27 Aug 2010 : Zoe Griffin e-newsletter
We've just put together possibly the world's most sparkly newsletter for celeb watcher and blogger extraordinaire, Zoe Griffin. Visit zoegriffin.co.uk to sign up for it, and if you like what you see why not vote for Zoe in the Cosmo blog awards in the Celebrity category.
25 Jun 2010 : The iPhone 4, a few thoughts
My mobile contract expired last month, I'd seen the leaked iPhone 4 pics through Gawker, and was pretty convinced my next phone would be the HTC Desire. So why did I find myself outside the Kilburn branch of O2 at 8.00 in the morning awaiting the iPhone 4?
I've never queued for a product launch before, and to be fair I didn't this time. The queue was well established, 30 or so hardy soles patiently awaiting the 8.02 opening time.
I thought "bugger this" and went to work.
At work I was asked, "What is it that's so great about the new iPhone?", I floundered, "Erm, its got a better screen, and its erm just better." It was at this point I realised I'd been sucked in by the Apple marketing machine.
You can say what you like about Apple products but they certainly know how to market them and build up media frenzy. I'm sure its no coincidence either that there's never enough product on launch day, as noted in this hilarious post.
I have to say of all the various Apple products I've owned over the years, the iPhone has been my favourite (my MacBook Pro the least, broken graphics card, broken fan, broken battery…). Your mobile phone is something that you carry around wherever you go, you form more of an attachment to it than say a tv, so its probably not surprising I temporarily forgot the most important rule about buying Apple hardware:
Never buy the first generation of anything. EVER.
There's always problems, which are invariably solved by generation two, leading to a much better product. This time around the guinea pigs (sorry, paying customers) are complaining about lack of reception, the external antenna (which forms part of the case) is affected by people, shock horror, holding the phone.
Apple seem to be aware of this, as they've produced a special case to hold the phone (they usually leave cases and other crap to 3rd parties).
Me? Well i'll be waiting a couple of months for them to iron out that particular problem before I upgrade… Or maybe i'll finally join the ever growing numbers of android users….
15 Jun 2010 : Submit your celebrity images to iPap.me
We've been hard at work rolling out some updates to our celebrity spotting site iPap. Users can now add images of any celebrities they've spotted, as well as giving the gossip on what they're up to. On the picture front we've hit the giddy (and slightly comical) heights of Vanessa Feltz in a boat, though its fair to say we're hoping to catch some bigger fish....
14 Jun 2010 : Relive England v USA - in lego
If you missed the England v USA match at the weekend (apparently a 1-1 victory for the US), you can relive the full horror (rendered painstakingly in Lego!) courtesy of the Guardian, lovely stuff.
10 Apr 2010 : Celebrity spotting website ipap.me launches
ipap.me is a celebrity spotting website, and after a good 5 months of work we've finally opened it up to the general public. iPap's mission is to record where celebrities are, and what they're up to. Users go to ipap.me on their mobile and record an iPap whenever they see someone famous. The mobile website, which is optimised for iPhone and Android devices, uses geolocation methods to record the position of the iPap, which is then displayed on the website and mobile site, as well as posted to the twitter account @ipapme. Of course if users don't have one of these devices they're still able to post iPaps through the website.
One of the key aspects of the site is that its not just about the celebrities, its about the people doing the spotting as well, so there's a scoring system and various top 10 lists. You also score more points if somebody else spots the same celeb at the same location within a couple of hours of your spot.
Its very early days for the site, but initial feedback has been great and as we continue development hopefully the user base will begin to expand, which is crucial if the project is to realise its potential.
13 Jan 2010 : Paul Merton and the giant rabbits
2010 is barely a month old and already we have our first giant rabbit story of the year. On his trek through Europe, Paul Meron meets Karl Szmolinsky, who once supplied the North Korean goverment with several giant bunnies.
The Koreans envisaged a giant rabbit in everyone's home, more specifically in a pot on their stove, a cunning method of solving the country's food shortage. The project didn't really get off the ground however, as Kim Jong-il reportedly ate all the rabbits....
27 Nov 2009 : Sugababes love Windows 7
I was initially quite cynical about this Microsoft/Sugababes tie up. For starters the design looks like they've just comped the Windows 7 loving Sugababes in at the last minute - probably when the Pussycat Dolls dropped out, and the video scenarios are really pretty cringeworthy....
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised its probably a match made in heaven. With every new Windows OS people hope its going to be as good as OS X, but it never really is. With every new Sugababes line up people hope they'll be as good as Girls Aloud but they never really are.
