I came across this site recently – it’s an idea that I’ve seen previously, noteably NB Studio’s You Are Here campaign for the museum of London l  - but this opens this very simple but brilliant idea up for everyone to relate to and add their own content. I find a lot of the pictures very emotive, linking memory, people and place in a powerful way. It’s hard to look at all these without feeling the strong desire to go out and do one yourself  – time to route through my old photo albums…

dearphotograph.com

Dear Photograph, memory, place

I came back from this year’s Web directions @media conference with new enthusiasm and excellent resources but most importantly these two little words…ONE WEB.

The over-arching message that I took away from this conference was that we should be building websites which can be viewed on any device, platform, browser by any user in any circumstance. A big feat but a worthy one!

Most impressive thing I saw was Animatable, a new way to create CSS3 animations. Check out the Mad Men opening scene animated using only CSS3! Whilst this is very cool it doesn’t quite conform to the ONE WEB ideal just yet as it only works on Webkit browsers.

In a nutshell, here are the useful tools/resources I took away from the two days. Here’s hoping they help us to keep up with a web experience that continues to transform.

Mental Notes - How we can apply basic psychology to the design of experiences.
Phone Gap - A mobile framework for building cross-platform mobile apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Video for everybody – A useful chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element.
Animatable - a new browser-based tool that makes animating with CSS easy.
leaverou.me/css3patterns - A gallery of excellent examples of creating patterns with css3.
modernizr.com - Feature detection library for HTML5 and CSS3 that gives you finer control over the experience, no matter what browser or device your visitors use.

No tags

Design Week have just announced that they’re stopping the magazine from next week and continuing purely online. The statement on their website tries to put a positive spin on things; “We believe that by concentrating on just digital we can improve our information service to you, ensuring that we remain at the heart of the UK design industry”.

Like most of us, having grown up with Design Week is certainly feels like the end of an era, although one that should have probably ended years ago – when the reason most people buy it is to look at the ’sport’ pages (ie the job section) you know that the magazine itself is in trouble.

For me, it had become very much a collection of design agencies press releases rather than actually having much insight into the industry. For example they had an article about the rise of hand-cut lettering a few months ago, probably around a year after this trend actually started gaining momentum!

It will be interesting how the online presence is developed (or not) to stop people cancelling their subscriptions. Especially when their sister publication, Creative Review has such a good website and blog. Having said all this, do people really care?  Is it a further nail in the coffin of printed magazines? Will Creative Review and magazines like Eye (heaven forbid!) eventually follow suit? Thoughts…

Design Week, Magazine, Print

Stanley Chow is an award winning, Grammy nominated illustrator from Manchester, England… and this is his official app. StanChow App is your free VIP invite to interact in a virtual gallery of his favourite and most talked about illustration work. more info here…

There’s a small trend starting to happen where individual artists, illustrators, designers and photographers are offering a new way of interacting with their work – their very own App! I’m curious to know what you think of this idea, would you download an App of this sort (and actually use it?) – would you feel safe purchasing artwork through an App on your iPhone?

No tags

Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a video (narrated by founder and CEO Jimmy Wales) and an infographic showcasing the organization’s major milestones over the years. This animation caught my eye – executed really well with a lovely style. The State of Wikipedia is the fourth installment in JESS3′s “The State Of” series. The first installment, The State of the Internet, made its debut about a year ago.

Wikipedia

When Facebook becomes a book from Siavosh Zabeti on Vimeo.

No tags

Ben Huh, CEO and founder of The Cheezburger Network, speaks at the Web 2.0 Summit to deliver a very important message “Internet Culture: What Does It Mean?!?!”, centering on the growing power and influence of culture propagated on the web.

No tags

..to the world in as many languages as possible.

Find out more >>

DandAD

Fast Company magazine are on the hunt to find out who the most influential people on the internet are. In a week where Old Spice have received much praise for their campaign this grass roots approach also has a strong incentive for users to be sharing branded content. With an interesting interface to check out and the chance to be featured in the magazine maybe its time you found out how influential you really are…

Fast Company, Influence, Interface

David Fincher, the director behind Fight Club and Zodiac (I’m trying to forget about Benjamin Button) has made a new film about the founders of Facebook. Doesn’t sound all that exciting but with Fincher involved it’s bound to be at least visually interesting. Great, unconventional poster as well.

No tags