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 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.

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.

My thought for the first month was to strictly do Adobe Illustrator tutorials. These became something to fall back on when I was feeling uninspired which so far has been about half the time. I cannot believe all I have learned from following these few tutorials—everything from basic commands that I should know (or have just forgotten) to advanced techniques.  Thought I would share a few of the simpler ones because they have come in super handy since I relearned/discovered them.

To scale just the pattern that has filled a shape, select the shape, bring up the scale tool’s dialog box by double clicking on the tool in the toolbar and check only Patterns in the Options section and then type in a scale percentage.

Cycle through color models in the color panel by shift clicking the spectrum bar at the bottom of the panel.

Option + Command click and drag a slider in the color panel to move the other sliders in relation to it. This keeps similar color but with a different tint or intensity. (Especially helpful in RGB mode when creating a gray.)

Make a layer a “Template ” layer buy selecting Template from the Layer Panel’s fly-out menu. This will lock the layer and make the graphic transparent for easy tracing.

16 two-color gradients are much more manageable than one 17 color gradient.

I have also learned that sometimes rasters have their place in Illustrator (especially drop shadows). Most the rasters I used were eventually vectorized and/or live traced to achieve some great effects I never thought possible.

Hope you find this useful. Here’s to another successful and productive 333 days.

Anyway, I ran across this video of Mobile Mobile an interactive installation by James Theophane and it caused me take a break from my usual metal massacre, get inspired and actually enjoy a traditional holiday song.

Experience Mobile Mobile from James Théophane Jnr on Vimeo.

Mobile Mobile is a large sculpture  made of recycled mobile phones that hangs in the lobby of LBi, a marketing and technology agency in the UK. The sculpture plays Choir of the Bells when you tweet it. You can also play it live like a great big circular piano thing with your keyboard. Check it out!

Happy Holidays.

I don’t know why or how but I have been oblivious to all the ads/videos promoting Chrome. They are incredible. The most recent one promoting Chrome’s features is amazingly analog. It animates the mouse arrow with Muppet-like technology, implements knitting, water freezing, stacked dominoes and mercury. It’s an interesting angle to take for something that is so high-tech and is extremely captivating. I can’t remember the last time i was so engaged watching a demonstration on tabbed browsing or internet security. It really gives things a tangible understanding.

You can watch them all in a row or one at a time by clicking on a link in the YouTube window at the end of the clip ( something else I hadn’t seen before, this time from YouTube ).

Here is just the opposite. A no less amazing, but high-tech, 2 1/2 D animated spot by  Motion Theory.

The Google Chrome Channel on YouTube is chock full of wildly creative videos. If ever in need of inspiration, definitely check them out.

I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt as it is a very different kind of brand identity. It is described as “uniquely dynamic” and “a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images.  It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal” on the AOL Corporate Site. It appears that the logotype will remain constant but the backgrounds behind the logo will always be changing in an effort to suggest the depth and extent of AOL’s content. Cool idea. Even kind of MTV like. But to me it falls short.

The logotype is boring, uninspired and does not make sense. Is it an acronym? Is it a sentence? It has a capital letter and a period. Is it a really a logo or is it just some keyed letters on top of a bunch of stock photos? Is it design or art? Is it’s purpose to generate a lot of attention and press because it is so bad?

At least there isn’t a drop shadow.

What are Google Labs? Believe it or not, they are are not pet dogs of Google employees. Google Labs is a website demonstrating new Google projects “that aren’t quite ready for prime time”. It serves as a testing ground for new services being developed. Gmail and Google Calendar were once Google Lab projects.

Google Swirl is another Google Lab project for searching images. It builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface. For example, if you search on Image Swirl for labrador, you’ll see 12 image thumbnails including labs on white backgrounds, yellow labs, lab puppies, etc.

Once you find the group of images you’re interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will “swirl” into view. For example, here’s what you’ll see if you click the image the dog illustration:

You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Apparently the image search result clusters will be dependent on the image metadata. With billions of users uploading images to the web without any description or metadata, getting desired images would still require some effort. As image analysis technology advances, the image search engine will rely more on the graphical recognition of image than the metadata attached to the same.

I think Homer Simpson put it best while talking to Kent Brockman whan he said, “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.” (Season 5, Episode 11, Homer the Vigilante).