Form follows function, indeed

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.

See also:

• Colorful multiplications
• Help create a digital landscape
• What Does Music Look Like?

 

Tweet the lyrics

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!

See also:

• I can see my house from here
• The perfect gin ‘n’ tone
• 10 more ways to visualize lyrics
• 10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics

This is where post-its go to die

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

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.

See also:

• The sky turned blood red
• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
• The Man in the Black Coat

Tim Burton’s animated filmography

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.

See also:

• Kubrick’s animated odyssey
• Tarantino from below and Anderson from above
• The ABCs of cinema

Save the sounds

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.

See also:

• The museum of obsolete objects
• A history of videogames
• Mobile phone matrioshkas

The Old Man and the Sea: watch it

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

See also:

• The sky turned blood red
• Guernica comes to life
• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out