something of mine goes live

lookee lookee my 360 icon is on the vauxhall site.
small win but still makes me happy

putting things live

experiments

i drew on a polaroid years ago, always like the way it looks surreal drawing over real world shots. my mam took this picture of a blue bell woods and it just felt right. I know lots of other people have done other things and some very similar, so before you decry plagiarism, I'm not claiming this is my invention, that would be ridiculous, i still like doing it tho, after all these years

the departure of the mase, my technical concepting team mate

So the mason has departed for pastures fresh and green, thus the chances of coming up with wonderous tech ideas and bending his ear about every stupid idea I have is gone (well until the usual time spent in the white horse). Also the chance of being mased is significantly decreased (again until time spent in the white horse).

I think there should be space in this industry (especially digital) for a new type of creative team. The tech and the creative (I don't agreee with those terms as discussed further down, but they get the idea across for now). One with a more technical knowledge but creative in outlook and use of technologies and executions as well as big ideas and the other with a more generalised knowledge of technology but  a more visual eye and approach to problems. I think this is why I enjoyed concepting and proofing stuf with the mase. I'd come up with left field ideas, he'd suggest a better use of that idea and then we'd try it out. That's the same reason I enjoy doing the hack days with dhrubo and kenneth, working with them and their expertise makes me a better art director/creative/designer, and gives me a deeper knowledge of our medium.

I'm still horrified by how much more designers and art directors could learn about digital. If this was print, we would understand paper weights, established grid systems, typography and all sorts of craft knowledge to make us the best creatives/designers, but in digital do many creatives know the difference between HTML and ruby on rails? API details? The list of stuff I guess is endless, but I don't understand why more of us aren't striving to find out and learn about this medium we are concepting/designing for. It makes us better in our field and makes our ideas sharper and better suited to our medium, without having some poor long suffering coder having to redo our work. (and then worse we come over and art direct and complain when all our drop shadows and layer effects are misisng- ok not in html 5 but you get the point).

Ok so that ended up as a bit of a rant, but fuck it, it's my blog
anyway adios mase,  i'll see you in the horse

N.B. I don't agree with the tech and the creative terminology, as anyone down the pub who has had their ear bent on this subject can testify, there is so much wrong with the idea that only a visual designer or art director or copy writer is creative. I'm not going to rant about it here as it's a sunny day and life is to short. grab me in a pub and buy me a pint and I'll lay it all out for you

testing embedding with specific start point

more tron related fun stuff from flynn lives

fun stuff from flynn lives came as part of the online search for kevin flynn, as part of the tron launch propaganda.

my encom i d badge complete with qr code that takes you to the intranet of encom complete with email and everything.

all the easter eggy fun

woooooooop

beta squnkey

after years of making other people's paper art toys i finally made my own.
so here is the squnkey
you get it one of many fun flavours C M Y K or blank
or get your laughing gear round the raw files and hack it up how you want
raw ai or blank ai
so heres the beta version for  people to play with
x

holy code

after some tech friends tried to explain the difference between ruby and php to me (they were good and kept their despairing looks to a minimum) they told me about a type of code language that is written in haikus. check it out here. So chuck and i were laughing about the resourcing of a project and how the only coders hired were a pair of french nuns and a dog.
this got me thinking...
Holy code, everything must be in psalm form, with plenty of eths and holy writ. also things must start with alpha and end with omega. also everything must comprise of three parts.
if  only i knew how to create coding languages and it d be amazing.

sorry random brain fart there
x

a playlist for an absent friend

you know who you are
x

scribbler2

click to make it large
if youve got 3d specs that makes it even more wweirdly


check out scribblertoo

dan showed me this earlier and it s fucking incredible i love it.
its like the easiest and most bizarre drawing tool ive ever used.
it makes everything look awesome.
get involved and have a play y'all
it also has full save and over drawing fun to play with
do it now
x

save 6 music

so i n my sleep addled state this morning i had an idea. It was an idea to save 6 music. you d have to be blind, deaf and have no internet connection not to have heard about the proposed closure of 6 music.

So whilst trying to drag my corpse from bed i had an idea. If i had the money i'd by six music outright from the BBC. Granted i don't have the money but for those who do, now is the time.
Have you ever seen a radio station with so much publicity? The bbc never gave 6 music this much oush but at the moment the name of 6 music is everywhere. Famous twitter feeds (like phill jupitus), to mainstream news, social media and more. If that hasn't boosted listening figures, I don't know what could.

