The one about Particles and music
After Effects particles and music
There’s just something divine about timing particle motion to music. Your call on the music though 
The one about breaking up and finding love
About the ‘Love For All’ campaign
Farfar in Sweden, has produced a really cool campaign for Björn Borg. It’s called ‘Love For All‘ and is consisting of 2 microsites and an old school TV ad with a sweet twist-ending.
I’ll be covering the micro sites. The first one is helping you to break off your current relationship and the other one helps you find new love (or a little extra on the side). These web experiences are pumping with great lille video pieces, edgy scandinavian humor and are just vibing with cool.
Though the production value is obviously high in this campaign, it’s clear that money isn’t the carrying element here. It’s a couple of great ideas executed very well through interactive deisgn!
Björn Borg’s Break Up test
Time for a little break … permanently?
When you enter the website (after sitting through a little too slow-moving preloader) it’s clear what they want you to do. Take the test to find out if you should “move on or stay strong”.
Here’s a few examples.
Question 1 - Does your partner annoy you in any way?
Question 3 - Have you ever suspected that your partner is hiding something from you?
Question 4 - Do you ever fantasize about someone else during intercourse?
Question 6 - What do you see in these pictures?
They even help you deliver the message
When you’ve taken the test (takes about a minute or so), they let you chose between ‘The Clean Cut’, ‘The Friendly’ and ‘The Tear Filled’ pre-written text message that you can send directly to your lovers phone. It’s obviously all in good fun, but’s it’s a nice way to tie the web experience into the real world. It just provides that little extra something to complete the experience. It’s also a clever way of doing the ’share with a friend’ thing. – wish i’d come up with that idea 
Okay, so you’re single again – Time to find some new love
Don’t worry, the hot blonde will help you.
The Björn Borg dating site – “134th largest in the World”
This pseudo dating portal will set you, or your friend, up with a new lover from the ever-growing Björn Borg database. It works like this; You define yourself and what you’re looking for through a couple of drop-down lists and finaly you upload a picture of yourself so the website can make a video of you and your new lover together.
Here’s a few screenshots of the result. As you can see, it’s not that good, but the stories in video itself will make it very hard for you not to laugh
At the seafood restaurant picking out the food
The big wedding day
Happily ever after
Summary
Overall it’s a couple of really well put-together, quality micro sites that will make you smile when browsing through them. it’s definately worth the 5 minutes it’ll take check them out, so i recommend that you do that.
Great work by Farfar for putting together and executing the campaign and i believe Showtime produced the videos.
The one about LEGO
A LEGO a day…
Just found this: Dan, another wordpress blogger, decided to take a LEGO-themed photo everyday for a full year. This has given birth to some really funny and creative images.
Day 342: The World was angry - Except for Leon
Day 355
Day 258: Braaaaaaiiiiiiins!
Anyway, take a look for yourself at Dan’s blog
Tip: How to fix the QuickTime h.264 Gamma Bug
The Quicktime Conundrum
Ever since Quicktime 7, there’s been a wierd bug when encoding h.264 videoes using Quicktime Pro. The gamma is being offset and the colors get washed out as shown below
Actually, in Snow Leopard, the entire system gamma has been shiftet to 2.2 from the old 1.8, which means this problem, along with a bunch of other color-related ones, have been mostly fixed for people running that OS – More about that here…
However, this does not fix the gamma problem if users with Mac OS 10.5, or god forbid, windows, were to see your videos. That’s because the system gamma only affects how your monitor displays content it doesn’t actually alter the content.
How to fix it?
There’s a couple of ways to do it. One way is to change the videos transparency settings to “Straight Alpha” (Windows) or “Composition” (Mac OS) – And then save the video again.
The problem though, is this method disables fast playback, i.e. the ability to start playback of the video before it’s entirely downloaded. It also seems like too much of a pain in the ass to have to remember to re-save each and every video you’ll ever encode with the h.264 encoder.
You could also change your monitor color profile, but once again that only changes your own perception of the video, not everybody else’s.
Yesterday i ran into this annoying problem again, and decided it was time to kill that bug once and for all. That’s when I found this nifty little encoder. It cured all my gamma and color problems entirely. -And it even turned out to be a much easier work-around. than those mentioned above.
Step by step
1: Go to http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/ and download the latest x264 encoder. (Current version is 1.1.2)
2: Inside the disc image(.dmg) you’ll find the following file ”x264Encoder.component” The icon looks like a Lego block.
3: Place the file in: MainHarddrive/library/QuickTime. You’ll see a bunch of other .component files there.
4: Now open a video in the QuickTime Player. (If you’re running Snow Leopard you need to find QuickTime Player 7 under applications/utilities as QuickTime Player 10 has been stripped of the ‘pro’ export features).
5: Go to File > Export(cmd+e) and chose ‘Movie to QuickTime-Movie’ as you normally would.
6: In the encoder drop-down list you’ll find a new one, ‘x264Encoder’. Pick it and render your video as you normally would.
Now your exported movie should look just fine. Easy as pie
7 (Optional): Now, if you want to go the geek-route, and really get messy with the video settings, you can. The x264 Encoder adds a neat little ’settings’ button below the ‘quality’-slider.
That’s it!
