Selfridges new store wide initiative is an homage to Words! With the likes of Faber Publishing and The Idler Academy providing talks and poetry readings, as well as handwriting analysis (which I’m especially interested in, as mines terrible) it looks like they’ve got it pretty well covered. As always though, what I’m most interested in is the window displays, this time provided by the clever people at It’s Nice That. I have to say that I’m not as keen on the supporting windows, but I think the main display is a really nice idea. Shown above, it brings a playfulness to what could otherwise be seen as quite a boring subject by many. It’s Nice That explain it like this:
“For the showpiece corner window of Oxford Street and Orchard Street, we have collaborated with interactive designer Stewdio to create ‘The Word-A-Coaster’ a playful fortune telling machine. The 14 foot high hand-built wooden rollercoaster (constructed by model makers Atom) is surrounded by a sea of 30,000 brightly coloured balls filled with 30,000 unique fortunes that can be picked up in store for free.
Inside the balls, shoppers will find a small card emblazoned with a uniquely numbered adjective, generated by a clever computer programme that leaves each individual with their own personal, playful prediction for 2012.”
For a full itinerary of talks and events take a look on the Selfridges site here
Following on from the success of their ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ interactive video Arcade Fire have teamed up with Vincent Morisset to create a new site promoting their track Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). As the video plays the user can either interact with it by dancing in front of their webcam (well, waving at least…) or by clicking and dragging with their mouse. With some dancing perfectly choreographed for the project you can have a lot of fun dragging the video around and clicking the dancers into a jolting stand still.
Have a play here
And be sure to check out more of Vincent Morisset’s projects on his site here (I especially like ‘Neon Bible’, also for Arcade Fire)
Beautifully intricate pop-up calendar by Johann Volkmer. Unfortunately all of the information I’ve managed to find on this project is in German (which I don’t speak) so I can’t tell you much as far as the concept goes, but just in case anyone reading this does, here’s his description of the project –
“Faltjahr 2010, kein Jahresplaner und auch kein Kalender im üblichen Sinne, vielmehr zwölf DIN-A4-formatige, im aufgeklappten Zustand DIN-A3-große, aufwändig als Wandskulpturen gefertigte, Pop-up-Objekte.
Jedes Monatsmotiv -als Einzelstück aufgehängt- ein ungewöhnlicher Hingucker zur anspruchs-
vollen Raumgestaltung.
Monochrom weißes Papier in schlichter Eleganz bringt Monatsthemen in reduzierter Form zum Ausdruck. Das Faltjahr 2010 zeigt, wozu Papier fähig ist.”
You can view the full project’s website here (also in German…) – faltjahr2010.de
A visually impacting way to display road accident casualty data by the BBC. Although over a long period of time, it’s still quite shocking (especially watching the video) to see just how many road traffic accident deaths there are. It’s also quite easy to forget what each light represents as you watch them scattered across the maps.
They described the static image (shown above) as –
“The image below (above) shows the location of 2,396,750 road crashes in Great Britain from 1999 to 2010. Each light point is an individual collision which resulted in a casualty. The intensity of brightness shows where collisions are more frequent.”
You can watch the videos here – bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15975724
A lovely little creation by BERG, the ‘Little Printer’ will effectively be your very own personal PA. By scouring the web, and other sources available from your phone, it then gives you a bite-size summation each day that they describe as a ‘mini newspaper’. Conveniently this ‘mini newspaper’ is the perfect size to use as a bookmark, slip into your wallet or stick on the fridge, so each morning you can take it with you to enjoy whenever and wherever you fancy!
In Berg’s own words – “Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.”
It’s a pity its not available until next year, otherwise it would definitely be on my Christmas list!
You can read more about the ‘Little Printer’ as well as their other projects on their site – bergcloud.com/
As an online follow up to their ‘Cog’ advert Wieden + Kennedy have created Honda’s ‘The Experiment’. A fun six level game where you place pop up windows in sequence to create a chain reaction. Not especially difficult, but a good way to wind down on a Friday afternoon! Although I still haven’t worked out how to use the egg timer in level 3…
Have a play at www.experimentgame.com
Lovely new BETA home page designs for the BBC and BBC Weather. Compared to the old layout (which you can still see up at www.bbc.co.uk/) all of the information is still there, just cleaned up, tidied away and so much easier to digest. Little touches like the weather tabs in the top right make it a joy to use, and it all works just as smoothly on both the iPhone and iPad (as you’d hope!).
Check them out here –
Nice, fun little project by Uniqlo. Enter either your Twitter ID, or keywords of your choice, and it takes the tweets and images related to what you entered and animates them. Although slightly psychedelic at times, it’s a good way to amuse yourself for a little while!
Have a play at www.uniqlo.com/colortweet
It seems like every step of the way Burberry have been way ahead of the rest of the fashion industry when it comes to using technologies, and more importantly, using them well. This London Fashion week they had their ‘Tweetwalk’ show, where they tweeted preview photos of every outfit before it hit the catwalk, bringing ‘Burberry’ up to the second most trended term worldwide (impressive eh!), but last April they did something a lot more visually inspiring. Their Holographic catwalk show. With models exploding into each other and randomly appearing/disappearing it was more like a fireworks display than a catwalk show.
If you’d like to see more of their events and other videos check out their YouTube channel here
Or if you’d like to read more on the thinking behind their campaigns there’s an interesting overview up on Mashable here
The first of a collection of HTML5 & Javascript animated experiments produced by Exposure Studio for the Bulmers Cider Summer campaign. I had the luck of being the freelancer given this project to work on, and although it’s been hard work, and due to the 3D rendered assets provided by Taylor James has involved a lot of very large files, it’s going to be worth it. The other experiments will be rolled out over the coming weeks, so make sure you check back here, or on the Bulmers Facebook page, to catch them all!
Visit their page here Facebook/BulmersUK
