things » design

When did video game ads get so cool?

Will — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:02:33 +0000

I’m by no means a serious gamer — with kids and a busy job and such, free-time comes at a premium. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t get seriously blown away occasionally by the craziness that is the gaming industry, as well as the increasingly amazing art direction. And beyond the actual games, even the whole ad/trailer space has somehow gotten really interesting and short-film-like in the last little while. And yes, the opportunity cost of watching some good trailers is way lower than that of staying up all night playing an actual game. The Xbox360 crowd, especially, has some really great ads. Couple highlights for the folks who live without game culture…

Kind of a classic at this point, here’s a game ad, for a shooter no less, that’s really more of a mood piece. Its all about the music, obviously, but someone over at the ad agency (McCann-Erickson San Francisco) had a pretty inspired idea here — focus on the game, yeah, but in a totally new way. Gears of War is the game.

Another interesting ad, though this time more of an interesting urban set piece with absolutely no connection to video games whatsoever. A good ad nonetheless.

And lastly, a trailer for Bioshock (which doesn’t appear to be at all suitable for playing with my toddler). Holy cow.

So, um, go out and buy yourself some video games and waste a bunch of time. Just tell yourself its “art”.

Blank Plastic Cards

Will — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:25:41 +0000

I was playing around with Ning, and I noticed a Google ad on the sidebar for “Blank Plastic Cards”. Intrigued, I clicked on it. Lo and behold, a very pleasing site selling blank plastic cards (makes sense I guess). If ever I am looking for a blank plastic card (maybe a Pantone 242 to go with that Magentic Fields song), now I know where to go.

Viva la prefab

Will — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:26:18 +0000

Ok I love prefab, as we all should. Just ran across a blog with lots of pics and thoughts. Good distraction.

DO Research

Office building with a single (helical) floor

Will — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:22:12 +0000

Ok I admit I like this post. Using a helical, single-floor scheme would be cool for an office environment, and some of the mentioned variations are neat:

“The principle is a cylindrical building with a helical shape for the floor. The slope of the floor is 1.5% (it rises by 1.5 cm every meter), thus hardly noticeable. The height of each ’storey’ is 3 meters, so that when you walk 200 meters along the corridor, you have walked a full circle, but you end up one ’storey’ above or below your starting point. This results in a diameter of approximately 60 meters, therefore quite common for large skyscrapers. The corridor is on the outside, so that everybody has access to the fabulous views over the city. Offices are all on the inside. “

Not sure why the Guggenheim isn’t mentioned, and there’s also the very real issue that you need an elevator core for all kinds of infrastructural reasons in an office structure, but it would be a fun place to work.

The Best Windows Subsystem

Will — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:22:58 +0000

Let’s pause for a brief celebration of great industrial design. I have a 2002 Jetta. It’s an ok car in general, a V6 with a manual transmission so it’s pretty fun to drive, but it’s nowhere near my wife’s 2000 Accord in terms of overall robustness, build quality, etc. The one thing that is totally awesome, however, is the way the windows work. You know, those glass things that are on the doors that you look out of. Two killer features:

On both front side windows, you can press the switch once in either direction until it “clicks” to cause the window to go up or down all the way automatically. That’s right folks, not only to open them all the way (which my Honda does), but to close them as well. I’ve never tried the experiment of putting my arm in there to see how much pressure it takes to reverse them, but I imagine it wouldn’t chop it off. This is exceedingly useful for tollbooths (those old school kind with no EZ-Pass), drive-throughs, needing to give someone the finger, etc.
After you shut the car off and remove the key, you still have the ability to control the windows until you open the door. This is awesome for things like cracking them when parking in the heat, closing a window you accidentally left open, etc.

In any case, just wanted to take a moment to recognize the substantial accomplishment of the windows subsystem team at VW. Good show. Who the hell needs auto-parallel-parking Lexi anyway.

Lolcats? Yes, lolcats.

Will — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:20:29 +0000

Ok it’s late, so I admit it. I like lolcats. Well, maybe except for that all-too-ubiquitous Twitter-down one. Maybe I don’t like them as much as the good old days of all your base, but still, lolcats are good as far as memes go. Incidentally, I am also I huge fan of making custom t-shirts for my kids to wear (and annoy their mother), favorite sources are cafepress and neighborhoodies. So, naturally, I decided to make my very own lolcat and put it on a t-shirt for my 15 -month-old. That’s what any other self-respecting parent would do, right? Just put the order in, here’s what’s going on the front:

I’m pretty bad at graphics, so no great shakes, but I am confident that it will contribute to the already high regard in which I am held amongst the other parents at the playground.

P.S. cheers to that phenom of the week, those cheeseburger folks.

Show me the vectors!

Will — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:34:56 +0000

A fun space to think about it if you’re into both design and the Internets is the visualization of folksonomical relationships — tags, the relationships between tags, and the relationships between the data they tag. Anyway, I ain’t no expert, I’m just the nuts and bolts variety of software guy, but I’m always intrigued when reading about this stuff.

Dave Weinberger (notable most recently for Everything is Miscellaneous) with his take the new Technorati
One of my favorite conference talks, Shirky on this problem
Some attempts at showing this kind of stuff
Randomly, Tufte, one of my heros
And last but not least, a decent book from a few years ago, by a Brooklynite no less, that I have to assume is the inspiration for Weinberger’s title.

Furniture! (ICFF 2007)

Will — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:02:28 +0000

If you’re the type to be moderately into furniture, and why wouldn’t you be, then know that this week ICFF is going on, along with all the other NY Design Week craziness. Given that you’re probably not reading this blog if you’re an actual design person that reads all the design blogs, here are a few roundups for the laymen of some cool stuff: Design*Sponge, SallyTV, PSFK.

And, because it’s there, interesting/crazy architecture in Afghanistan.