So a bit of a musical post this time. We often are quick to scorn those that take ideas and run them as their own. Cries of ‘un-original’ and ‘rip-off’ can be heard. But what happens when an awesome song is taken, and then reinterpreted by another artist? Sometimes the result is just so ace that the original artist conceeds the cover is better than the original which I believe was confessed by Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor when referring to Johnny Cash’s version of their song ‘Hurt’. Also, sometimes a song you would have never even considered top anything can blow you away. So without further ado, here is my Top 5 all-time musical covers. Any you would add to the list?

1 – Hurt, Johnny Cash

2 – Stand By Me, Playing for Change (various)

3 – Hey Ya! – Matt Weddle (who?)

4 – You Gotta Fight – Coldplay

5 – Lonely Boy, Matt Corby

Special Mention

Wonderful World – Joey Ramone

 

 

Just like my man Tyree Cooper in the 1989 classic ‘Turn up the Bass‘, we are looking for an awesome super dooper digital roducer. Click here for the Digital Producer Job Description but essentially a producer to help deliver great projects for clients like Mazda Australia, Cricket Australia, Cancer Council, Quit Victoria and Hardie Grant Publishing. To help you deliver these projects is a talented bunch of creative and technical eskimos. Sound like this is for you? Please email your send your cover letter and CV to Samara

 

In a first for Cancer Council, Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea is going digital, offering a ‘virtual’ morning tea on Facebook on May 24 in the lead up to the traditional event.

The digital campaign has been created to generate awareness and attract new people to get involved with the traditional Morning Tea fundraiser. It was developed for Cancer Council by Igloo. Users register on Facebook and are prompted to invite their friends to a virtual morning tea, with an option to host a real morning tea as well. People can choose to share their stories, or donate directly to Cancer Council; while an interactive map displays the virtual teas that will take place.
“Cancer Council understands that people connect with their community in different ways,” said Tori Cella, National Marketing Manager, Cancer Council Australia. “A virtual morning tea is an opportunity to share an online cuppa and show your support for Cancer Council’s vital cancer research, prevention and support programs.”
Australia’s Biggest Virtual Morning Tea is being supported through an online advertising campaign, fronted by celebrity chef, Manu Feildel – running across various sites including Facebook.

The Facebook campaign design takes advantage of Facebook’s new brand page layout to extend the Cancer Council design and pushes the brand in new ways. A paper model aesthetic was developed to represent the virtual component of the event.

Register now for you Virtual Morning Tea for a chance to win some stuff!

 

 

After so many years of working with Illustrator and Photoshop I’m still discovering new techniques and different ways to use the software. After visiting Field Trip 2012, where some very talented designers showed their work and their way of working, they not only inspired me, but they also taught me a few techniques that I find really interesting.

Travis Price, one of my favourite designers of the day, showed us some of his artwork – at fist, it all looked like it was all created in Photoshop. I started to think of all possible tools I am so familiar with in Photoshop, until Travis took us trough his creative process – from his really conceptual sketches to some really cool executions on the computer. All of his artwork was done using only Illustrator. These are some of the techniques he used.

 

1. Feather
Instead of using Photoshop to blend colours, create glows and give more depth to your illustration, the ‘feather’ tool is good way of creating the same effects but keep all of your illustrations inside Illustrator. This is beneficial because it keeps the image as a vector, and maintains the shapes integrity. This also means you can scale the image without loss of quality. The image below is entirely created in Illustrator, layering multiple shapes with the Feather effect.

• The ‘feather’ tool can be found here.

 

 

2. Swatches and Patterns
Having patterns and applying them to your artwork, like the illustration above, creates more depth and adds interesting details to your work. Besides using the swatches window for colours it also works really well to create patterns. By creating a small illustration and dragging it into the swatches window, Illustrator will create a new fill pattern from the shapes dragged in. This saves you the time of creating the entire pattern.

1. Create a shape and drag and drop it in the ‘swatches’ window.
   
2. Create a new shape and select the swatch you created.
   

3. Brush strokes
Another technique he showed is the way he uses ‘brush strokes’. The process is the same as creating patterns in the swatches window, but all you have to do is drag and drop your shape into the “Brushes” panel. This lets you create illustration along a path. Say for example I want to create a rope that will follow the path I draw, I would only need to create a small part of the rope and let Illustrator fill in the rest of the path. Or in this case I want to create leaves on a tree, but I dont want to create every unique leaf. By using this technique, I only need to create a single leaf and then let Illustrator create the leaf on the different paths.

