this technology are truly amazing, a website is no-longer a flat canvas but can be transformed in to a rich 3d environment. Recent updates to the engine allows developers to uses triangle tessellation to distort textures and render complex objects in real 3D.
The most exciting area to Papervision3D is the ability to embed video into a 3D environment. Could this open-source technology transform the way established traditional medias allow consumers to view their content. Combing Papervision3D and a 360 degree camera can already achieve amazing immersive video allowing us to take control of the camera and become a character in the environment.
After controlling the singer’s hands in the Neon Bible video that we covered last October, the band shows again that they’re here to entertain you, not to help MTV sell advertising space. In the interactive movie for their single Black Mirror, you’re the sound engineer, toggling on and off the different tracks on the song, from the lyrics on #1 to the spookiest sounds on #5 and #6. Awesome work, I dare you to spend less than 4 minutes on it!
A project by AATOAA, directed by Olivier Groulx and Tracy Maurice (who’s been working on Arcade Fire’s Art Direction for a while now and that I had the pleasure to meet in NY through Paul).
Via Adeline Marchal.
(To be fair, I remember that Madonna had done something similar for the release of Music in 2000 but can’t find any trace of it on the web)
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