Here is a site by plate for Wild Advertising. Had a chance to speak to them and asked them to provide a fun fact prior to this whole project.
The brief was for us to create a website design that is able to capture the company’s culture, has to be relatively timeless and easy to use. It should also project an image of professionalism without coming accross as boring or nondescript.Adhering to the company’s existing corporate Identity, the website is predominantly kept to a greyscale palette. This gives it a rather business like setting, but to counter this air of seriousness, we turned to the use of simple hand-drawn animation to inject some fun and quirkyness to the website. For example, if the cursor is left alone for a short while, it gets attacked. Afterall, its in WILD territory!
Fun Fact:
After creating quite a few hand drawn, frame by frame animated sequences for the mouse ‘death’ sequences, I was a bit drained and worried that I may not make the deadline if this were to go on (its a very time consuming process!)… So to decided to turn off the lights in one of the sections and use sound effects of different types of screams to continue telling the story. In the darkness, its totally up to the user’s own imagination to guess what have happened to their mouse cursor.
I’m glad the website is getting some attention because the clients have been very supportive along the way. They basically left their trust in me and I’m happy to have been able to deliver a product that they absolutely adore:)
- Sean Lam, Plate
Working together with the amazing Emily Gobeille, we created the interactive installation, ‘Funky Forest’ which premiered at the 2007 Cinekid festival in the Netherlands. ‘Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it. Made with openFrameworks.
Writing for HP blog a trend competition in a viewpoint of an interactive designer, I believe that future lies in selling experiences.
Websites and applications will not be made just to show information and having to experience the website using just mouse interaction only.
Taking one example, Pill and Pillow, from Hong Kong, has done a website for Eric Chan Design, http://www.ericchandesign.com that user could interact using laptop with new technologies like motion sensor and the website will be responding to your movements when you swing or rock your notebook.
Whereas on the other hand, using the influx technology of markers to make an Augmented Reality, Boards Magazine showed us how from their March issue print magazine.
It seems like these technologies has almost been starting to have their own category; Augmented Reality (is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery.) to Projection Mapping to Holograms to Visual Sound to Touch Screens and Gesture/Motion Interaction and we will definitely see more of that everywhere in the future, with more people becoming tech-saavy and internet-connected anywhere.
Below are a few selected examples of how such technologies have been brought nearer to us, making things interesting one way or another.
Augmented Reality
(1) Interactive Store Front Display: Interactive dog that follows you around, discerns your gestures as friendly or aggressive and tries to engage you in a play.
(2) Augmented Reality Cosmetic Mirror in Tokyo: All you do is sit down and let the camera scan your face. The terminal then gives you tailored recommendations to test make-up and recommendations without even having to pick up a mascara brush.
(3) Augmented Business Card
(3) Li Ti Hui Chun: New Year Greeting Card
Touch Screens
(1) Interactive Museum
(2) Citroen In-Store Touch Screen Kiosk
(3) Interactive Mirror for DIESEL GINZA
(4) LCF Graduate Show Installation by Moving Brands
So what will the point be? What will be the future of design? Will it be those? Maybe not. No one really knows that I can be sure. I can also be sure there are a group of people are starting to hate so many new technologies coming into our life and always yearn for more handcrafts and traditional art techniques like letterpress for example.
Art Director Jopsu Ramu from Musuta Ltd. (a multidisciplinary design agency based in Helsinki & Tokyo) has created together with Shun Kawakami (artless Inc) an artist and designer from Tokyo – a piece titled Urban Abstract. This digital art piece is being shown as the November break bumpers on one of the biggest commercial TV channels in Finland: TV Nelonen.
Urban Abstract -piece was born in Tokyo during 2009. It consists of 40 X five second clips or it can be viewed as a one 200 second journey.
Urban Abstract is a first piece created in collaboration with Ramu and Kawakami. The artists have plans for new pieces and are currently looking for interesting projects to work on and to continue this Helsinki – Tokyo collaboration.
Wonderwall is a Japanese Interior design studio, which was created in the year 2000 of Masamichi Katayama.
It’s new website structured with a three-dimensional scaling product wall proves to be like a wall of colours and its miracles.
Yugo Nakamura, one of the most impressing and innovative Flash developers world-wide and its Design studio tha Ltd. are responsible for the conversion of the website. If you can’t recall who or what it is, you should be able to remember HELLO, WORLD!, Dropclock, playMUJI, Kashiwa Sato, or UNIQLO Grid.