Form follows function, indeed
April 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
Apart from being my motto in design, form follows function is the coolest website I’ve seen in a long, long time. And a great example of a truly engaging experience online.
Jongmin Kim creates small interaction experiments, where the user controls what’s going on on the screen.
We are talking about colorful, fun and, sometimes, unpredictable experiences.
What’s even better is that you can download some of the experiments to use as a screensaver (both for mac and pc).
All of the experiments are built in HTML5. And for those of you who don’t talk web, this means that the website works perfectly on your computer, tablet or mobile phone.
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Tweet the lyrics
March 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
I really don’t know how to explain this in a way that makes it justice so perhaps you should better visit tweetflight immediately. If you insist, though, here is my best try. Electro-folk (yes, this classification exists) group Brightly have released one of the most clever web-based music videos ever, for their song Preflight Nerves.
It is basically a lyrics video, but the words of the song are drawn (almost) real-time from tweets. Clever huh?
Taking the words / phrases out of the context of the tweet and into the song and vice-versa is very interesting; sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic, sometimes hilarious.
I am dying to create a self-referential loop by tweeting about this and appearing in the video!
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This is where post-its go to die
February 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
It is the fate of the post-it note to be dismissed very soon after it is written – whether, a reminder, a scribbled map, a love note, a cheat-sheet, a name, an address, or whatever else, its nature is by definition ephemeral. But there’s somebody collecting these used-up post-its.
Anthroposts gathers any found post-its and organizes them by color, complexity and the use of common words. With a haunting soundtrack of all their trivialities read out loud.
There is a chilling effect to this memorial to the ephemeral.
In every cry of every Man
July 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
A few days before the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympic Games in London, Alex Robinson remembers William Blake and his poem London, published in Songs of Experience in 1794, to portray Olympic city’s face.
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Tim Burton’s animated filmography
June 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
He did it again. French animator and graphic designer Martin Woutisseth, whose animation on Stanley Kubrick’s filmography we have already admired, created an animated video for Tim Burton’s films, this time. What can we say? We love Stanley Kubrick, we love Tim Burton and now we love Martin Woutisseth.
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Save the sounds
June 3, 2012 § 1 Comment
Sounds in danger of extinction? Well, it seems that there are sounds that are about to extinct, to be forgotten and lost forever, like the sound of a tape in a tape recorder, the loadind of VCRs, the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 computer, the ringing of an old Nokia mobile phone. But Brendan Chilcutt aim’s is to preserve these sounds: the sounds of old technologies and electronics equipment. In his site, the Museum of Endangered Sounds, you can hear all these sounds and remember an era before it is totally forgotten.
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The Old Man and the Sea: watch it
April 4, 2012 § Leave a comment
Instead of reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, you can now watch it in a beautiful hand drawn stop-motion animation by German photographer and designer Marcel Schindler.
via Brainpickings
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Wild is the wind
March 30, 2012 § Leave a comment
Colorful multiplications
March 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Did you own an abacus as a child? I did, but nobody ever bothered to explain it to me, so the colorful beads representing numbers remained a mystery and I never managed to perform any arithmetic functions on it. Thankfully, Stefanie Posavec revisited the concept of replacing numbers with colors, in a much more user-friendly way.
She explores the hidden patterns in multiplication of large numbers, and together with Hadrien Jouet they created multiplication waterfall, an online application for you to experiment with. You just insert the numbers and it does its mathematical magic. It translates the abstract patterns that mathematicians recognize into beautiful patterns of colors and shapes, for us laymen.
See also:
- Strange things that do exist: Computational Origami at MIT
- In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly
- A fountain of time
Erased words
February 7, 2012 § Leave a comment
Just erase: words, commas, sentences to reveal the true emotion and find poetry. Newspaper Blackout, a Tumblr blog of Austin-based artist and writer Austin Kleon (included in TIME magazine’s list of the 30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs) creates”blackout poetry” just by blacking out unwanted text with a permanent marker and revealing new and shorter versions of poetic expression.
