Man, there is a serious overload of super-hot work being produced at the moment. There’s an abundance of inspiration out there for anyone involved in interactive design - so no more excuses for producing mediocre work!

Here’s just a handful of the amazing stuff I came across today:

Let It Bleed: http://www.letitbleedbook.com/
Absolutely first class example of what can be achieved within the boundaries of a mostly HTML-based site.

Epsonality: http://epsonality.com/
This site just blew me away. Big Spaceship and BSSP really created something incredible here. And this isn’t just a big budget splurge on Epson’s part - this is a truly engaging experience for the user. I’m sold.

Red Issue: http://www.red-issue.com/
Beautiful and engaging website that allows you to browse by using mouse gestures. Why didn’t I think of that?!

Hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think.

I had the opportunity to attend the launch event for the all new Adobe Creative Suite 4 today… man, it totally freaked me out! I would have never expected an upgrade as big as this - CS4 is a quantum leap from where CS3 left off.

Here’s an outline of my favorite new features:

• Illustrator
  • Multiple “artboards” (pages) - it’s about freekin time! Freehand users can finally migrate across. This artboard functionality is super-cool - in a single Illustrator document, you can have an entire campaigns artwork layed out over the entire stage, e.g. an A2 poster, a flyer, a sticker, a CD, a web banner, etc.
  • The gradient tool has been totally upgraded - rather than using the gradient panel, the gradient slider control appears right on top of the object you’re applying the gradient to. You can change the gradient, add colors, move it around and change the style right there. Very nice
  • Blob drawing (Flash’s method of painting and creating shapes) has been incorporated.
• Photoshop
  • More sophisticated 3d object controls
  • Content-aware scaling - you can stretch out or compress an image without objects distorting (and people getting fatter / thinner).
  • Photoshop can now make use of your GPU (the processor built on to your graphics card) which speeds things up hugely. This enables slick, smooth zooming and panning (reminiscent of Microsoft Seadragon) and general speedy rendering and processing.
  • A new panel specially for custom and preset Adjustments.
• Flash
  • Tweening and animation has been totally reimagined. No more creating multiple keyframes for tweens, and no more guide layers to tween objects along paths. Creating a tween is a single-click process, and moving an object creates a bezier curve that it completely editable for creating complex motion paths. There’s also a handy “Animation Presets” panel to quickly create common animations, like ball bouncing, zooming out, etc.
  • There is also a Motion Editor panel that allows you to fine-tune motion easing.
  • For those of you who are familiar with creating animation in After Effects, Adobe have basically canned Flash’s method of animation in favor of After Effects methods and tools.
  • This also means 3D! Objects now have X, Y and Z positioning, so you can animate objects using 3D techniques. Divide a scene into a foreground and background to give the illusion of depth, or create more complex animations with objects flying in within a 3D space. Hectic. Only problem is that THIS functionality required Flash Player 10 to play. Sucky.
  • You can import an After Effects composition into Flash in order to add interactivity to a scene / animation. Freekin brilliant!
  • A new Bones tool allows you to join multiple objects together by creating a skeleton which can be animated really easily. This makes character animation such a breeze.
• Premier
  • Managing loads and loads of video clips is a total mission, particularly when you need to find a particular clip. Premier now includes a transcribe tool that… wait for it - scans video clips, performs voice recognition and transcribes the voice, to be used as meta data allow for quick easy searching. Seriously sophisticated stuff.
• Integration between the products totally rocks… a few examples:
  • Create an After Effects comp directly from Premier - edit the comp in After Effects and the clip immediately updates itself in Premier without rendering.
  • In Dreamweaver, drag a PSD onto the stage and you’re able to Save For Web and create a JPEG (or GIF / PNG / etc.) right then and there. Later, if you edit the original PSD in Photoshop, the JPEG created from it in Dreamweaver updates itself.
  • Open a video file in Photoshop and edit individual frames… *gasp*
• All of the applications now feature a consistent appearance with the following features:
  • A “breadcrumb” trail detailing where you are within an object “nest”.
  • Tabbed file editing (much like tabbed browsing in modern web browsers)
  • Stack modes allowing easy rearranging of assets within the workspace

Sincere apologies if I’ve gotten some of the terminology completely wrong, but I’ve done my best.

There really is so much more, but let me stop waffling on and on and leave the detail up to the professionals. Check out the following sites for much more detail:

• the Adobe website
• Adobe TV
• Adobe unveils CS4 suite (Macworld)
• Photoshop & Illustrator CS4 Video
• A whole whack of other videos available on YouTube

So here’s the new Wordpress Theme - based on the Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks.The intention with this version was twofold:

1. To create something REALLY simple and fast and remove all the fluff and design bull
2. To adapt the interface to be more of a content aggregation tool - bringing in my Twitter and Delicious feeds.

It’s not meant to be a piece of groundbreaking design by any means - just something simple and functional. That said, it’s really quite difficult to force yourself not to add a shadow here and a swoosh over there. Intentional simplicity with a touch of class isn’t easy to achieve.

The TO DO list for the theme is still exceptionally long, but in the interest moving forward, here’s the 1.0 release that will be slowly upgraded over the next month or so. Let me know what you think!

There’s been a couple months of silence from my side - largely due to an INSANE workload. Over the last few weeks I’ve been working hard to try and bring back some balance in my life - part of which is having an hour a day to dedicate to this site and producing some cool content that others might be interested in.

Happy to report that things are back on track, and I’m working on a redesign  - the aim being to work out a few usability issues and align the site’s look-and-feel with how I would like it to ideally function and serve / aggregate content from various sources. ETA - September 28th. Watch this space.

It’s been two weeks of slogging through roughly 220 entries, but first round (shortlisting) and second round (scoring) judging is complete. The ballots are in, and we wait patiently to see who will scoop the birds (not to mention the Grand Prix).

I have some mixed feelings about this years entries. By far the coolest entries were in the Digital Campaign category. It’s fantastic to see agencies putting in so much effort to close the loop and develop really solid, cross-channel communication (and by that I mean campaigns involving microsites, email, mobile, blogs, social media, FaceBook, YouTube, even installations). REALLY awesome. I know the harsh reality of client budgets in South Africa, which means that agencies must have poured their blood, sweat and tears into the work… and to them I take my hat off.

In terms of the other categories, even though the year marked the biggest overall digital increase, as well as in niche categories like mobile, viral and online advertising, I’m left with a feeling of frustration. As much as creative concept and execution is important, it means nothing if not in the best interest of the client. I found a fair amount of creative “fluff”. Oh, and how useful is a HUGE preload on a Flash website in a South African market anyway, even if it is insanely awesome?

Lets not forget the plagiarism. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take inspiration from the rest of the world, but if you’re going to use someone else’s idea, at least put a new and original spin on it … or better it.

Enough about that. Besides the minor frustrations, it was by far the best digital year to date, both in terms of number of entries and in terms of quality. Onwards and upwards!

Andy Ellis and Piers Buckle, the award-winning editors of Men’s Health and Men’s Health Living magazines have joined to form an independent creative agency called TypeFace Media. Andy & Piers approached Stonewall with the brief to create a completely unconventional website reflective of their approach to business.

Working in close collaboration with them, our approach was to develop a Flash-based website that incorporates a Typeface character created from the typeface lettering, as well as a navigational mechanic designed to illustrate the fact that Typeface Media provides you with “any type of face you need”.

The finished product features wild, quirky animation and hilarious sound effects designed to entice the user to explore and discover some of the sites hidden gems. I like it. I like it a lot.

• Check out the website
• Check out their blog