We have collected 1 Nominee & 2 Honouree Nominee´s in The Webby Award´s, aswell as with two of our fantastic clients been acknowledged with 2 “Design Excellance awards” from the Norewgian Design council.

To top it all off, we´ve got together with our clients 6 nominations, 1 Gold in this years Gulltaggen awards. We also won Gold with our fantastic client STATOIL, in the Norwegian biggest Design competition VISUELT, and another Nomiation for another Statoil job in the same competition.

What does all these awards mean if it “only” is getting awareness and building strong brands? We think that it is important to prove that all this work have to sell and work as somethings that start something important for our client. Something that makes a difference on the results. MediaFront/McCann/SDG was the most winning agency (by far) at the Retail Award in May. With 4 gold, 1 Silver and 1 Bronze
Its a lot of fun getting recognition for our clients and the work we do for them. Brave & innovative client strategies & pioneering solutions that stand out in their categories is what we love working with.

Theres lots of talk out there these days about providing real value in customer experiences through App technologies & Service design processes, but there´s relatively few real projects that illustrate the affect. So when we are awarded prizes for projects like the “RIMI Pluss” application, which has incorporated a complete process of strategy, planning, design, programming for all platforms and so on, we are proud and extremely happy.

This is truely what the design & communication business is all about. Brave clients and teams of people that really believe in what they are doing, understanding that having ambitions is not just big words or dreams, that we can always push out in front. Its that something that contains something. That something is passion and guts.

This is the place to be these days:D

In march, our creative department went to Resonate Festival, in Belgrade, Serbia. Resonate was held for the first time this year, and gave an overview of current situation in the fields of music, visual arts and digital culture. Guest artists, lecturers and other participants represented the cutting edge of the contemporary creative industry in Europe. Our four-device-man Johannes took a lot of notes during the lectures, and has put up a detailed report with interesting stuff to explore.
Resonate Festival will continue in 2013,, meanwhile you can take a look at their their platform for networking.

Some of the key findings

• The web is expanding and infiltrating the physical world.
• Raw data doesn’t say anything, but when you recontextualize and tailor the visualization to the data it becomes more comprehensable and tells stories.
• Creative and innovative solutions lies in the intersection of science, art and design.
• Experimentation, research and development are the keys to pushing the field further and make interesting things.
• Do what you love and make intersting and cool things that people can play around with.

 

B-Reel

B-Reel shared the evolution of their work and talked about how their work has begun to expand beyond the screen, keyboard and mouse and are starting to become physical objects.

They also talked about how R&D and exploration and experimentation with technology and ideas has lead to innovative and interesting projects.

Some of the work they showed:

Mind Scalextrics – Control slot cars with the power of your mind. Read more at their projectsite.

Ariel Fashion Shoot – An industrial robot that user could take control over through their browsers and shoot on laundry.
Read more at their projectsite.

EELS – a multiplayer game experience where people can control their virtual EEL projected on a physical installation.
Read more at their projectsite.

Mitsubishi LiveDrive – A website that allows users to remotely test drive a Mitsubishi vehicle from the comfort of their own computer desktop. Read more at their projectsite.

You should also check out B-Reels broad range of innovative work at their website.

Karsten Schmidt

The talk was about the library Toxiclibs and work done with it and it’s extensions. Some fairly interesting things here. The showreel sums up the power of the library.

toxiclibs showreel 2010 from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Field

Knee-deep in the datastream

Field talked about their methodology, what inspires them and about their recent work.

Things that inspires Field:

Design is about cultural invention.

Culture is the thing that makes life interesting.
– Bruno Munari

Starlings of Otmoor

Evolved Virtual Creatures by Karl Sims.

Read more about the simulated Darwinian evolution of virtual block creatures.

Sculpting Possibility Space
– Will Wright

Alex McLean‘s live coding

Haskell live coding environment

David Schnell, german painter

I didn’t find much info about David Schnell, but there’s lots of pictures of his paintings at google. The paintings are vivid, but with references and the feel of glitches in computer graphics and games.

CV DAZZLE – Camouflage from Computer Vision

CV Dazzle™ is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs.

Issey Miyake

 

 

 

 

A Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances.

Human Connectome Project

A project to construct a map of the complete structural and functional neural connections in vivo within and across individuals.

