Just in time for the Xmas party season Mr Porter have launched their The Tux iPad app. A slick and fun app which is refreshing for both it’s innovation and playfulness, as well as being a nice change from ‘Here come the girls’ style female targeted campaigns, that will inevitably start appearing on (saturating) our screens soon. The main high points of this app are the interactive elements, which makes it slightly more difficult to write about, but I’ll give it a shot…
My two favourite elements of this app, which were what made me decide to write about it, are the Bow Tie Tutorial and the It’s In The Details, both pictured above. The Bow Tie Tutorial talks you through tying a virtual bow tie using drag and swipe to follow prompts. It’s such a simple way to explain it (especially as I didn’t know how before), and it really takes advantage of the iPad’s touch screen to get the user interacting and involved with the content.
In the It’s In The Details section they’ve showcased a selection of products, nothing new there eh? The difference is that each one utilises it’s own type of interactivity. Whether it be using the accelerometer to tilt cufflinks for a better view, the touch screen to stroke fabric or (my personal favourite) the camera of the iPad to display reflections on the face of a watch. Combined with some nice, and pretty varied, videos and animations the whole app is just fun to play with, and for those with heavier wallets, quite easy to shop from.
If you’d like to have a play yourself you can download it from the app store here
Might as well, it’s free after all!
Introducing The Britain (to quote the campaign..), the first multi-platform ‘experience’ I’ve designed while freelancing at Burberry! Designed as a form of micro-site within the main Burberry.com site, it’s purpose is to promote their new range of watches. With mobile and tablet visitors to the site increasing daily it was a necessity for it to work across all devices, and I think the result does that pretty well! It has a separate mobile version, with a crystallisation of content (as well as some nice mobile specific features), and a responsive version for desktop and both tablet aspects. Some nifty (or “whizzy”, as The Guardian called them…) features include a real time and real weather watch on mobile, and 360 rotatable and exploding 3D versions of the hero watch on desktop/tablet.
You can take a look and have a play here – uk.burberry.com
Designed while working for: Burberry
Creative direction: Marga Arrom Bibiloni & Chester Chipperfield
Interesting second issue of POST’s iPad magazine. I’m not totally sold on the design of the copy sections, but some nice ideas throughout. They describe it on iTunes as –
“…an extra-terrestrial exploration of the ways in which humanity has sought to transcend this invisible force that binds all of life. Pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved on the iPad, POST Gravity opens with a groundbreaking, interactive 3D fashion story powered by infra-red technology in which users can distort, bend and flip the dimensions of model Iselin Steiro.”
I especially like the interactive beauty shoot, with the twinkling galaxy reflecting off the visors, which through hiding the product from initial view built a nice intrigue before the user unveils them. Other nice features are the interactive 3D models in the ‘Inner Space’ Shoot, as well as the skydiving models in the ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ shoot. Overall some really nice concepts, and all pretty slickly executed. I look forward to seeing what they come up with in their next edition!
You can download it on iTunes here – itunes.apple.com/app/post-gravity/
Beautiful iPad app by Spring Creative for fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Conceived by Sundsbø and styled by Marie Chaix, it plays on the old mix and match body parts concept. As you swipe through you can create your own combination of the video assets as well as moving and expanding each element, which in itself is a lot of fun to play with, but you can also tilt and the accelerometer angles the image depending on your tilt. The first time I played with it I had my sound turned off and I still enjoyed it, just for the pure aesthetic of the app, but with sound on it transforms into a different experience. The two bespoke tracks mixed by James Lavelle also react to tilt, so as you tilt it the ethereal track slows down and warps with your movement.
For the purists who think all apps need to serve a purpose I’m not sure how useful it is, I don’t think it was ever intended to be, but for something to enjoy looking at and playing with I’d recommend it to anyone. Also, it’s free. So you’ve got nothing to lose!
If you’d like to have a play you can download the app from the iTunes store here
And you can see more of Spring Creative or Sølve Sundsbø’s work here:
www.springstudios.com/springcreative
www.solvesundsbo.info
The latest interactive project from Google Creative Lab’s Aaron Koblin and Director Chris Milk, ‘This Exquisite Forest’, has gone live this week at The Tate Modern. A clever take on an old surrealist parlour game called ‘Exquisite Corpse’, where each person adds to a composition before passing it on to someone else to continue, they’ve developed a version which runs concurrently within Tate Modern and online. The initial digital ‘saplings’ have been created by Tate favourites Miroslaw Balka, Olafur Eliasson, Dryden Goodwin, Raqib Shaw, Julian Opie, Mark Titchner and Bill Woodrow. From these animations anyone with browser access can choose to continue on the same story, or to take it in a different direction and create a new ‘branch’, using a web based drawing tool developed by Google for the project. As the submissions grow, so will the forest, creating an almost completely user generated art installation of animated ‘leaves’ from around the globe.
You can visit This Exquisite Forest online here (only supported in Google Chrome though, of course…) – www.exquisiteforest.com
Also, check out their previous collaboration on Arcade Fire’s ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ here, another great digital project.
Nice work from Bunker Design for the London College of Fashions 2012 promo video. Using a combination of split screens, reflected shots and playfulness they’ve managed to create an engaging and entertaining promo, while still showing off the student’s collections.
You can see more of the students work/collections here – showtime.arts.ac.uk/lcf/
and you can see more of Bunkers work here bunker-london.com
Lovely little story by Pentagram London partner Naresh Ramchandani covering their 40 years since first opening their doors. Up to their usual standards and well worth a watch.
For Benga’s new video for I Will Never Change, 960 separate pieces of vinyl were carefully measured, cut, and then finally animated. The result is a real-life waveform. Directed by Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor of Us they describe the process in an interview on Creative Review like this –
“To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.”
The final result is well worth the effort!
You can see more of their work on their site – www.weareus.co.uk
Beautiful animation created by Globaïa for the short film ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’, a commission for the Planet Under Pressure conference. Showing every road, flight path and shipping route in the world you know from the start its going to be pretty spectacular. Watching the rotating globe is strangely hypnotic, but my favourite part of the video is when they remove the earth to show an ‘elastic band ball’ of our travel paths. Although I do find it very similar to the BBC’s ‘Every Death On Every Road’ project (which you can see here), as it’s gone a step further I can overlook that…
You can read more about this project here, and see more of Globaïa’s work here
Following on from Microsoft’s ‘Productivity Future Vision‘ video late last year (which you can see in my post here) this is Google’s version of how the future will play out with their ‘Project Glass‘. Here’s how The Guardian described it –
“The video, ominously titled “One Day …” depicts what a day in the life of a Google glasses-wearer would be like. Shown literally through the eyes of a hip downtown New Yorker, the video starts with the glasses booting up. A series of icons flash into his field of vision, Terminator-style. He checks his calendar and the weather, chats and shares photos with friends in his circles (remember that week we were all active on Google+?) and listens to music.”
Personally the guy in the video annoys me a little, and the idea of that being the future scares me a little more, but all in all an interesting concept and a nicely made video to promote it. I can’t help but think it’ll be a bit like most of the products they used to show on ‘Tomorrow’s World’ though, that never actually made it into public consumption…
