My Mouse Has Gone

I've given up on my mouse in favour of a tablet.

1. It's a bit of variation


2. It's making me think about different interaction methods - namely touch

But it's actually amazingly intuative and eficient when you stop treating the pointer like a mouse and instead treat the rectangle of the tablet as your desktop. Navigating the whole area of the screen is amazingly fast.

Let's see how long this lasts.

Me 2.0

The number of RFP's arriving for work that essentially recreates and reformats exisiting applications is going through the roof. Everyone it seems wants their own YouTube or MySpace or Facebook. Why not leverage the power of those tools in themselves, play with the APIs, harnes their audience and try not to reinvent the wheel, it rarely suceeds and is almost always very expensive or under powered.

Most Contagious

The guys at Saatchi & Saatchi introduced me to this little gem. Contagious Magazine is a publication about the most innovative and interesting marketing strategies and campaigns currently going on. They produce an annual PDF retrospect and It's well worth a read. www.contagiousmagazine.com
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Data Visualization

an excellent collection of data visualisation interactives.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Panic Sweeps Ad Land

Grey have recently hired an Exec CD who's actually got 'Digital' experience and it seems to have spread a wave across blogs questioning if the end is nigh for ad creatives without digital experience.

People: Don't panic, can't we just all live happily ever after? You don't need to know too much about digital really, just that you can put your TV ad on a special site and slap the URL on the end of the TV ad. Simple.

Here's the full story.

Problems and Solutions

I've just scrapped a post about the differences I've seen in interactive departments of ad agencies and interactive design and build agencies. My main point was going to be that at an ad agency you're more likely to be given a brief which outlines a problem or objective whereas at a design and build agency you're generally presented with a project your client has already conceived and just wants the agency to design and build.

It's pretty obvious when you think about it, it's just I hadn't thought about it long enough - clearly.

Designer Questions

Here's an interesting read from a large group of designers on their profession and it's perception...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/09/05/50-designers-x-6-questions/