You’d be hard pressed not to have noticed it, but this year is the 200 year anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday. The Museum of London is hosting a major exhibition about his life, and to coincide with that, they’ve created a rather delicious iPhone & iPad app called Dickens Dark London.
The app is an interactive graphic novel, illustrated by the frankly brilliant David Foldvari, and based on Dickens’ Sketches by Boz. It will run to five issues (just the first one is available so far), each one centred on a different location. As well as Foldvari’s stunning images, the app includes excerpts from the sketches, read in gravelly tones by the actor Mark Strong; as well as a map that shows story locations on a map from 1862, which overlays the standard Google Maps.
The first issue (available free) is set in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials - here are a few of the pages:
Dear Apple, please can you stop designing your interfaces with these faux-leather effects? They’re horrible.
Find My Friends (top) is Apple’s new stalker app on iOS 5, and its first iteration seems really clumsy – which is peculiar, given that companies like Loopt have already shown how you can do the same thing properly.
iCal is the native calendar app on Macs and other Apple devices – it used to be clean and functional, but they’ve messed with it for iOS 5 and Mac OS Lion, so that it now works less well.
An enjoyably understated video from the gang at the Guardian (despite the muzak soundtrack), advertising their upcoming app for the iPad. Some interesting stuff about the grid they’re using to define clear hierarchies for their stories – something that most digital versions of print have yet to resolve.
“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Personally, we’ve used Apple devices since 1996, including Apple Mac computers, iPods, iPhones, Macbook Pro laptops and even an Apple TV. All of them were generally a joy to use, and blended incredible product design with brilliant graphical user interfaces – which stands in stark contrast to most other tech products.
Jobs helped to define technology at the turn of the century, and revolutionised several industries, all the while with an absolute focus on the importance of design.
~ While Alistair is away cycling the length of Great Britain, we’ve invited twenty disgustingly talented people to each write a post for our blog. Today’s post is from the inimitable Richard Weston, the man behind the brilliant Ace Jet 170 blog. ~
207. That’s how many people know I am crazy about Instagram at the moment. Naturally nosey, it fits me like the proverbial hand attire. Spare moments, and some that aren’t actually spare, are spent peering into places I should probably not peer for potential Insta-fodder. Down darkened allies, over rooftops, into murky rivers. So far, it hasn’t got me into trouble.
On the surface Instagram looks like a gimmicky, fake retro photo filtering application. Masking, as it does, bloody awful photos in old-style falseness. You probably know of it, even if you don’t use it. Because I use it frequently, every day, I find it hard to imagine you aren’t at least aware of it and its auto-counterfeitery.
Perhaps you’re like I used to be. At first, I was repelled by Instagram’s faux photo styling. There’s no craft in it. You point, you click, you pick a filter. But hang on. Your crap photo, surprisingly, looks better. It really does. Often, not just better; more than better.
But the reality is, Instagram is much more than a tricksy little app for polishing your photographic turds. Photo sharing is ace. Arguably way more fun, certainly more intimate, than Twitter; it is the natural successor to moment-sharing-as-text. Especially for snoopers.
So we can show people what we’re seeing. We can show off a bit (hey, look where I am! / look what I’ve got!). And we can collect instances because we can feed them, effortlessly, straight into Flickr or Facebook. Or even into more purpose-built diarising apps like Momento.
And like the way Twitter can make you think more about the words you use and can act as a channel for those thoughts you have that are of no real value to anyone, Instagram can encourage you to look around more and snap the things you would ordinarily smile at and forget. Like the flock of pigeons that circle overhead, the planes that fly over our studio, and the asterisks in the sky.
~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~
Hmmm, visual culture. Something we, in this funny old business of design, are submerged in. We see stuff when others don’t. It’s what we do. It’s what we love. But somehow in this increasing digital age, our visual dexterity is being diverted…
Have you noticed how many people walk straight out into the road or onto a zebra crossing without looking because they are texting or chatting on their mobile? Or others having half engaged conversations with friends because they are too distracted by their emails or texts? Maybe you haven’t, because it’s exactly what you are doing right now reading this?
Yes, we’ve all got one and spend more time looking at it than our surroundings. SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, and I’m sure many more new kids on the block, have taken us over like those big pea-poddy things in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.
As wonderful as these innovations are, they come at a price. And it’s not just financial. They deprive us from being in the ‘here and now’. For a so-called ‘visually aware’ community we are losing our sight and the protocol of real social interaction.
Digital has accelerated our world. Freddie Mercury’s, ‘…I want it all, and I want it now’ is a reality. Bookshops, music stores, fashion outlets and many more are closing down in favour of virtual shopping; and the recent demise of Design Week has brought it closer to home.
Many years ago I conducted a workshop in order to help Royal Mail discover how they could improve the accessibility of their stamps for the partially sighted and blind community. The meeting was held at the Royal National Institute for the Blind in a rather bland room in the basement. As I watched this small group with their heighted tactile sensitivity navigating perforations, size, shape and Braille, all in minute detail, I suddenly realised that I was the only person in the room with something very precious. My sight. And that day in that soulless basement has stayed with me, and I never undervalue the gift I have. I look everywhere and anywhere and resist being mesmerised by that irritating, but necessary, little gadget that we all carry around.
So slow down, put your phone away and look around you. And engage with those passing moments. They can be a joy to behold…
Like this…
Or this…
Or even Alfred Hitchcock on the 38 bus. And what is he up to?…
If you need a primer to get into the zone of the beauty of our world, take in Terrence Malick’s stunningly shot The Tree of Life photographed by the brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki – a man who truly uses his gift…
Take a look here:
~ Alistair is raising money for Cancer Research UK during his ride – please wander over to his Just Giving page and donate a little cash. ~
This is great. Direct marketing of the very best kind. Transport for London have been blitzing bikes in town with these flyers, which slot onto your handlebars. They’re printed in a single colour, which is nice and economical, and the stock’s been coated so that they don’t go soggy if it rains before you return to your bike. And the call to action is dead simple: “Use this lorry and your webcam to see the blind spots come to life in 3D at tfl.gov.uk/seetheblindspot“.
When you hold the flyer up to your webcam (you can print your own flyer out on the site if you don’t have one already), it kicks in with a spot of augmented reality, showing a lorry on your screen, which is surrounded by bikes that sit in the lorry’s blind spots. You can rotate the flyer / lorry to see the blind spots to both the front and back of the lorry. And at the same time, the key message scrolls onto the side of the lorry. And the wheels turn too!
We nipped across to Trafalgar Square last night to check out Outrace, one of the centrepieces of this year’s London Design Festival.
Outrace is a large scale installation of eight industrial robots (on loan from Audi), each of which has a powerful LED head attached to the end of its arm. If you log on to the Outrace website you can submit a message of up to 70 characters which the robots will then recreate in a 3D cursive graffiti font written in light (assuming they deem your message interesting enough – we quite liked “Bow to your robot overlords puny humans” which someone has already posted). Long exposure cameras placed round the base of the installation then capture these interactive light paintings, and display them on screens just below the robots, as well as sending them to their YouTube channel (it’s 2010, nothing exists unless it’s on YouTube), and emailing them back to you. Here’s ours (with a couple of stray characters, guess those robots aren’t infallible…):
The project was designed by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who in the newspaper handed out at the installation are described as being very different from standard ‘professional designers’: ”You will know these genteel people by their office pallor and their dainty Apple iPhones. Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar do not fit this mould.”
Well boys, judging by your bio shots on the Outrace site, you fit the mould just fine:
To be fair, the newspaper has a fairly tongue-in-cheek tone (in parts – other parts are dripping with painfully sincere academic analysis of the project) so perhaps us genteel folk shouldn’t get too worked up…
The project is evidently mind-blowingly complex as a piece of software engineering, which is all well and good, but what’s the actual experience like?
Well, it’s kinda groovy to have a gang of beautiful robots girating around in Trafalgar Square – you can check out the live stream to see them doing their thing – they’re like a nest of rhythmic vipers, dancing to some unheard tune (Bjork’s All is Full of Love perhaps?) Very beautiful.
As an interactive text piece though it works far better online than it does as a physical piece – when you’re in the square you can’t see the letterforms left by the light traces (unless you photograph them at night as we did, which means taking an SLR and a tripod along), and the screens below the robots showing the messages don’t feel entirely connected to what’s going on above them. And while we were there they’d run out of the explanatory newspapers, which was leaving people in the dark, as it were. The online films are great though, and the graffiti font works well for the kinds of messages that are being sent in (‘Kirstin, I love you with all of my heart. A xxx’ being one of the latest), pleasantly undercutting the mechanical movements of the robots.
All in all a fine centrepiece to the festival. Outrace continues until tomorrow evening (23 September) so get down there sharpish if you want to take a look.
Larger versions of our shots are on Alistair’s LDF10 Flickr set.
So the kids over at Berg have been playing around again, this time for creative communications agency Dentsu, and have produced this beautiful little piece of stop frame animation.
They created wireframe models of words, and then did virtual CAT scans of them, creating thin slivers of the letterforms. Each of these became single frames, which were then played in sequence on an iPad, and photographed with long exposures of between 3 and 6 seconds. The photographs were then spliced back together as stop frame animation, a rather tasty mix of lo-tech and hi-tech. (And reminiscent of the great stuff that the Lichtfaktor gang have been doing.)
Well, this is just a whole bag of good. The Guardian have launched an app for the iPhone, and it feels like a real step towards those personalised newspapers futurologists have always dreamed about.
The app costs £2.39 to buy, launches fairly speedily, and lets you tailor the bits of the paper / site you want to read. The home page opens with a Latest section, which shows your choice of up to six filtered areas (we've chosen Top Stories, Culture, Features, Technology, UK News and Film – you select them using the settings icon at the top right of the screen) and a Trending section (as per Twitter).
There's a shortcut menu at the bottom of the screen, which you can also personalise. The Favourites page (below, far left) lets you choose more sections to keep an eye on, and you can add in your favourite columnists too.
Following the Art & Design section (below) as an example, you jump through to a page showing Editors Picks, Galleries, Features, Popular, and Audio (they've not got video on the app yet). Clicking on an individual story takes you through to its page, which is set at a fairly comfortable text size (you can increase it and decrease it if you're wildly long or short sighted), though the leading is perhaps just a tad tight? You can bookmark the story, and email it / facebook it using the Send icon at the bottom left of the page. You can also download content to read later on the tube / plane / beach.
There are areas they've not included in this 1.0 version, including hyperlinks, commenting and video; and it's iPhone only for the time being, though they're working on rolling it out to other mobile operating systems. It's also UK only for now, apparently due to some complex EU tax rules. Check out the full FAQs.
We're loving it – total future goodness. Pick it up from iTunes.
(And heck, while you're there, check out the Google search app – the voice activated search function is super shiny.)
