Changethethought

All kinds of new seizure-inducing updates at the infamous Hi-Res. They are also now hiring. Don’t miss your chance if you’ve got the right stuff, they are one of the best.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, Hi-Res, Web Design

BBH was established in 1982. To this day they remain independently owned and operated. They now have six offices in London, New York, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo. They currently employ 988 people and have total billings of 1.5 billion dollars.

written by Christopher | tags: Advertising, BBH, Graphic Design, Web Design

“We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

– Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006″

This has been online for a while now and I have neglected for no good reason to remember to post it. It is really amazing and you can really get caught up, once you realize what all is possible, in playing with it. It is Web 3.0 aggregate data thinking in action.

written by Christopher | tags: Aggregation, Emotion, Technology, We Feel Fine, Web 3.0, Web Design

Super More Better is the studio of Eric Duvauchelle focusing on graphic & web design, strategy, & creative thinking.

written by Christopher | tags: Eric Duvauchelle, Graphic Design, Super More Better, Web Design

Newly established Danish motionographer Jesper Bentzen has launched a new site featuring his gorgeous work. He also happens to have a highly functional and totally non-disruptive Flash website which is a nice thing in and of itself. Brilliant work all around.

written by Christopher | tags: Anova, Denmark, Jesper Bentzen, Motion Graphics, Web Design

While I am on the subject of web design today, there is no way I could leave out MSNBCs spectra visual newsreader. It’s a whole new and fascinating way to read the news. It’s really a grand experiment in information organization and that is something that has always interested me in terms of web design. One of the first things that interested me in Flash, and still does, was the amazing possibilities for how you could file, categorize, display and allow users to access information. It was exciting to see MSNBC take that idea and apply it to their news stories. Spectra is a really fun website to explore and since it is the news you are playing with, you might actually find something interesting to read as well.

written by Christopher | tags: MSNBC, News, Spectra Visual News Reader, Web Design

This has been appearing on a lot of other blogs lately but I have been reluctant to write about it because it seemed a little corny to me. It is expertly done however and is designed very well. So, who am I to withhold potentially inspiring content.

To mark their 75th anniversary the popular clothing brand Lacoste decided to take a glimpse into the future and how the changes in the game of tennis might affect their brand. They do so by showing you how their brand was started, where it has gone since and finally where it could go in the future. It’s an interesting exercise and a little self indulgent but it is also expertly designed website offering up video that downloads very quickly.

written by Christopher | tags: clothing, Lacoste, Lacoste Future, Tennis, Web Design

Good design abounds in the portfolio of studio De-Facto.

Here is the copy taken directly from the profile section of their site:
“De Facto was formed in 1997 to create a team capable of taking branding projects and translating them creatively across all forms of media. From print to ecommerce, De Facto has built an excellent reputation for developing client brands – winning a number of prestigious national and international awards along the way.

Client needs are at the heart of what we do and we keep things simple. Whether a client wants to talk to us about a new brand identity or a potentially complex e-commerce web site, we aim to keep the process as simple, jargon free and effective as possible. Our wide range of skills offers a number of benefits to clients, but most notably cuts down on the requirement to ‘brief in’ a number of agencies for any prospective project or campaign. This maintains a cohesive and confident look and feel to any creative output.

We also pride ourselves on being a very friendly, approachable studio and promote a high degree of contact between clients and our design team. This removes the sometimes unnecessary layers of account management and ensures that communication is delivered quickly and effectively between both parties. Importantly, we are renowned for delivering projects on-time and within budget.”

written by Christopher | tags: De-Facto, Graphic Design, Nottingham, Web Design

Mike Tucker is a designer and developer in New York. He has always had a fascinating body of work and now he also has a fascinating website. It’s nice to see someone still experimenting with Flash and how to interact in new and different ways with the internet. You can view his all new updated website along with some very interesting new work at his website: Ludosabato.

written by Christopher | tags: Experimental Video, Ludosabato, Mike Tucker, Web Design

I saw this image today and it really cracked me up. Building this blog just about killed me this year and I swear I am paying someone to do it next time around. I am super particular about design and typography and web design is just pure hell for someone with that special form of neurosis. I think this diagram is almost precisely accurate to the time spent building this blog (especially the bit about Internet Explorer). Will someone just abolish that damn browser already? I swear you should be able to trace a suicide to building a compliant website for that browser by now.

written by Christopher | tags: Internet Explorer is evil incarnate, Web Breakdown, Web Design

Medusa Team is a Spain-based studio bridging the digital divide between print and web. They have some interesting work in their book and an equally interesting website. The website is Flash-heavy, so consider yourself warned if you are not into that sort of thing.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, Medusa Team, Spain, Web Design

The boys at Joyengine also work under the name Cypher 13, where they work across mediums from digital to analog. They just relaunched their website in a big way where you can now see a lot more of their most recent work. They are based out of Boulder, Colorado where they also run the Joyengine storefront. They are a great group of guys and really work hard at what they do whether it be designing a logo or painting a painting. Sometimes it is as much about facilitating creative and encouraging it in others as doing it yourself.

