Archive for June, 2008

Inspiration from the D&AD Awards 08

Monday, June 16th, 2008

While the graphic design community may be wondering what happened at this years D&AD awards, the Website category is alive and kicking and managed to serve a mix of good, great and even one sensational project to inspire us new media types.

HBO Voyeur, implemented by Big Spaceship and amazingly only a nomination, is breathtaking in scale and may well prove to be an indication of the future of television.

Essentially a small-scale television series contained within a single website, the intricate, interlinked story–line takes place before your eyes as you interact by controlling both the viewpoint and timeline. Bonus points for having Clint Mansell for the soundtrack!

UNIQLOCK is a microsite/viral for Japanese clothing company Uniqlo which manages to make the viewer want to see more of their range by using cute, dancing, models in the videos which are displayed every few seconds.

A simple concept directed and executed so well it’s almost mesmerising. Deserved yellow pencil winner for Projector.

Orange Unlimited has been around for a little while now, but it’s still impressive. A ‘never ending’ scrolling page of brightly coloured interactive illustrations, the technical achievements (how smooth the scrolling action is, for example) are almost as notable as the design. Received a nomination for Poke.

Lastly, what roundup of amazing Flash work would be complete without a little something from North Kingdom. Their brilliant Get the Glass game for the California Milk Processor Board received both a nomination for the Website category and also the highly–prestigious and rarely awarded black pencil for Animation & Motion Graphics.

One thing I found interesting was that the map used isn’t a 3D render as you may expect – it’s a highly detailed model they had built especially for this project. Amazing level of detail and effort involved!

Safari Flash caching issue solved in 10.5.3

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Just to confirm that the bug in Safari (and WebKit) which prevented caching of SWF files has been fixed by the recent 10.5.3 update to OS X.

There’s no information on the 10.5.3 support page about the fix, but from a quick read of some related WebKit bug reports (18972 and 19144) it seems likely an unreported patch to CFNetwork has done the trick.

Discovered this by chance this morning when checking over a site we’re launching soon and noticed the files were loading too fast not to be cached!

Dealing with job-related stress

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

After having one of the most frustrating days in recent memory, I’ve had to leave work with a problem (actually, several closely related problems) unresolved as my stress levels were making it impossible to either concentrate or think rationally.

In any job where you’re essentially solving problems for a living you’re going to have issues that take longer than you think they should - that I understand and accept. The hard part for me is trying to stop thinking about it (on the train home I had my notepad and pen out, scribbling notes about the problem in case they come in useful tomorrow).

Let’s hope a movie (Aliens), a cold beer and an early night do the trick.