The Lungs of Good Design

It’s just as well Northen Kingdom are from Sweden, the home of IKEA. Handy for picking up a new awards cabinet every other day. One of the many great examples of work is the the Teamgeist. To create a buzz about the new German football team’s strip they create an interactive game. The look and feel of the film used would not look out of place in any Hollywood movie. We could blab on about them but best to let them tell us what they do. It’s quite inspiring:

“Storytelling is our trade. We provide unique interactive communication. Connecting brands with people. Creating emotional bonds and experiences that make people feel, reflect and discuss. We work methodically and are always excited about new ideas. When we work with you, we’re a focused and passionate team. From the wildest concepts to the finest details, passion, perfection and innovation are at the heart of everything we do. If you want to break boundaries with your project, working with us is a good start.”
And please, please, please check out their amazing showreel on Vimeo.

This movie showing the known universe created by the American Museum of Natural History really makes us feel a little small.

The guys at Wrangler Jeans must of been chucking around a few good ideas before they came up with this nice site with a extra nice dash of Flash. Can’t help but think this would be really effective if it is was used for a banner campaign. Which it probably was.

After seeing Avatar and being quite blown away by it’s amazing CGI I came across Alex Roman’s The Third & The Seventh. This got me thinking. In true Harry Hill TV Burp style who’d win in a fight? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Pandora is pretty cool but I’m not sure I ever felt like I was fully transported into the world. It felt a little like being in spectacular animation. An amazing animation (especially the glowing forest foliage – wow) but an animation nonetheless. Alex Roman’s abstract piece left me in true awe. And I’ll bet it cost a fraction of the big Hollywood budget.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

A while back us designers here at Whitespace did a straw poll to discover our favourite design blogs with the intention to write a post about our top 10. Unfortunately there were so many we never did did get a chance to work out the top 10. So instead we are going to post a few of our favourites.

First up is recently revamped ComputerLove, a daily magazine on art, design and creative culture. It’s been around for a while and used to be quite ‘out there’ at times but the new version has become much more relevant to today digital culture. Split up into static, motion and interactive it shows off some amazing pieces of inspiring creativity. The varied nature of topics keeps it fresh. They have also added a search feature which was something lacking in the old version. The new layout is also nice and easy to scan. It’s almost like reading a broadsheet although it is slightly annoying that you can’t view endless pieces of work as per Reform and Revolution. You can also feed in you own blog and social media has been integrated at every opportunity. The new version is still in it’s Beta stages so maybe there will be more improvements to come. Watch this space. Looks good on an iPhone as well.

Love great title sequences (sometimes more than the movies they are for) and we love the blog The Art of The Title Sequence. An incredible amount of inspiration on the site which features title sequences from modern films such as Coraline to classic favourites such as Saul Bass’ Vertigo titles. All videos are also available in a iphone friendly quicktime movie format. Which makes us love this site even more!

To give it its full rather long winded title The North East of North Digital Arts Festival kicks off this weekend in Dundee showcasing the world leaders of digital arts including interactive, online, videogame, music, movie, broadcast and digital media sectors. Some really top names will be attending including AXIS animation, ex Pixar great Bud Luckey, Al Mooney from Adobe and Microsoft Academic Evangelist Paolo Barone. Follow NEoN on Twitter for all the latest gossip.

Nice bit of flash in this site highlighting the plight of the people in Mozambique.