I hope this relieves some headaches and confusion around the QuickTime gamma bug. Do leave any comments below if you need something elaborated or i’ve provided wrong info of any kind.
The one about the technology behind Google Street View
The technology behind Google Street View
When i first saw a link to this one on twitter, i actually hoped to get some insight on the way they run this incredible technology over at Google. Even though that wasn’t the case, it kept me smiling all the way ’till the end
- Great work by whoever made this for Google Japan.
The one about H&M’s Autumn 09 website
Simple, and does little more than what you’d expect!
It’s not a technical wonder, nor is it a mindblowing design or a big bubble of creativity, bursting in front of you, with all the colors of the universe.
- It’s just a simple way of displaying their autumn line-up, with minimal effort required by the user, but still spiced with exactly the right amount of creativity, to make you smile and enjoy looking around.
Why is this worth writing about?
When you come across as many websites as i do (I’m a graphic/interactive designer), it’s nice to stumble upen something, once in a while, that’s just excactly what you’d expect. Don’t get me wrong; i love AR, alternative navigation and full browser Hi-Def-blow-you-away experieces as much as the next guy (probably more, since i chose to make excactly that kind of thing my living …).
- But this time i was really pleased with a website basically telling me: “Oh, hello Sir. Here’s our collection – You navigate with the arrow keys. If you find something you want a second oppion on, we’ve made a share function, and if you want to check out a combination of garments we’ve got a place for that – Oh and btw here are some fluffy leaves and slow music to set the ambience.” It took me around 5 seconds to understand every function of the website, but i stayed around for around 10 minutes and chose to write a blog post on my experience.
Anyway, take a look around for yourself – This one was created by the talented people at Perfect Fools, the award winning studio, who also made Mentos Kiss Cam among a lot of other very cool websites.
The one about social media as a fad
Still think social media is a fad?
Saw this little video over at Soshable. Figured it was worth sharing
From the video:
- 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via social media
- Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million people, TV took 13 years, facebook had 100 million users in less than 9 months.
- If facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest, yet it wouldn’t even be as large as QQ, which is mainly used in china.
- Online students out-performs those recieving face-to-face education
- 80% of twitter usage is on mobile devices
- 76% of perople trusts peer recommendations. only 14% trusts advertising
- Youtube is the worlds 2nd largest search engine
- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
- Studies show, that wikipedia, on average, is more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.
The one about Facebook Lite
Facebook Lite
Earlier today Facebook announced the following to a select few:
“We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.
Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.”
Facebook Lite
What is Facebook Lite?
It’s a simplified version of the Facebook platform. It definately looks like their take on micro-blogging and it also looks like a direct attack on Twitter.
Facebook Lite displays little more than the most recent updates from you and your friends. Actually, it kind of seems like Facebook without all the “noise and clutter”.
Is Facebook trying to be too many things?
You might very well argue that Facebook is attempting to cater to two different groups of people.
The first group of people enjoy the constant, global, live-streaming “twitter-way” of doing things. This includes public status updates from all over the world and real-time search.
The second group of people are more locally engaged. They are mostly interrested in their friends. Be it insider-jokes, relationship statuses, vacation photos or just frivolous updates about their breakfast. It’s important to remember that this was also Facebook’s starting point.
However, the most recent updates to Facebook have all been focused on the first group of people, and Facebook actually tried to buy out Twitter some time ago. Then, just recently, they aquired FriendFeed instead (A service somewhat similar to twitter).
What will the outcome be?
The big question then remains; if Facebook starts looking, and feeling, too much like twitter, will the second group of people leave for another service – or will Facebook eventually be able to establish a solid foundation within micro-blogging without losing too many users in their change of direction?
Please share your opinion below.
The one about right and wrong
It’s wrong to be right!
Being right is based upon knowlede and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it’s safe. It is also out of date. It is the opposite of originality.
Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that old solution will have to be bent to fit new problems – And possibly fit badly – Also, the likelihood is that, if you’ve got the experiance, you’ll probably use it. -This is lazy..!
Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right, you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people.
Being right is also being boring. You mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if used very sparingly.
Worst of all, being right has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or fallible, and people who are right would hate to be tought fallible.
So: It’s wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug.
It’s right to be wrong
Start being wrong and suddenly anything is possible. You’re no longer trying to be infallible.
You’re in the unknown. There’s no way of knowing what can happen, but there’s more chance of it being amazing than if you try to be right. Of course, being wrong is a risk.
Prople worry about suggesting stupid ideas, because of what ofthers will think. You will have been in meetings, where new thinking has been called for. At your original suggestion, instead of saying, ‘that’s the kind of thinking, that leads us to a novel solution’, the room goes quiet, they look up to the ceiling, roll their eyes and return to the discussion.
Risks are a measure of people. People who won’t take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up by having more. Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you’ve been.
Being wrong isn’t in the future, or in the past. Being wrong isn’t anywhere but here.
It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.
Paul Arden - Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi for 14 years
The two viewpoints above are heavily inspired by Paul Arden and page 54-57 of his book It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.
It’s a pocket-size, fast read, filled with subjects as diverse as the value of being fired, clients and how to get past mental blocks.
- And of course i’d suggest it to … pretty much anyone, anywhere.
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