Infocow connects young people with useful stuff to help take control of life - sites, stories, information and inspiration.

Worked on the front end code and UI design with Nicolas Alpi and Ed Davey developing the back end on this project for Futurelab. Was a great experience with lots of brilliant feedback and user testing done by Futurelab feeding into the Agile development methodology we use here at Jiva.

Was pleased to be able to do a design based on Conway’s Game of Life. The pixel shapes in the logo are two examples of patterns that are either static (survive) or create exponential growth (thrive) using the standard rules of the game.

The private beta is now live and we are looking for students and tutors to start testing.

The visor screen from “Boy In The Bubble” (Fan shot video)

The visor screen from “Mirrorball” (Fan shot video)

The rear vertical screens on “Apres Moi” (Fan shot video).

The rear vertical screens on “My Body Is A Cage” (Fan shot video).

And some stills from the original renders..

Was pointed at this UK advert for Helvetica by a post on Daring Fireball and wanted it for my wall. Spent an evening kerning to match the original poster and pushed the images a bit to counter the lowish res scan then added in some red to honour the swiss origins of the infamous typeface.

You can download a zip file containing an A4 and a Letter sized PDF from here.

Absolutely loving the latest work from Frederik that popped up on my Flickr Processing Group feed. The neon colour scheme is almost 80’s in feel but it really works for me.

…to my mate Marc for letting him down royally and not doing his website for him when I said I probably could I thought I’d at least let you know that his site is up and full of yummy graphic design that he’s done.

My new home at Jiva is a startup company building web services to help people find other people who can help. The first product is a website called Beanbag Learning and it’s purpose is to help parents find tutors in their local area for their children. Moving the ‘word of mouth’ culture onto the Internet in short if you will.

I’m excited to find out that my first project is an Adobe AIR application built round communication. This is something very interesting to both design and build as the technologies and UI paradigms involved are pretty well defined these days so the basics of the interaction are pretty much in stone and assumed so that leaves all the fun stuff. The details.

Nothing really new up front as yet in terms of features but - like Real World Records - the site has been designed to be extended easily over the coming months with plenty of scope for custom areas.

Standards based, with proper separation and where possible semantic markup this is the final Real World site to move to PHP from Lasso and the final missing site after the theft.

www.womad.org

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

www.realworldrecords.com

Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.

I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!

Amazing piece of HTML/CSS/jQuery hackery by Cameron Adams that just begs to be played with. It looks like my future will mainly involve creating nostalgic Q-Bert landscapes.

Cubescape

 bigblueball.realworldrecords.com

Front and back end rebuilt from the ground up to enable products to be grouped in dynamic ways so digital downloads can be incorporated in the next phase with lots of work done to make the front end as simple as possible to create a higher conversion rate despite the relatively high amount of information required on-screen.

www.womadshop.com

Also I’ve remembered that there is a fully functioning URL based search function that I’ve not got round to creating a form for. Simply stick search/searchterm on the root URL and it’ll work fine and dandy. Try it out here.

Taken a while and there were some last minute hitches - namely Media Temple’s lack of a set_charset() command and the Grid Server performance problems but I’ve finally uploaded most of my new home.

Portfolio section is ready but waiting on content so that shouldn’t take too long hopefully.

One that front a new website I’ve found may be of interest called monoscope.

Page upon page of great design (with the odd example of nasty design) both old and new, and all of it fodder for your internal scrapbook.

Joanie Lemercier sent this link to a recent installation she did in Berlin of a very simple idea executed very nicely. 2d animations in Flash designed to be projected onto a 3d sculpture mounted on a wall. Looks great, very TRON.

http://www.youtube.com/v/6ZQK3pBkAl4

More photos and video on the AntiDJ.com website.

—edit—

Just noticed that it’s already on createdigitalmotion.com so late to the game with this one!

Sold Out. Finito. 500 units gone into the world. The beautiful, logo-less, indie made musical interface has sold out.

I always held out hope that one day the money would be there and available and I could get in touch with the guys at monome and order my very own but fate has dictated that one will not be mine.

By the time the $500 dollar price tag + shipping + VAT + Import Duty was totted up there was no chance of it being affordable.

So congratulations to the monomons (or whatever they are called) for a successful run and here’s looking to the upcoming 100h (256 buttons!) for more geek musician pron fodder.

I dread to think what a 40h would fetch on ebay in the next few months…