1. Create a shape
2. Drag and drop it in the ‘Brushes’ window
3. There are many different ways to create brushes, but in this case I chose for the ‘Pattern Brush’. Another window will open which gives you some more options. I named my brush, and chose ‘Stretch to fit’, then clicked ‘OK’.
   
4. Then by creating a new line and applying the brush stroke, the “Brush” shape you just created will follow that path.
   
   
   

The next tips were provided by Toby and Pete. Besides showing a couple of great projects they did together, they showed us an interesting technique in Photoshop.

4. Channel Masks
The most common way to create mask is by using the pen tool and tracing it as a vector mask, or painting the area you want to be masked and creating a Layer Mask. This can be a very time consuming process and not always as perfect as it needs to be. Toby and Pete showed us how to create masks using channels. In stead of editing the applied ‘layer mask’ you create a new layer that will become a mask. This is very useful for a quick mask or for masking complex images.

1. This technique works the same as the common masks in which black is transparent. Instead of manually masking everything onto a regular Layer Mask, we can create a black and white image from one of the Layer Channels.
   
2. By going in to the ‘Channels’ window, select the channel with the highest contrast and copy that channel layer to your clipboard. Activate the RGB channel and then go back to the layers window. Paste the channel as a new layer.
   
3. Use the ‘Dodge Tool’ and the ‘Burn Tool’ to create a black and white representation of the mask (again, where one colour represents the shape you want to mask out).
   
4. When the image has the desired black and white values, copy the layer.
   
5. Select the layer on which you want the mask and create a new ‘Layer Mask’
6. Select the mask and go into ‘Quick Mask’ mode by pressing the ‘ \ ‘ key. Paste the mask. The black and white image you created now becomes the Channel Mask.
7. In this case the apple is black, which is transparent – so invert the mask into order to reverse the area masked out.
   

Although the examples and the results are very simple, these techniques can be used to get some great results. Try them out and discover what you can do with them.

Okay – so that title was a lie. Working at Igloo has a whole bunch of perks. Getting VIP tickets to go to wickedly awesome conferences just happens to be one of them. FieldTrip isn’t your typical kind of design conference, which is quite refreshing. This conference shows you a designer’s process – their tips, tricks and secrets – but spares you the sales pitch.

 

The one day event had a flow that worked like this: A designer creates a piece of work. The next presenter then takes part of that work, and builds on it using their own style. While not every speaker followed this convention (due to time constraints), most did – which meant that we weren’t just “shown” their process. They were actually doing everything live in front of us. Pretty rad, right?

 

Here are some highlights from the day:

 

Beci Orpin • Illustrator

Beci Orpin kicked off the day, showing us the process she used to create a piece of art used for FieldTrip’s branding. She had a really unique way of texturing her vector art which gave it a bit more depth – some of these textures she created from scratch using various traditional mediums. Beci also pointed out the importance of creating lists while she worked. You can check out a bunch of her work here: www.beciorpin.com

 

Travis Price • Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator extraordinaire, Travis Price had about a billion tips up his sleeve, a few which we thought weren’t even possible to do in AI. He knew his software inside out, and we managed to learn a whole lot. Keep an eye out for Jaro’s blog post highlighting tips and tricks from the day, because Travis Price’s hints are definitely worth a look at. The highlight of his presentation was when he used a feathering technique to make his vectors look as if they were digitally painted. Amazing! More of his work can be seen here: www.travisprice.com.au

 

Jeremy Ley • Storyboard Artist & Illustrator

Jeremy gave us a rundown of how he’d go about storyboarding a short animation. Ley went through the importance of hierarchy, keeping initial sketches really loose, using dual brushes for textures and various different types of cameras (internal, external and what he likes to call ‘MTV’). He also told us about his brief stint in an ad agency after doing his degree, that lead him to pursue his career in illustration – he decided to stay home for 10 months and dedicate his time to learning how to draw. Guess it paid off! Take a look at his artwork here: www.jeremyley.com

 

21-19/Flutter • Motion Graphics House

The piece of work that 21-19 took us through was that funky Telstra ad that’s been popping up on TV screens everywhere. Domenic and Ash gave an overview of the animation process, and how they collaborated with creative people from different fields to come up with their finished product. It was quite difficult for them to actually “create” something live due to the nature of animation work (it takes a really long time!) 21-19 (www.21-19.com) has formed a motion house with the Jacky Winter Group called Flutter – take a look at their website here: flutter.jackywinter.com

 

Toby & Pete • 3D & Retouching

Toby & Pete is a collective of designers with various different skills sets, specialising in 3D & Retouching. Two screens simultaneously showed a 3D artist and retoucher doing what they do best. Toby & Pete covered using Channel Masks for clipping high contrast images (extremely useful!), and discussed the irony of how perfect 3D renders are these days that they need to “imperfect” them by adding grain and dirt. Some of their work can be seen here: www.tobyandpete.com

 

If you want something a bit different out of a design conference, something that’s a bit more technical – definitely consider FieldTrip. It’s run as a collaboration between the Jacky Winter Group and Australian Infront, and was held at ACMI in Fed Square. This year was the first time it was ever held, so we can only hope that it comes again next year. As said before, keep an eye out for Jaro’s post for a technical breakdown of all the hints & tips we picked up on the day!