The second benefit for this would be the PR for which ever rich lucky bugger could afford to buy 6 music. They would be seen as the saviour of independent music, the protector of what the bbc should be saving. Whether this be for one-upmanship, taxable deductions, or simply instead of their advertising budget on other projects, they should do it.

So come on Sir Richard Branson, give it a go.

anyway
just an idea but had to chip in my two pennys worth


get your voice

live stream from multiple source experiment

just to explain I came up with an awesome idea earlier about using multiple mobile streams, this is just a first phase test, and the reason that both boxes are dead is that neither of the phones are live streaming at this second. hopefully you ll see an output here soon
x

my week of mouspaths

i'm going to keep recording these everyday and see what i can do with them. click here for the big animated one. generated by mousepath.jar by anatoly zenkov
x

Verbatim monster

how cool is this. the most boring subject and one of the most fun sites of the year

check it out

new illustration for beebzteez

new mailer illustration for beebzteez to go out promoting their donkies tshirt
same deal as the last two.

oh and for those like me who didn't get the reference a donkey is a crap poker player that other more experienced players take to the cleaners (can you see the reference coming) or eat for breakfast.

location alarm / iM DRUNK AND WANT TO GET HOME

FLASH DEMO CLICK HERE CLICK HERE CLICK HERE FOR THE LOVE OF SOMEONE ELSE"S GOD CLICK HERE






so i ve debated putting this up for a long time, because before i was worried about someone making my idea and making their fortune, now i m just worried about this never being made.

This idea came to me after talking to my flat mate after he fell asleep on the bus and missed his stop for about the forth time in as many weeks. The concept is that your set this app/web page running on your smartphone (works best on non iphones as they allow background processing) you set a location on a google maps like map and when you get within a pre programmed distance of that place (be it your house, nearest pub, kebab shop, bus stop or whatever) your phone sets of an alarm. simple concept and there are other apps that do similar things, but at last check and on project commencement none designed for your London drunk taking a bus home.

the app is in alpha stage and the design was knocked up to explain the concept. cash made me the lovely flash test and the partner in crime mason thought up the actual technical workings.

if i can mobilize 2 grand it ll get made but chance is a fine thing.
x

pixel masters

Following a conversation with rakesh the other day about the concept of a pixel in the real world (hopefully new work on that theme coming soon) i remembered that i d done a couple of investigations into classic masters paintings and trying to reduce them to the fewest number of pixels possible whilst maintaining their iconic look and leaving them recognisable.

one day when i have some money i d like to frame them all at their relevant size and have set them all on one wall with an indesign links pallete with all the links brokens as an inside joke that no sane person would get or care about.

last fm output / spotify mash-up

heres the skin i made to be used by digitas london to put on their website using andy's technology (website concept went off in a different direction) which in is andy's own words;


"Version: 0.2 (alpha)
Author: Andrew Mason
Introduction

This jQuery plug-in uses Last.fm and lastfm-api-ext.appspot.com to retrieve a user’s music history and display it on a webpage or blog.
Features

* Pull real-time data from last.fm
* Fully customisable via CSS
* Open artist, album or track in Spotify via the music note link
* Show Recent tracks, top artists/albums/tracks

Coming soon

* Build and customise your own
* Embed in your own webpage/blog
* iGoogle & netvibes widget"


check it out here

pantytone generator screens

based on a pantone book from HGV that will my flatmate got when the studio relocated to Thailand. I wanted to archive the book on the internet as it was a beautiful piece of design history that computer technology has almost made redundant. However chatting to my partner in crime Andy he showed me how you could automate server processes to recreate the same steps automatically, meaning that people could actually create a page of separations with their own image, making a more desirable tool, that is actually useful and not just an archive.

The idea is that you when you come to the page, you:
pick your colour (which live changes the colour of the entire sites text and buttons)
upload your image
then output a page of the seperations that use the uploaded image: monotone in the colour you picked with the colour in 10% tint increments & duotone with black increasing in 10% tint increments. (see the image 2 for better explanation)
the user can then capture the entire page or choose a new colour.

well thats the idea anyway. I ve now finished the design of the two pages in snatched mornings before work and in the hours on the weekend i have spare. Andy has created a proof of concept located here. hopefully soon we'll get the time to hook the whole thing up. watch this space.

pantytone generator project progress

a first look screenshot of the project i ve been working on for too long to digitize and improve a pantone book from the 80's designs are done and the first page is sliced with pngs in the relevant place so that the chosen colour will change bits of the page automatically. still so much to do and so much help needed from the mason to pull in the server stuff but progress at least my friends
x