written by Christopher | tags: Cypher 13, Graphic Design, Joyengine, Web Design

Birmingham-based Tak! has been around a while and used to have a really over-the-top almost inexplicable experimental website that was a lot of fun to explore. Since then they have grown into an established creative agency with an impressive roster of clients. They symbolize the new wave of agencies that seem to function more as a team defined by creative collaboration versus a group of employees working as cogs spinning in a deadline machine. It’s a trend that I think has a lot to do with how the internet has opened the communication lines between creatives and allowed us to consider relationships and methodologies the were not-so-long-ago entirely inaccessible.  I think it is a positive shift and a microcasmic experiment in how business with work in the future.

In that vein Tak! functions as a team of designers, art directors, programmers, illustrators, photographers and film makers. They believe in the power of an idea and that power is the culmination of of their client interaction driving their desire to always keep thinking. They live and breath design and believe good design is about choosing the appropriate look and feel for the given project at hand. In other words, style where style is due. A good note for young designers, myself included. They also work to communicate simply and not overshadow the communicative transaction with over saturated style keeping usability and functionality top of mind.

Their website is also a testament to how this new wave of agencies is administering their culture to the end user and potential client. Tak! has a great blog full of fun and inspirational content that doesn’t read like a PR effort. The site overall has a friendly and honest tone that really makes you feel like you are engaging personally with their agency.

Good stuff. Thumbs up on this one.

written by Christopher | tags: Advertising, Birmingham UK, Graphic Design, Tak!, Web Design

The Neighbourhood believes in cities, green spaces, architecture, animation, good design, community, originality, big ideas, colour, playing, innovation, imagination, the future, collaboration, learning, curiosity, useful technology, sharing, taking risks, smiling, random encounters, luck, the road less traveled, instinct, purpose, surprise, delight, new ways of thinking, taking an occasional wrong turn and the birds and the bees.

They are a creative community of people who share a fascination with design, animation, architecture, contemporary culture and science.

It also appears as though they have created work for all of the above mediums. I highly suggest viewing their website in the fullscreen version since it doesn’t work quite as well in the browser window. It’s worth it to view it that way and the immersive experience allows you to absorb the work more fully. It looks beautiful on my Mac to say the least.

Link discovered via Formfiftyfive.

written by Christopher | tags: Animation, Architecture, Graphic Design, The Neighbourhood, Web Design

The new May 1st Reboot website has launched along with this years competition.

May 1st Reboot has been around for 8 solid years now and has become a bit of a phenomenon in the Web Design community. Their new website is online now and open for entries.

If you have never heard of Reboot, it is an interesting experiment in how the creative community communicates globally now with the invention of the internet. The ‘event’ which is a better term to describe what May 1st Reboot is than competition, starts on the eve of April 25th. Participants are asked to shut down their website and put up their ‘Reboot Holder’. According to the Reboot crew, this is important in drawing attention to the even and making it distinctive. A momentary pause followed by a resurgence of new material and creative experimentation by a global collective of participants.

The actual Reboot happens at 2PM GMT. The precision of the timing is key as it shows the singularity of the event occurring across the unrestricted plane of the internet in a single instant.

It’s an interesting concept and always a fun ‘happening’ to watch year after year. If you are working on a site redesign or need one, then you should look into it and participate. If anything, to feel like you are a part of something larger and potentially make contact with your peers floating in the internet ether.

written by Christopher | tags: May 1st Reboot, Web Design

Bionic Systems has been an inspirational hot-bed on the web for several years now. Previous versions of their site featured animated robots and robust Flash navigation. They have since stripped down their style, as many of us have, and made their website more about their studio work. The studio was established in 1999 by Doris Fürst and Malte Haust and has grown to become a full service design studio. They can be found in Düsseldorf, Germany, working for large global-reaching as well as small boutique brands creating work across all forms of media. If you would like to see there old site full of bells and whistles, you can still find it online here.

written by Christopher | tags: Bionic Systems, Germany, Graphic Design, Web Design

I don’t know why I have never seen this before but Design Charts has been linking the net’s best designed websites since June of 2007. Even better, the site itself is well designed and fun to navigate. The site makes the claim that web designers are the new rock stars. I don’t know about that. I worked for several years as a web designer and recall spending around 20 hours a day in front of a computer. I thought rock stars traversed the globe, picking up hot ladies, slamming beers all while building up a tolerance to controlled substances. I think if given the option, I would choose to just go ahead and be a real rock star.

Anyway, if you have the internet generation attention span, Design Charts is the place to give your itchy mouse clicking finger a quick fix.

Discovered via The Denver Egotist

written by Christopher | tags: Design Charts, Web Design

There has been a nice update at the always interesting I am Always Hungry. New work abounds and none of it disappoints.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, I Am Always Hungry, Typography, Web Design