We Made This Ltd

Archived posts: Technology

iPad light painting

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.)

Read all about it over on the Berg blog.

Via Catherine Dixon.

15 September 2010 | No Comments

Guardian iPhone app

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.)

15 December 2009 | 1 Comment

Labuat ‘Soy tu aire’ interactive promo

'Kay, so we try not to re-post stuff we find on the web, but sometimes something truly great comes our way, and we just have to share.

Cast your mind back, and you might remember the rather tasty interactive video for Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. Well, here's something that outdoes it by a country mile. It's the promo for the single Soy tu aire (I'm your air) by recently formed Spanish band Labuat (they opened for Beyonce in Barcelona recently don'cha'know), and it's quite staggeringly beautiful.

During the promo you paint the song, with your mouse moves determining the movement of a beautifully inked line. It's utterly beguiling, particularly as the speed of the line tracks the passion of the song.

It was conceived and art directed by Herraiz Soto & Co, animated by Jossie Malis, with creative programming (we think we're translating that right) by Badabing!

via Very Short List

11 June 2009 | 1 Comment

Adobe raising prices

The Guardian Technology section today has an interesting report on Adobe's imminent UK price hike of 10% on all its software, which will lead to the Design Premium CS4 package costing a staggering 39.7% more here than in the USA. Kerching!

Check out the full debate on their tech blog post.

4 June 2009 | 1 Comment

Wired

Wired magazine has always been one of our favourite reads, so we were dead glad when they launched their new UK edition last month. As usual, the magazine's a mix of ideas, technology, culture and business (as it says on the cover), but now with a bit more of a British twist, both in terms of content and contributors.

We grabbed their rather fine subscription offer (£2 per issue), which means that the latest issue arrived by post. And just how brilliant is it that ripping open the mailer (above) revealed the Superman logo, just as if Clark Kent were tearing open his shirt? Clever stuff.

5 May 2009 | No Comments

Monumental

This is a tasty little number. It's a screengrab of a daily timelapse, shot from the top of London's recently re-opened Monument.

The Monument View is an "ambient responsive outdoor installation" by Chris Meigh-Andrews, which shoots a continuous timelapse birds-eye view of the city. You can use the Explore button on the top right to search through a back-catalogue of the sequences.

Brilliant.

7 April 2009 | No Comments

⌘X & ⌘V

The latest Cut & Paste Digital Design Tournament hits London at the beginning of April, with a selection of pixel wizards doing their thing down at the Coronet in Elephant & Castle. No news yet on who's competing or judging, but it should be a grand night. Tickets from Amiando.

5 March 2009 | 3 Comments

iPhone camera app goodness

So, for most designers, the iPhone is the mobile of choice. But for most of those designers, the phone's camera is, well, rubbish: just 2 megapixels, and a cruddy lens to boot.

But, help has arrived in the form of a couple of deeply tasty downloadable apps that let you process your shots on the phone. We've secured the services of two 'resting' members of top pop combo Gorillaz (2D and Murdoc) to demonstrate those apps.

First up is 2D and the delicious QuadCamera from Art&Mobile. This application lets you fire off a salvo of shots, just like you might with a Lomo Super Sampler toy camera. Utterly brilliant. You can adjust how fast they shoot; which layout they come in (a rectangle of four, four in a row, a rectangle of eight, or eight in a row); and whether they're colour or greyscale.

We've pushed the colour/contrast on the shots above (using Photoshop), but even without doing that, they look great.

Fantastically, once you've got them on your computer, you can download the free QuadAnimator application to create gif animations of your shots. Eat your heart out Michel Gondry. Can't wait to see the first promo shot like this…

Next up is Nevercenter's CameraBag app, which lets you apply some groovy filters to your shots, re-creating a whole variety of retro styles like Holga, Fisheye, and Lomo. (We're guessing there's some kind of copyright reason for them renaming Holga to Helga and Lomo to Lolo). It's still a bit buggy, but generally does great stuff. Here's a selection of shots of Murdoc using some of our favourites.

First up, the original shot:

Now, the Instant (Polaroid) version:

And the 1962 version:

And the Lolo version:

And finally, the Helga:

Lush eh? Check out the full size shots over at Alistair's iPhone Flickr set.

Thanks to 2D and Murdoc.

Clothing: Models' own

Styling, hair and makeup: Jamie Hewlett

29 January 2009 | 1 Comment

Flipping addictive

Okay, so cast your mind back to when you were, oh, say seven or eight. Remember how on the last few days of term at school you'd basically do no work, and mainly just played board games?

Nothing's changed.

It's so very nearly Christmas, and all across the land designers and project managers are desperately searching for ways to while away those last few hours before the next Christmas party. And heck, here come Adobe, riding in like some kind of well designed fairy godmother.

They've created a disgustingly addictive online game in the form of Air Flip. It's showcasing their new Air technology, which lets people create cloud apps, but that's largely irrelevant. The fact is, this sucker will eat up all of your remaining hours till it's stocking time.

Give it a go. You won't regret it.

(Well, not immediately.)

18 December 2008 | 1 Comment

FontShuffle

The rather tasty little iPhone application FontShuffle has just hit town, courtesy of the folks at FontShop.

The app lets you browse through a selection of Font categories (sans serif, serif, slab serif, script, blackletter and display), and then to pick from a list of relevant sub-categories (so serif would take you to grotesque, humanist, geometric, gothic, decorative and hybrid), and then to a list of six of FontShop's available faces. Then, and this is oddly fun*, if you want to see a further six faces, you give the iPhone (or iTouch) a shake, and a new set pop up.

Select one of the typefaces and you'll get The Quick Brown Fox text in that face, swivel the screen to the landscape mode and you'll get the glyph chart.

This is the first version of the app, and at the moment it's just a friendly little marketing tool for FontShop, without any hugely practical uses. But they're promising to add more faces, and more functionality, so it could go somewhere very interesting.

Cheers to Caspian for the heads up.

*If, like us, you don't get out much.

8 December 2008 | 2 Comments

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