Seriously?

Let's hope this shit isn't supposed to be aspirational.

Today, Tomorrow

Today is Halloween. People in the USA, UK and many other countries will be having fun dressing up, trick-or-treating and partying. There will be people dressed as fried calamari, computers, dinosaurs, space men, politicians, Indiana Jones and towers of Ferrero Rocher. There will be amazing carved pumpkins with designs from the death star to bowling balls to popular television personalities.

It's an exciting time for anyone. We're planning on carving up some pumpkins in the office this afternoon, and we all arrived to find sweets and spider webs on our desks.

The different thing about it these days, though, is that today (the only Halloween) is only the start of the event. As more and more awesome costumes and pumpkins arrive on flickr and digg, it'll take them a few days to reach the top of 'explore' or the front page. Halloween will last four or five days.

Christmas will last until mid January, thanks to this 'digital delay'.

It's slightly ironic, too, that all this technology that has made things easier and faster in so many ways has now overloaded us and it actually takes more time now for our trusted filters like 'explore' or digg to deliver the information we see. Without them, though, we'd be living in the dark ages... right?

High Five Generator

A bit of self-patting-on-the-back today. This made it onto the interweb in all sorts of places.

Zoomdoggle

PSFK

Gizmodo!

and it even made it through the NotCot editors!

Where to next, mister high five?

The best product design I've seen in a really, really long time

I have no idea where you get these, or who designed them. PLEASE use the comments to let me know, if you know.

THIS IS TYPOGRAPHY

I recently noticed a trend in which designers write the word 'typography'. 

In this example I'm a bit disappointed there's no message connected. It's a beautifully executed piece of 3D/retouching, but all it says is 'typography', which is a bit boring in my opinion.

All sorts of other designy stuff at www.youthedesigner.com

Awful, just terrible, really, really bloody bad media placement

Link below for those of you from outside of the UK, or are immune to londonpaper sandwich boards.

Jean Charles de Menezes on Wikipedia

If you know who took this photo, or where it originated (blog, news website, etc) please let me know in the comments so I can credit the image.

nano-chro. sorry I can't say it again.

I like the paint streaks. Obvious choice, but nicely executed and stuff or whatever. But that headline is pretty painful.

"iPod Touch, the funnest iPod ever" on the other hand, is quite funny. Say it a few times, funnest. Feel dirty?

UPDATE: this is awesome too - from the end of the TV Ad.

Virgin Media get it

This pretty much sums up the experience I had getting my broadband transferred and working when I moved. Over a period of 4 weeks.

Animals on the Underground

Animals on the Underground is probably the best London Underground map 'mashup' I've ever seen.

Go look at it immediately!

Content Paradise reconsider brand promise?

Content for your 3D models can still be found at Content Paradise, though.

These post-its are awesome.

For men who drill, screw and...

Forgot the end of the line, and the brand, but this was definitely an ad for tools.

Update: the line was "For men who screw, bang and drill" and is for a £39.99 pair of steel capped boots.

Matter of fact: most image searches will have a cat result in the first 5 pages

Fact.

Edit, make it 'first six pages'. This one was on page six of the search string 'towel':

We built this city on milk and... Um. Milk.

London Dairies 020 8440 0619

Solving the problem of mumbling in the office

Many creatives (well, here anyway) tend to mumble to themselves while working. So I invented this hi-tech flag so people know when they're being spoken to.

Is that cause you think you're fat?

Cause you're not, you could drink whole if you wanted.



Sainsbury's launches 1% Milk in the UK.

Box Master

Yes, pardon me? What is 'Box Master'?

SWA

Except for the delays, crying babies and poor people, of course.

So happy to be a Bank of American

Now I work here

Cunning have lots of logos, so I thought I'd show you mine. It's a bit silly. I couldn't believe that nobody had done an alphabetti spaghetti one, then I went to Sainsbury's and found out THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY.

Shocked and appauled.

See what we do at www.cunning.com

It's the widescreen that makes it

Popular Flickr subject matter

I thought it was about time I compiled a list of what i notice to be popular flickr subject matter.


'Bokeh' (out of focus light sources that make pretty, colorful circles

Attractive women doing the 'take a photo every day for 365 days' thing

Attractive women (no theme)

A bit of an attractive woman

Writing on hands / body

Stuff with something written on a piece of paper next to whatever it is. Usually a coffee or something like that.

Hands making the shape of a heart over a belly button

A ring stood up in an open book, lit so the shadow makes a heart shape

Kittens / baby animals in general

Pictures of pets with sickeningly cutsie titles

Those freakish Japanese 'fashion dolls'

'Thank you for so many views on my photostream' dull as hell self portraits / screen grabs

Flowers really, really close up

Pictures of dogs taken close up with a wide angle or fisheye lens

Extreme off-camera flash work

Other pictures photoshopped into polaroids in the picture

Water/colorful liquids splashing in wine glasses

Bugs humping (macro, of course)

Out of focus things brought into focus by a water drop in mid air

Something poorly exposed, badly framed with boring subject matter... with a clever, 'poetic' name

Around f/1.4 or f/1.8 aperture (usually taken on a Canon 350D)

Pandas!

Update: Jumping. Just people jumping in the air.

Update: Balloons. Preferably black balloons in white, softly lit airy locations. Polaroids of Balloons are good too.