In the blog post, Team Development for Sitecore – General Usage, I mentioned that we start our development by grabbing the latest data from our content entry or live server. This blog post touches on how you can retrieve this data so that you are working with the latest Sitecore items in your development environment.

(more…)

A couple of months back I blogged about the Advanced Usage of Team Development for Sitecore, which included in concept of Field Level Deployments. This blog post revisits Field Level Deployments, and how you could set the value of a new field on a existing items.

(more…)

Earlier this week a small start-up OMGPOP, the developers of a very simple app called Draw Something were bought by the infamous maker of Farmville, Zynga for a mere $210M.

“They bought a property that went from 0 to 60 in four seconds,” said Lewis Ward, a research analyst at IDC who focuses on the game industry.”

In today’s digital landscape, it is getting easier to take a concept to market if you know how to. In times like this you tend to hear a thousand developers shouting from the rooftops saying ‘I have a beta app that does that!’ and the other thousand or so are screaming I had that idea in the shower last decade!

And as for the geek dads out there (in possible sleep deprivation) “I did that with some paint and butchers paper on the weekend”.

Jenna Worthham New York Time article: has a nice summary of what Draw Something is:

“Draw Something, a twist on Pictionary, involves making quick sketches that illustrate words and phrases like “swimming pool” and “starfish” for a friend to guess. It has been downloaded more than 35 million times since its release on Feb. 6, and players have generated more than a billion drawings, according to Zynga. ”

It is another very simple app right? So what made it so addictive. It’s social, a bit of fun but who has time for these things.

Aside from some odd usability challenges (no back button)  there is something I think the OMGPOP gang definitely understand, how to make  things simple and usable, design for the ‘Mainstream Users’ and design for ‘Human Behaviour’.

 

 

Simple and Usable – Design for Mainstream Users
In an upcoming #UXBookClubMelb book for @UXMelbourne, I recently got to the part where Giles Colbourne, the author of Simple and Usable advocates product, service and experience designers to focus on designing for the mainstream user.

Giles makes his case through a number of examples, however loving stats, you can’t go past another story relating to Apple’s success. This time look back to the first iPod. Here is how the story plays out (in simple terms):

“Apple listened, but didn’t take direction from their ‘expert’ advanced users. There description of a device that plays music and is easy to use was described as the ‘Flying Car’.

To date the count was (at the time of writing the book) Apple sold 240,000,000 iPods… and no Flying Cars”

Apple is referenced so often as a way to build great products. Apple is also the No. 1 company recommended not to copy. Why? Because there is more to great products than just the product itself.

 

 

Who use’s a desktop
Zynga have escalated to the No1 platform for social gaming, leveraging the lean start-up model and going where the user’s are, Facebook. But where are they on the mobile device front? Draw Something grabbed the simple, social and playful space of your intimate mobile device, a feat I know Farmville didn’t achieve for me.

Combine this trend with a recent epiphany by the Financial Times about mobile devices and supported by emerging trends from comScore that mobile devices are our first touchpoint for a lot of our digital consumption.

And one of my favourite interaction designers Luke W recently made a splat of stats about the rise of the iPad WiFi (aka tablet) as the preferred purchase choice.

 

Below is the Financial Times graph displaying their recent achievement of  1 million registered uses on their mobile apps.

 

 

Gamification, still thinking it’s new…
Gamification is a word I openly side with the ‘buzz-word skeptics’. In my opinion the goal here is all about reward (reinforcement) for good engagement (human behaviour). We have been doing it for years, decades… it’s in our human DNA.

I close friend is embarking on a PhD as a result of a late night discussion (strong debate…) on the merits of ‘Gamifying’ everything. However the deeper you go, the more your read about game theory and role of behavior and positive (and negative) reinforcement.

If you ask the question of any service or product ‘What are the core things people want to do?’ Even what you would like them to DO, the conversation immediately turns to people ‘doing something’.

And the best way to tell someone what to do, is to tell them i.e. ‘Draw Something’.