See more after the jump
The sky turned blood red
January 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
“I was walking along a path with two friends / the sun was setting / suddenly the sky turned blood red / I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence / there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city / my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety / and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
Edvard Munch, 1893
Not only poems can be animated, as we have seen in our previous post, but paintings as well. Edvard Munch’s The Scream gets a life of its own in this amazing video, created by animation director and graphic artist Sebastian Cosor.
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There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
January 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
To visualise a poem’s world : what a challenge.
Designer Monika Umba attempts a magical immersion to Bukowski’s world with her mesmerizing animation video of Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Bluebird,” originally published in his 1992 anthology.
The Bluebird
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
via Brainpickings
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Don’t stop me now ’cause I’m having a good time
September 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
Today, Freddie Mercury would have been 65 years old and Google celebrates the birthday of Queen’s legendary singer with an animated doodle.
Today’s doodle is also accompanied by a blog post from Google, which was written by Queen’s guitarist Brian May.
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OK Go do a chrome experiment
July 28, 2011 § Leave a comment
Long gone are the days that musician could go by a simple, story-telling video clip to go along with their music. That simply won’t do anymore. And if you can’t make an iPad app for your music you need at least to make it an interactive, online experience. OK Go, of course, are not new to making amazing music videos that go viral on the internet – heck, they invented the viral music video. But their newest endeavour for their song “All is not lost” is an amazing chrome experiment. Featuring moving & synchronized browser windows, amazing choreography by Pilobolus, body typography, kaleidoscopic effects and, *winks* a cameo by it’s a small web, you better not miss it. View it here.
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The form of a word
June 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
Can you imagine the forms and colors that words can take? Digital design agency Corum + Guerrette created String DNA, an interactive data visualization image generator, which converts alphabet letters into shapes and colors. 
By typing your name or a short description in the text box, you can a visual interpretation of how a letter or a word looks like, like our blog’s name just below.
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Videogaming hurts
May 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
And I am not talking about good-old wii injuries. I am talking about chronic, painful, disfiguring afflictions. I am talking about Game Arthritis. About a hidden epidemic that the gaming industry wants to keep secret.
Created by Italian artist Matteo Bittanti and mischievous art collective IOCOSE, Game Arthritis is an online art installation, a powerful commentary on the demonization of video gaming.
I really don’t know what I like the most about this project: the concept in itself (genius), the photos (clinically delicious) or the accompanying text (hilarious). Read for yourself: “The conformity of interfaces produces deformity. It’s a fact. Call it “the reality of the virtual”. Prolonged vicarious aggression lead to permanent physical disfiguration. […] The authorities have dismissed this hidden epidemic as “mass hysteria”. But according to some scientists – who speak under condition of anonymity fearing ostracization – these undiagnosed disorders are the psychopathology of ludic societies”
via Holy Kaw
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Follow @itsasmallwebListen to your city
May 26, 2011 § 2 Comments
What would we learn if , instead of just looking at our cities, we could listen to them? SoundAffects, an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design, tries to answer this question by turning everyday things like weather and traffic into sounds.
Placing sensors around a New York City block for our week, SoundAffects tracked objects, temperature, light, weather and so on, assigning each variable a color and sound. Thus, everyday things acquired a life of their own and, of course, a musical sound.
via Design Taxi
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365 six word stories
May 17, 2011 § 1 Comment
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
According to urban myth that is the reply Ernest Hemingway gave when he was challenged to write a story in just six words.
In 2010 two creatives, Van Horgen, writer, and Anne Ulku, designer, felt up to the challenged. They launched six word story everyday blog and did exactly that: they posted one six word story for every single day of the year.
Once 2010 came to an end, they opened up the project to everybody on sixwordstoryeveryday.com.
Admittedly, these are great story openers rather than stories in themselves, but very interesting, still.
via quipsologies
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I shall not live in vain
April 29, 2011 § 4 Comments
Clever words
April 29, 2011 § 4 Comments
What happens when the Saussurian signifier and signified meet up in the form of a word? Beautiful typography.
Typeplay is a tumblr blog, which plays with words and their meanings creating typographically meaningful words and whose goal is to reach a million words.
See more words after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
it's a small web 