Projects by Field

Communion – Instalation with live coded generative creatures. Read more at its projectsite…

A permanent installation of 8 dynamic video artworks in the lobby of Deutsche Bank Hong Kong. Read more at its projectsite…

Near future…

• New metaphors for an abstract world
• Behavioural identities
• New forms of storytelling
• Artist-designer-entreprenur

 

Jürg Lehni

Be kind to your computer.

We need to protect this amazing technology we have. Let it be free and accesable to everybody.

 

Projects by Jürg Lehni

Hector – A printbot utilizing a spraycan and prints vector illustrations. The robot humanizes the digital output. Read more at its projectsite…

What you see ≠ What you get

Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator™. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language. Read more at its projectsite…

Rita – A drawingbot drawing on semi-opaque glass.

Viktor – A drawingbot drawing with chalk.

Empty Words – A modified CNC plotter which prints out posters by cutting out dots.

Paper.js an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Chris O’Reilly, Nexus Interactive Arts

Make comercial work people like to share and talk about.

Always keeping alive by keeping the small projects and art projects. This is important!

Cross polination – Projects flows into each others and ideas cross connects.

Artists meets technicians.

Projects by Nexus Interactive Arts

Forms is an ongoing collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola, a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time.

Set in an icy fantasy world, the spot sees an army of fearsome fire warriors poised to descend upon a peaceful community of ice-dwelling creatures. Accompanying the warriors is a huge fire-breathing dragon, which leaves a burning path of destruction in its wake and little doubt as to the outcome for the defenceless villagers.

The Dewar’s Hub is an interactive audio visual installation that uses OpenFrameworks to deliver a real time experience that bridges the real world and Twitter.Read more at its projectsite…

 

Jer Thorpe

• Being mediocre at a broad range of disciplines and the intersection of science, design and art are the sweet spot for creating ground-breaking work.
• Data has character – Engage with the character of the data.
• Tailor the visualization to the data.
• Bespoke tools to understand systems.
• Visualization as a verb. Use data visualization as a part of the process.
• Find the things you dont know about. Whats lurking in the back of the archive?
• Understand how the connections liik like.
• Data is a measurment of our life.

This is another speech by Jer Thorpe, The Weight of Data, held at TEDx Vancouver. A lot of the same topics and thoughts that was shared at Resonate are covered in this speech.

Projects by Jer Thorpe

Cascade shows the precise structures of NYT articles being shared on Twitter. Read more about Cascade at nyt labs.

Just Landed looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. And displayes their locations and their voyage on a world map.

GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying ‘good morning’ in English as well as several other languages.

A visualization of the 1236 exoplanet candidates observed by Kepler.

openpaths.cc grants the first partie accecess to their data. Upload yor data and use it as you like. If you want to you can securely and anonymously donate your data to researchers who could use it to study mobility, transportation, land use, epidemiology, and overall make the world a better place.

Josh Nimoy

Sexy bullshit

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size. It is essentially the small detailed technical part of a larger object. The detail can be made from geometric primitives, including cylinders, cubes, and rectangles, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction. – Wikipedia

• It’s not about the tools. It’s about the individual, the concept and your thoughts.
• Software expands the range of possibilities.
• Not every piece you make needs to be a masterpiece. And it’s not for you to decide which of your pieces are a masterpiece or not.
• Random numbers are just vanilla.

People always want the data spehere. Could I have a data sphere with cheese, please?

 

• Between the sketchbook and the code there should be a phase for thinking about the algorithm.

Create interfaces that the clients/art director can manipulate the variable parts of the code them self.

 

Projects by Josh Nimoy

Typeface machines making robotic typography. Learn more about Josh’s robotic typography

Special effects for Tron Legacy. Read Josh’s case study of his work with Tron Legacy.

 

 

 

BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. Read more about BallDroppings and play it here.

 

IBM datababy

 

 

Pinch is a hypnotic and inspiring aesthetics exploration toy that allows the player to easily generate many kinds of abstract shapes. A virtual sheet is made from free-floating physics masses. Click in different places to apply forces making the masses move towards that area of the screen, hence “pinching” the sheet. Read more about pinch…

 

 

Nicholas Felton

Felton talked mostly about how and why he gathers data about his life and how he recontextualizes that data and finds the structural potential to make it more human and readable. He also talked about how he structerted the life of his father through data found in calendars, slides, postcards, scorecards, reciptes and other useful sets of data.