23 Nov 2009 : Andrew Winch website launches
Andrew Winch is one of the world's leading yacht designers and I've recently been involved in the redesign of his company's website (Andrew Winch Designs) for brand design consultants Inaria. The new site is more image led than its predecessor and is fully content managed, including the flash elements. The Project History interactive is a particular favourite as it gives a really good overview of the amazing yachts, jets and residences that he's created over the years.
05 Nov 2009 : A new look for hannahteare.com
Been busy of late refining the original site design for hannahteare.com. More and more of the new images were landscape in format, and the existing design wasn't really doing them justice. The new system shows the work off to maximum effect as well as allowing busy Art Directors to navigate through the portfolio quickly and easily. The site is also cms driven (using modx) giving the client the ability to change content. The shoot featuring the Pucci prints has to be seen to be believed.
31 Oct 2009 : Happy Halloween!
I was quite pleased with this bit of pumpkin carving until I came across the pumpkin version of the Death Star on Fantasy pumpkins - where else! Apparently it took about 9 hours to produce, maybe i'll start carving a bit earlier next year.
31 Aug 2009 : Web navigation is about moving forward
I stumbled on this article by Gerry McGovern whilst doing some interface work, which was drowning fast under a sea of links.
"Your job is not to design for all possible directions someone might want to take. Your job is to understand the primary direction your most important customers are heading, and to remove obstacles in the way of them arriving at that destination."
Rather than overloading users with a page of links, you need to focus on the task they're trying to complete, and present them with navigation options that best enable them to do it. There's some other interesting articles and perspectives on gerrymcgovern.com too, its well worth a look.
17 Aug 2009 : Bunny chairs
Check out this interesting installation by LAVA (laboratory for visionary architecture) for the Sherman contemporary art foundation. The backlit honeycomb cells are the star of the show, but how cool are those bunny chairs! Thanks for the tip Caspar :)
02 Aug 2009 : Winter in Melbourne
I'm currently enjoying myself in Melbourne, Australia as part of a 30th birthday celebration. Its quite a shock going from the UK summer (average as it is) to winter in Melbourne - which is surprisingly cold. I'm about to escape up north to Queensland for some sunshine :)
06 Jul 2009 : Faile Bunny Girl
I spotted this lovely artwork in our local pub, and after some intensive googling and two narrow ebay loses, we finally have a copy adorning the walls of Hoppermagic HQ. It is of course a print of Faile's iconic 'Bunny girl' image, and you can even find the bunny loitering around Brick Lane if you look hard enough.
28 May 2009 : An evening with Cheryl Cole
Been working very hard of late but I managed to find time for some r'n'r, in the form of Girls Aloud at Wembley Arena. The highlight of the show was when the mighty Aloud floated across the crowd on a giant walkway. You can probably make out Cheryl in the black stockings, and yes its fair to say the outfits were quite racy. There's also been a tough regime of sit-ups along the way by the looks of things. Oh and the music was quite good too. Coming next in the gig review section we'll be reviewing Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds Live, stay tuned....
08 May 2009 : First Sharify application launches
The first Adobe AIR application built using the Sharify payment system has just been released. Called Nihongoup, the application is a fun educational tool for learning Japanese. Having no Japanese skills we don't know exactly what's going on but it looks terrific and its great to see Sharify up and running in the wild.
13 Apr 2009 : Social media marketing
There's an interesting debate on Matt Haughey's blog about the merits of social media marketing vs just making a product that's so brilliant that it finds its way to the top organically:
"So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need 'social media marketing' after all."
Obviously its not a black and white issue, you have to do something when you start up to get the ball rolling, and as someone points out, what do you do if your competition has a better product, surely you don't just give up....
...well if you're trying to market Microsoft's Zune maybe you should. A survey of teenagers has found 100 per cent will buy one of Apple's music players in the next year. Of those questioned only 4% had a Zune and no amount of Twittering by Microsoft will improve this.
07 Apr 2009 : Hoppermagic updates
The latest version of Hoppermagic is finally live, hooray! There's been a few graphical tweaks, but the main thing is we're now fully content managed using Expression Engine for the CMS. It was a relatively painless process, and I thought I'd share a couple of EE plugins that I've found useful:
File Extension by Mark Huot makes it easier to upload multiple images for a blog entry.
LG Social bookmarks takes the hassle out of adding bookmarks to your posts as it works out the paths you need for each service.
SS Friendly this one works in conjunction with your 404 page, it examines the final segment of the url to suggest content on your site that best matches the incorrect url.... So if you try this dodgy link for example www.hoppermagic.com/shair it will give you a sensible suggestion. It's all in the details :)
23 Mar 2009 : shAIR becomes sharify
You may have noticed the lovely logo and naming we came up with for shAIR, a system built by Luck Laboratories that allows you to make money out of your AIR applications.
