Archive for the ‘Lab Report’ Category

ACDC vs Ironman 2

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

I ran across this today while watching some skateboarding videos on my lunch hour and it totally blew me away. The idea is simple, project a video onto a giant surface — like the facade of a building. It doesn’t matter if the building is not a flat surface.

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 – Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

It’s called Architectural Projection Mapping. This one is done by a Seeper, an interactive arts and technology collective, but there are many other companies doing similar projects. From what I have read, this is more popular in Europe but is now spreading to the U.S. Can’t wait to see one of these on a building near me! Lots of potential here.

Here are a few more examples:

3D Projection Mapping from anema on Vimeo.

The LightLine of Gotham from seeper on Vimeo.

KraftWork from seeper on Vimeo.


Awesome Fontstacks

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Continuing the discussion of new web typography options from our earlier posts Web Fonts and Cufon vs CSS3 vs Google Font API, I ran across this the other day: Awesome Fontstacks. And it is pretty awesome. Kurtis will back me on this.

This site allows you to “automatically match fonts based on typographical metrics, optimize the font bundles for their intended purpose, and deliver rock solid CSS for those fonts and their fallbacks to copy & paste”. Basically, you can go to this site and choose from 45 fonts (that are free and licensed for online use) to use for your headlines, body copy, decorative and monospaced needs. As you choose your font for each category, sample text in a window to the right updates to show you how it will look as copy. It only displays fonts that would be appropriate to use together so you don’t end up with, say, two similar sans serifs like Droid Sans as your headline font and Fontin Sans as your body copy font. This makes it really nice for me as a designer.

What makes it nice for web developers is that after you have chosen all your fonts, or your “fontstack”, you can conveniently download the font files and put them into a directory in your website then copy the CSS code to your stylesheets folder and link it from your website. Awesome, eh?

AND, each font stack has a back-up stack for those using browsers that don’t support @font-face.

P.S. Iron Maiden rules


Go Redlegs!

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Today, I thought it would be inappropriate of me not to mention that the Cincinnati Reds, a Major League Baseball team, are headed to the playoffs for the first time since 1995.

I grew up falling asleep listening to the games on my dad’s old battery powered transistor radio. As a kid, beside my dad, my idols were Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Ken Griffey Sr., George Foster and Dave Concepción. I followed them all through grade school and most of high school, going to a few games but always listening on the radio to the announcers Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall. As skateboarding began to take over my life, baseball faded and the last thing I remember paying attention to was them being in 1st place from the beginning of the season to the end of the season in 1990 and then sweeping the As in the World Series.

I totally forgot all about baseball until 2002. I had been living here in Portland, OR for a few years and my brother, a die-hard reds fan for all of his life who was living in Flagstaff AZ, mentioned that he had been listening to Reds games on-line. I “borrowed” his password and logged into MLB.com Gameday audio and was immediately taken back to my childhood and hometown of Dayton, OH. The audio I was listening to in real time was of the same two announcers, Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall, and from the same radio station, 700 WLW that I had grown up listening to. I felt like I was a kid again. It really took me back.

Vintage Marty and Joe

Since then, I have been following the Reds and listening to almost all the Reds games religiously. Joe Nuxhall passed away a few years ago but Marty, the hall of famer, is still broadcasting and is hilarious to listen to. It is amazing the amount of work I can get done in 3 hours when I tune everything else out and just listen to the game.

Anyway, since I returned to following the Reds in 2002, they have not had a winning season. It was hard to be a Reds fan because they seemed to always lose and never finished the season over.500. That is until this year. It has been so exciting to follow them and listen to their come-from-behind, 2-out rallies and win most of their games. They clinched the National League Central Division last Tuesday and are now headed to the playoffs. I would love to see them go all the way and win the World Series but that is a long shot. But you never know. You honestly never know what you will see when you watch a baseball game.

Go Reds.


Download The New Google Image Search

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Just kidding. That’s an inside joke here at Zoom. You really don’t have to download anything to see the Google Image Search makeover. It is already in effect on the Google.

Here is what the old Image Search looked like:

old search

Here’s what’s new in the refreshed design of Google Images:

  • Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.

new search

  • Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
  • Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
  • A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”

hover pane

  • Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
  • Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.


Clearly Awesome

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

The idea is simple: you take a photo of your surroundings and set this photo as your background or wallpaper.

I had been thinking of doing this to my monitor(s) here at Zoom for a while when I ran across this article at Smashing Magazine detailing the process and showing some really cool applications. And not just to your monitor or laptop but also your PSP or phone as well. Here are a few that really caught my eye.

You can find a Transparent Screens Flicker Group here and a tutorial for creating your own here.


The Champagne of Packaging Redesign

Friday, August 13th, 2010

A few months ago, I noticed that something was different about the packaging of the Champagne of Beers which is Miller High Life. It was much simpler, bolder and graphic with an emphasis on the logo and Lucy, the girl in the moon. After a little research, I found out that this redesign was done by the San Francisco office of Landor, with illustration assistance by Chris Mitchell.

The old logo on the left has been simplified by eliminating the bevels, gradients and hi-lights and the curves are a little more graceful. The letters in HIGH LIFE are cleaned up, thinner and more readable. It is also just a one color logo now.

Old Lucy on the left is also more simplified and now wears hearts instead of diamonds.

One nice detail of the packaging occurs when you set multiple sized cans sitting next to each other.

Overall, the updated look is definitely a breath of fresh air with many great details and graphics working together.

Cheers.


Snuggies Plus

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

The last time we went to the pet store, something on the clearance table caught my wife’s eye. It was a bright pink Snuggie made specifically for dogs. And it was five bucks. And so we bought it. Poor Pepper. She was a good sport, though. But all she did was sleep in it. From the photos on the box, it looked like she would be playing backgammon with Hoss or using the remote control with this paws-free blanket-like invention. Maybe I put it on wrong.

While doing a quick bit of research for this post, I ran across a few other Snuggie-like products. Behold the Peekaru and the Lippi Selk’Bag.


Super Slow Motion Dogs

Friday, March 5th, 2010

I thought my dog, Hoss, moved in slow motion until I saw this video titled “The Catch”. It is a commercial for Pedigree dog food by TBWA Toronto, shot at 1000 frames per second that has gone viral. The video was inspired by the French community of digital artists, Pleix, who made a video called Birds in 2006. Birds also features dogs in super slow motion but includes laser lights and 80′s-style synthesizer music. Both are sights to behold.