As some of you may know I attended the Flash Forward conference in Boston last week. I finally have a chance to write about it a bit.
There was a great turn out this year and the sessions where all well attended. There were several highlights. Adobe showed off “Moviestar” which is the code name for the next flash player at the opening keynote. It has all sorts of video enhancements: h.264 and hardware scaling. They also demoed the dual core support which results in about a 70% performance boost. They gave a demo of AIR and some of the cool apps that are in development. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to AIR but over the course of the week I really got excited about it. It’s one to watch.
Craig Swann’s presentation on day two was really good. He showed a lot of his physical computing/music/video work. Great stuff. Later that day I sat in on Mario Klingemann’s presentation about generative art. He is working on some really interesting concepts (MMMM….100 dimensional vectors).
Well the silicone is here. We tested it today and by golly it works! Now it did point out one minor flaw in my mad scientist ways, not enough LEDs. So tomorrow I am going to pull everything apart, again, and drill more holes and put in another 26 leds on the other side of the acrylic. Not a huge deal but a bit of a pain. Once this is done things should be as close to perfect as they can get. New pictures will be posted tomorrow.
Dig through- there is a lot of wacky stuff in here. Not all design related, but if you are into popculture insanity from the 1900’s to 1970’s, this is the place to come. My favs are in the “Institute of Official Cheer” section near the bottom- but there are niffty bits throughout the site. A good place to come when you’ve got designer’s block.
Since Tom totally forgot about the dd06 crew in his last rumours post (j/j Tom haha), I just wanted to showcase some of our work after VFS. So here they are…
The rest of ddo6, plz post your completed work and let everyone see what you’ve been up too.
And also, keep a look out for Stefan as I am sure he’ll be doing some crazy stuff at AKQA in SF.
Hey everyone. I’m glad that something started happening on this site. People are actually talking. Anyway, me (Bart) and Antonio from dd08 decided to pull off some kind of mockups. We ended up with two themes.
‘Upcomming events’ could be a great place where Tom could post about all the events around digital design (like the emails we get).
Banners could be a interesting concept where students can create an own banner to advertise their blogs… There can be a lot of them and they can run on the right side filling up the space that will get created by posts.
I must say I am quite surprised, but mostly excited that a lot of people are interested in the future of the DD Blog, I think we broke the record for the most amount of replies for the blog, or at least I hope we did. Some of your comments were really helpful on the development of the second revision of the layout. This time I made a wireframe of the site. I’m still working on the graphics that this design will feature, but this will give my team the ability to start coding the site.
I will say some of the features we will implement on the blog, but first of all here’s the new layout.
Layout
This new layout follows the VFS logo standards, the logo is positioned in the way the brand book specifies (thanks Brett for such book) the search area will be positioned opposite to the logo, by this I will give the search function a little bit more of spotlight than before, because the DDBlog is quite extensive and people use this function a lot, so this is a good way to incorporate the search bar at the same hierachy level of the navigation, which resides next to it, and if more sections need to be added they will be flushed right, starting 2 pixels before the search area starts.
This layout will encompass a quite graphic-heavy header image (the big blue area on top,) this image will incorporate the title “DDblog” or “Digital Design Blog” in it’s visuals.
We decided to keep the same structure, with just a little tweak, the size will now be 950px wide, in which the main two sections, (Main Post, Secondary Post,) will be completely visible at a 800×600 resolution, since they both share the dimensions of 750px wide. Also the design will float to the left, and the remaining area will be filled with a texture, that still needs to be determined. To finish up the layout section of this post is the footer, just like the header, it will incorporate graphics and maybe some type if needed. The darkened area on the bottom is the representative of what is below the fold.
New Features
Some of the features we will try to implement, is a directory section, which name we will give it to that section is still on hold, but I will refer to it as crew, this section will have a headshot and information of the active members of the blog. This way employers or other students will be able to check at their website, portfolio, etc.
We will implement a picture wrap-to-text function, this meaning that if you want to post an image that is really small this will automatically make the image float to the left and wrap text around it, (I’m not completely sure on how this implementation works, It might be a check box that will make you decide if you want to wrap text around the image or not.)
These are the features that I can remember at the moment, I will update the post on Monday after I have a meeting with hopefully Brett, if he’s still around, and my team.
By the way happy Mexican Independence Day, (September 16, 1810)
After our recent Reason classes, this video really resonated with me! The video shows the instrument being played by the creator, a man named Toshio Iwai (the guy behind Electroplankton - a Nintendo DS music game). He creates a pretty awesome song.
“The reality right now is that many people, including professional musicians and kids and simply passive listeners, have the chance to create their own music. This isn’t a traditional musical instrument though, it’s got the perfect balance between being a musical instrument and a device for listening to ready-made pieces.”
What is Tenori-on?
“What the TENORI-ON is:
* A well-designed piece of interactive art.
* An innovative and fully-contained musical instrument that allows anyone to easily produce very listenable music.
* A very tactile feedback-loop experience. The interplay of the lights with sound is incredibly mesmerizing and draws you in immediately.
* Incredibly immersive.
* Expensive - approx $1200 USD.
Let me start off by saying what the TENORI-ON is not:
* It is not a programmable synthesizer or sound module.
* Although it can hold some limited samples, it is not a sampler.
* It is not a compositional tool, not in the traditional sense at least.
* It has a tactile x/y matrix element but is not a Kaoss pad.
* It is definitely not the type of highly flexible “soup-to-nuts” production workstation device most working musicians would use to compose and produce their next musical opus on.”
I feel like this sort of thing, while definitely much less feature-friendly than a program like Reason, which does the same thing much better, it would be a blast to play around with. It is a bit like the multitouch display in that it draws people in to try it, which programs like Reason often scare people away from even going near it.
For people who don’t know, Tyler, Pablo and myself, from dd09, are redesigning the DDBlog, and here is the first mockup of the design for your viewwing pleasure, tell us what you think!
We decided to go for a fairly simple design to give an emphasis on the posts. The new blog features a three column design.
The first column (far left) will host the feature posts, important news, articles and what not. The second one (middle one) is for the not so important posts, but still important enough to be posted about. Lastly the third column will have a link-list of websites we should all look at, being informative, inspiration or merely recreational; and a blogroll of current and graduated students who keep their blogs updated.
There’s some details we need to work on such as the logo placement, but as I mentioned before, this is the first draft.