Tate Local

The Tate Modern has kindly moved their turbine hall floor to Valentine Place, SE1.

Nearest tube: Southwark

Showing for a limited time.

Ameeeewwwrica

If you haven't yet seen the new American passports, I suggest you search for some images on Google right now.

Following that, I suggest you get a new one yourself, even if you're not American. In which case you'll have to apply for citizenship and then get one before a Democrat gets voted in.

Seriously, they're the most amazing pieces of propagandist artwork I've ever held in my own hands.

o2 makes mistakes too

Found on the o2 website.

Must be something in the water today, or maybe since I saw Photoshop Disasters I've been subconsciously looking for website cock-ups.

This poor web designer did a quick copy-and-paste (probably while muttering "I'm a designer, I'm not supposed to be copying and pasting frickin' content... always with the frickin' content. Jesus".

Fair enough, though, art school never told me I'd spend half my life copying and pasting stuff.

Microsoft Typo

Just found this on the Microsoft website.

Well done boys.

-UPDATE- Try clicking on the 'Connect and share anywhere' image. It goes here.

Again, well done boys.

A thought on routers

I've been thinking, why don't people take the opportunity for comedy
names for their wireless interweb routers more often?

A while back I was thinking of compiling a list of 'good' Bluetooth
device names. I have a couple written down at home.

Ok everyone, let's get interactive here: use the comments bit on this
post to suggest a couple 'good router names' for others to use.

As an example, I'll share one I can pick up from near my home:

"buy_internet_from_flat19"

Fire away!

Sent from my iPhone

Am I on MySpace?

No.


This is a Firefox plugin that warns you that you're on MySpace with the message,

"You appear to have navigated to a page on internet cesspit MySpace.com
This is probably a terrible mistake.

Would you like to rectify this unfortunate mistake?"

All in good fun, I assure you.

I also had to post this

Dalston Kingsland Shopping Centre, London

Lomostrobism

So recently, I've been into this 'DIY-on-a-budget-home' lighting thing that many people are calling 'Strobism', after the interblog that has made this way of thinking about photogaphic lighting very popular and accessible: Strobist.com

Also, I just found that Lomo are now making all sort of flash equipment - maybe not the cheapest for the quality you get, but certainly fun and quirky.

The gadget pictured above is a slave flash, which is a flash that flashes when other flashes flash, allowing you to.. well, have more than one controllable light source in your photograph. It's quite tempting to buy lots and lots of these things and stick them all over the place.

They even have a lave flash that you screw into the lighting fixtures in your home which sounds like a bit of fun.

Maybe I'll treat myself to whatever's cheapest next pay day.

Custom Made

In short, if you have a girlfriend that likes vintage furniture, hand made things, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS and cats, you should go to this website and buy her something.

They're also very friendly people, and if you sign up for their newsletter they'll even tell you when their website is down, and when you can buy more cute woodland animal print purses. Oh, and if you want to meet them, they have a little market stall, either in Spitalfields or Brick Lane... they might move around, not sure.

More iPhone Stuff: BBC iPlayer

[photo by me]


Ok, trust me, it's not my intention to turn my blog into an iPhone or Apple fan blog (they do exist, and they're run by REAL Apple geeks. I've never downloaded an SDK, whatever that stands for).

Anyway, BBC's iPlayer, a 'watch TV you've missed online' service is now available on the iPhone via interwifi at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer.

You can't watch it on the bus quite yet as 'the EDGE network is too slow to stream video', but if you take a bus through Moorgate on your commute, The Cloud network should soon be signing some pieces of paper that allow iPhone users to watch iPlayer while out and about, which will lead to comedic instances of people walking into lamp posts while watching, hopefully.

In the meantime, just put EuroTrip on your iPhone to watch on the bus, it's amazing.

The BBC blog talks about it all here, too.

Hot nuts

I had to post this.

Lovely as a tree

Beyond the trendy logo, there's a great website and lots of information about making your big print jobs less negatively impactful on the environment.

I'm the new office 'green nazi', by the way.

Troika's Jealous Picture Frame

Troika: The objects that surround us are rapidly getting electronically updated with promises of greater intelligence and enhanced user satisfaction. This developing intelligence might set the ground for darker impulses, and soon greed, jealousy and revenge could happen electronically.

Ok, so these guys are genius. Sometimes they make me wish I did an MA. Basically this picture frame messes with TVs because it's jealous of them.

Click here to find out more, and see more of their crazy stuff.

No touch? What the...?

So I noticed there's a lot of stuff about iPhones and touch things on my blog. Well, since I last posted I got a job that isn't in a pub. Part of this job involved me making this no-touch interactive window thing happen for Orange.

See the ITN News coverage here:



Oh, and the company I work for is here

A few things about previous posts

I got one of those iPhones. It's pretty sweet. (Jan 21st 2007)[photo by me]

The patent application drawings for some sort of touch-sensitive Apple MacBook-looking thingamajig (May 5th 2006)are most likely the starting point of what turned into the iPhone: the Safari Pad. See Mac Rumors for more info.

Flickr's 4th Birthday

SO it's going to be Flickr's 4th Birthday on the 15th of March 2008, see:



How very exciting! I hope they give members some cool free stuff.

What I'm not looking forward to, though, is the 'explore' section of the webbysite being full of cakes, t-shirts, and emo girls with 'happy birthday flickr' scrawled on their arm with black lipstick.

Good luck everyone!