Sadly Adobe informed us we were infringing on their trademark. Specifically you're not allowed the word 'air' in your business name or domain name if your product relates to Adobe AIR™ technology. We're a little bit gutted (not entirely surprised given some other similar cases) but its just the sheer pointlessness of it all that's got us down a bit. We're not pretending to be Adobe (passing-off), we make that fact clear on the website and I'd like to think our product makes AIR development more attractive if anything. But rules are rules and we whilst we'd love to argue this one out (I've watched a lot of Ally McBeal in my time) we have better things to do....
Anyway you can read our full statement here and if you want to make money out of your Air applications I suggest you give sharify a try.
19 Mar 2009 : Nano:ztag small, cute, smart
Its been a big week, Apple have announced a raft of fixes enhancements for the iphone, (copy and paste!). Google have launched street view vomit , but best of all the Nano:ztag has arrived!
For those not in the know the Nabaztag is a wi-fi enabled rabbit, Nano:ztag is his smaller RFID enabled friend. The Nabaztag brand is a great example of how tecchy things don't have to be tecchy, there's so much character, personality and fun running through everything they do.
Their Mir:ror product looks interesting too, using an RFID enabled coffee mug to sign into facebook, though I suspect (like the Nabaztag) the novelty will wear off. Our Nabaztag, whilst extremely cherished, has been inactive for a while now, though it might be time to fire him up again....
06 Mar 2009 : Who's watching the Watchmen?
Even though I haven't read the graphic novel, I quite enjoyed Watchmen. It dragged a little bit in places, but the cinematography is well done, and the characters are an interesting if flawed bunch. We'll give it a rabbit rating of 7/10. What did strike a chord though is the opening sequence which is really lovely, a combination of slow motion action, 3D typography and a bit of Bob Dylan, what more could you want :)
15 Feb 2009 : Open Amsterdam
Visited Amsterdam at the weekend and came across a really cool little shop. Open is a collective of young dutch designers that sell their designs in a cute little shop just off Dam Square. They all take it in turns to man the shop so you get to chat with the people that create the work.
09 Feb 2009 : shAIR
We've been hard at work on the identity and naming for shAIR. Devised by Luck laboratories, shAIR is a .swc library that can be easily incorporated into Adobe AIR projects thereby allowing developers to charge money for their applications. The admin section of the shair.it website provides a suite of tracking and management tools, giving you complete control over your shAIRware application.
19 Jan 2009 : Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Popped down to the Natural History Museum at the weekend to check out the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. After negotiating the longest queue in the world we were finally treated to some truely amazing animal photography. There were a lot of favourites, but I really loved 'Ghost of a March hare' as it captures the character of the animal so well.
15 Dec 2008 : Updates to hannahteare.com
We've just added a selection of new images to fashion stylist Hannah Teare's website. As always there's some really lovely stuff there but we particularly like these chicks enjoying a nice cuppa down in Brighton.
28 Nov 2008 : Europa website launches
Hoppermagic provided the flash programming and animation for this job, with the design and illustrations created by Mosley Design. The site was programmed using the Gaia framework which took care of the repetative tasks; loaders, intros, outros, leaving more time for creative work like page animations. Even though the site is pure flash there is also an accessible version running in parallel courtesy of Gaia's SEO tools. This means the site is 100% Google friendly and i'm looking forward to seeing how it performs.
08 Nov 2008 : Memory Mayhem wins bronze!
Exciting news! Multiplayer Memory Mayhem, our entry into nonoba's multiplayer gaming competition, has scooped the third prize! The judges particularly liked the 'Excellent graphics and animations'. There were a lot of very good entries and we're well chuffed to pick up some recognition for all the hard work that we put in, can't wait to start on the next game....
03 Nov 2008 : Multiplayer Memory Mayhem
Collaborating with Kelvin Luck, I've worked on the design and illustrations for Multiplayer Memory Mayhem, our entry to nonoba's 'Multiplayer API Kick Off Competition'. The game is a fast paced multiplayer version of pairs, where you compete against other players to match up as many animals as you can. It's extremely good fun and highly addictive.
17 Oct 2008 : Biometrics makes the 2008 D&AD Annual
The Welcome Trust's Biometrics installation, which I worked on the concepts for, has made it into 2008's D&AD Annual, there's a nice video of Alex from Ico playing interacting with the finished exhibit here.
06 Oct 2008 : Hoppermagic v2 launches
Welcome to hoppermagic v2! There's a few design tweaks left to do, some css that needs tidying and an 'About' page that hasnt even been started yet, but at least now you can check out the latest work and experiments. The next stage of the redesign will be to make the site content managed (I'm going to be delving into ExpressionEngine shortly) and enabling all the bookmarking functions that today's kids seem to be into :)