It’s not rocket science, however sometimes we forget about it.

 

 

References:

“A Game explodes and Changes Life Overnight at a Struggling Start-Up” Jenna Worthman, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/technology/draw-something-changes-the-game-quickly-for-omgpop.html

 

“Draw Something” by OMGPOP, Itunes

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/draw-something-free/id488628250?mt=8

 

“Data Monday: iPad Mobile Connections” Luke Wroblewski, LUKEW

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1518

“The Rise of Digital Omnivores”, By Mark Donovan, comScore, November 15, 2011

http://blog.comscore.com/2011/11/the_rise_of_digital_omnivores.html

“Financial Times Hits 1M Users On HTML5 Site That Dodges Apple’s Tax”

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/18/financial-times-mobile/

 

 

Here at igloo we are real schticklers when it comes to setting up your web comps perfectly and there are little things you can do to eliminate those little design bombs for developers or for the next designer. Of course there are layer naming conventions, considering text wrapping on headings etc… but there’s also the little considerations that make you feel warm on the inside because you know that file is pixel perfect.

So junior burgers, mids and … well, people who want to tighten up their files, please take note. I’m not saying any of these methods are new, just good practice.

In no particular order, ha… im getting angry just thinking about some of these, here’s a list of don’t do’s and do do’s.

• Resized point text fields
  There is no need for a font to be 13.46px big. If you Free Transform a Point Text textfield re-adjust the font size to whole numbers.

  

• Paragraph text fields
  If your copy is more than 1 line long, set your text to a Paragraph Field and let the bounding box define the line breaks.

  

• Textfields with adjusted opacity (im talking when there’s no need transparency )
  Argghh… Always use the colour palette to adjust colour for accurate RGB values, and not the opacity setting.

  

• Bitmap Masks
  There is a place for these but when a simple shape is required use a shape mask, much easier to
  resize and reuse.
  NB: Shape layers are awesome, if you want to hear how awesome they are just ask Pete.

  

• Shape Layers & Pasting Vectors
  Use these as much as possible, they make your file more precise and flexible.
  For more shape layer pixel perfection see this article.

  

• Bitmap Buttons
  Again use a shape layer, this is a priority if you are doing iPhone and Android design work.
  More on this here.

  

• Smart Objects
  Make your bitmap images Smart Objects, it will increase out your filesize, but the ability to add Smart Filters, non degrading resizing, ease of updating and retouching out way any filesize issue.

  

• Flattened layers and screen grabbed elements
  Nothing worse than opening a file that was worked on 12 months ago to edit some content only find that the layout is a mashup of screengrabs and flattened layers, if you do use screen grabbed elements, remake that asset, you’ll feel less dirty for it.

• Use adjustment layers
  Don’t apply effects straight to bitmaps, add adjustment layer and smart filters. Keep your main image clean so that it can be tweaked as the project evolves.

  

This was a pretty quick list but they are some of the annoyances I see regularly pop up in psd files.

Im sure there are more tips out there, whatya got?

 

 

There is a time and place for sitting in boardrooms, our desks and thinking of ways to grow the business and find new opportunities. But sometimes breaking out and jamming an idea can be much more productive, fruitful when you collaborate with a diverse group of people and focus on the problems you are facing.

2 weeks ago I joined up for a weekend of fun, creating a new innovative service in 48hrs at the 2nd Global Service Jam.

I’ve been apart of idea / skill building jams in the past, however there is something unique in the people who attend and the process we use to make something that is not just another app.

This thirst for these jams came in March 2011, the inaugural Global Service Jam where 1200 people around the blog in 40 cities over 100 ideas for new services come out like this one.

 

Melbourne helped set the benchmark for the quality of the idea and their communication, however this year 85 cities, 40 countries and 350 services ideas (see the projects) were created and that benchmark has been smashed.

The quality of the outputs was amazing! And the detail and depth of the ideas are greater than ever. Getting an idea working is no longer about boardroom meetings and brainstorms to product a business case, sketchy wireframes or proposals. It is about quality communication with business models in place for successful testing not just of the website or service.

 

This approach focuses on communicating it as it if it is working right now. Because you only know if an idea will really work if there is some working version of it, that people can use.

It is more than just prototyping! The difference here is a focus on making the idea as solid as possible through using the tools and process of User Centred Design. In this case a large focus on the principles of Service Design and Design Thinking.

It can feel uncomfortable; you’re stretching the opportunities of what is possible.

And it is about having fun! Because we normally care about the work we want to produce! See you at the next one(s!)

 

See you at the next one: