I am often reliant on the Lorem ipsum genertor site when creating some design concepts, and thanks to Swiss Miss and Chesley I’ve found a supercharged version – the Dummy text generator. This gives you all the features of the Lorem ipsum generator but adds some extra touches such as adjuusting the size of the preview window, choosing different text instead of the usual Lorem ipsum and being able to specify CSS styling. Give it a go!
Thanks to Carl Haggerty for posting up this presentation by Oliver Blanchard, something which cuts through the social media crap and shows obvious ways to tell if all your social marketing is actually doing anything. And of course what’s key to any good presentation, it has excellent graphics.
After a few text heavy posts here’s something less brain demanding. Thanks to the London Advertising & Design Group blog I found this site for the new VW Golf GTi. Take control of your own GTi and drive it round the track as fast as possible for your chance to win a golf for 3 months (Only three months? Then what?). It’s been very well put together and plays well, and if (when) you take a corner to fast your car goes flying off and you have to wait for an scientist to pick you up and place you back on the track. Good attention to detail there.
Go and have a play and take a look around the ladge blog, one worth keeping an eye on.
For a team away day we’re all given the following task:
bring a screen shot of 3 sites that inspire you for a warm up discussion: 1 information giving site, 1 income generation site, 1 other
Which is something I thought would be worth sharing here. So here are my three:
Information giving
For infomration giving I’ve picked google reader. I refer to it many times a day, have a reader on my phone and use it as my main tool for keeping up to date with the web world and beyond. At last count I subscribe to over 200 feeds and I could never track all those sites without a robust feed reader
Income generation
I shop a lot online, as much as possible. One site I am happy to recommend for their online and offline service is photobox. Their service is quick. Very quick. Place an order in the morning and chances are they’ll be delivered the next day in a hard backed envelope. You can share photos with other people and let other people order copies of your photos, even changing the price so you can make a profit in what is sold. The site has a clean and clear design and is simple to use all that an online shop should be.
Other
For this I picked a section of the London 2012 website. I’ve covered this in an earlier post and my thoughts havn’t changed. It’s still a great example of location based media content. And the time slider gives a great historical view of information too. Winner.
Smashing Magazine have their usual monthly wallpaper showcase, and this month there’s 60 to choose from, with some really strong entries.
This month I’ve picked the “creative spark” design by Vinod Batus from India. “The entire concept of this art came out when i was playing around with various photoshop brushes. The effect came in so beautifully that i instantly named it Creative Spark.”. Many thanks Vinod andof course to Smashing Magazine! Maybe one day I’ll submit my own entry…
Today I found a new way to challenge my London knowledge, which was a map of Zone One of the London Underground without any of the station names. You have 10 minutes to type as many of the station names as you can remember and watch as your answers get added to the map. I managed 52 out of the 63 stations which I was fairly happy with, but still had to kick myself when I saw the ones I’d missed. It instantly highlights the parts of London you never visit, for me there was a huge empty space in south West London which I had no idea about. Have a go yourself at www.sporcle.com/games/londontubecentral.php and see if you do better than 52…
It reminded me of a simliar game, with the same concept but on a much larger scale. At travelpod they have a flash game where you must place a flag on the map of the world to mark the location of cities and famous places with points are awarded for speed and accuracy. There are 12 levels of difficulty with cities becoming more and more obscure as you progress. Give it your best flag at www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq. Unfortunately I didn’t make the 30,000 threshold to get past level 6, I’m sure you can do better!
I like the effect that a tilt-shift lens gives – turning a bustling city into a model railway set. The effect is created using a special lens which gives a very shallow depth of field on objects far away. It’s better explained in this article: What is tilt-shift photography?.
The lenses aren’t cheap (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com) but the effects can be brilliant. In the spirit of web ingenuity and freedom the good people at tiltshiftmaker.com have created a nice little online application which can give the same effect to your own photos. It works best with wide angle shots with a deep sense of distance, and the results are very effective.
Here’s a photo of Beachy Head which I took earlier this year:
And here’s the same picture after I’ve put it through the Tilt-shift Maker, suddenly the photo takes on a whole new feel.
Here’s another photo taken from Christ the Redeamer in Rio, Brasil last year:
And again after it’s been put through the Tilt-shift Maker:
There’s a group on flickr where people publish their results, there’s already almost 4,000 photos there. Have a go and add your own.
The Mapperz blog has highlighted a great interactive map of the activity around the country in preparation for the 2012 Olympics. Street level details shows the latest ariel photos of the site as well as altering the map to show activities over a particular time period.
An excellent example of how mapping and other media can be combined in a very usable way.
The latest site I’ve been working on is for the British Heart Foundation to promote their campaign for a new government strategy for heart and circulatory disease.
The site is flash based and features a crowd of origami people campaigning for BHF, and by signing the petition another person is created on screen who joins the campaign.
The campaign and petition also features in their shops and will be delivered personally to Number 10. Visit the site - www.newheartplan.org.uk - sign the petition and add your origami person to the campaign.
I like reading guides to London, it’s such a huge and varied city you can always find something new about an area you’ve lived or worked in for years.
Today I found a new site thanks to Read/WriteWeb which offers a different apporach to city guides. The IFeel series lets you browse maps of London, New York and Toronto finding things to do and places to go depending on how you few. Choose your mood from energetic, chilled, manly, sophisticated, romantic, naughty, manly and broke. The site is invite only so far but has some good potential to find hidden gems and personal favourites you may have missed around you.
Enjoy: ifeellondon.com, ifeelnyc.com and www.ifeeltoronto.com