Projects by Nicholas Felton

 

The 2010/2011 Feltron Biennial Report .

The 2010 Annual Reportan encapsulation of the life of Feltons fateher, as communicated by the calendars, slides and other artifacts in Feltons possession..

 

This is another speech by Nicholas Felton, Numerical Narratives, held at Eyeo Festival 2011. A lot of the same topics and thoughts that was shared at Resonate are covered in this speech.

Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld

In 2012, the Tripp Trapp® chair celebrates 40 years and the number of chairs sold has reached 8 million. Now you can share you Tripp Trapp® moments and be a part of the celebration. Join the party today and upload your favourite photo to be a part of our competition.

Deep dive also picked up Farmandsprisen a couple of weeks ago, and The Gas Machine was nominated for “hedersprisen” (Honour award) at the prestigous norwegian design award Merket for god design.

Hurra! Happy days!

We are looking for several interaction designers to join us in our work with some of the most progressive and innovating projects in norway today.

SENIOR INTERACTION DESIGNER

Job description:

Our Senior Interaction Designers (SID) work with research, concept development, prototyping, information architecture, interaction design, user interface design and testing to create world-class digital services across multiple platforms.

 Core activities:

Apply strategic thinking to design end-to-end customer experience solutions with a focus on user needs and business goals directly responsible for delivering all aspects of design, from defining customer needs to delivering concepts and prototypes to UI specifications for development.

Work directly with customers and users to design experiences using participatory and iterative design techniques, including observational studies, customer interviews, usability testing, and other forms of qualitative and quantitative research to uncover insights, learn about user behaviour and verify design concepts.

Turn visions into concepts and translate those concepts into designs that illustrate simplicity despite system complexity. Utilize industry design standards and best practices to define and implement design criteria, design guidelines, and design specs

Work closely with advisors to plan, prioritize, coordinate, and conduct user requirements analysis, task analysis, conceptual modelling, interaction design, and usability testing

Produce user requirements specifications, personas, storyboards, scenarios, user flow diagrams, wireframes, design prototypes, and design specifications.

Work closely with development teams to manage the design process, drive decisions, track design issues and ensure that design specifications are implemented.

Participate in and foster design thinking within MF

Experience required:

Minimum of 3 years experience with interactions design and / or information architecture projects

Experience of developing user experience concepts / principals based upon user insight & clients business models.

Experience of service design methodologies & tools, e.g. customer journey blueprints.

Working knowledge of design and prototyping tools,

Proficient in a variety of methods to convey ideas and concepts (e.g. storyboards, wireframes, prototypes, etc)

Experience as a client advisor & leading UX design processes

Ability to intrepret client strategy into concrete needs requirements

Skilled practitioner in conducting & analalysing user research / testing

Ability to drive projects independently as well as being a good team member.

Strategically & conceptually strong, with an ability to see the whole picture in design projects.

Co creation & user centered design princiapls

Content analysis, structure & strategy

Ambitious & are interseted in developing MF within the design feild

INTERACTION DESIGNER

 Job description:

Our Interaction Designers (ID) work with research, concept development, information architecture, interaction design,  user interface design and testing to create world-class digital services across multiple platforms.

Core activities:

Turn visions into concepts and translate those concepts into designs that illustrate simplicity despite system complexity. Utilize industry design standards and best practices to define and implement design criteria, design guidelines, and design specs

Work closely with advisors to plan, prioritize, coordinate, and conduct user requirements analysis, task analysis, conceptual modelling, interaction design, and usability testing

Produce user requirements specifications, personas, storyboards, scenarios, user flow diagrams, wireframes, design prototypes, and design specifications.

Work closely with development teams to manage the design process, drive decisions, track design issues and ensure that design specifications are implemented.

Participate in and foster design thinking within MF

Experience required:

Minimum of 1 years digital interactive experience or recent relevant education

A good understanding of design

Self motivated with good team skills

Working knowledge of design and prototyping tools,

Proficient in a variety of methods to convey ideas and concepts (e.g. storyboards, wireframes, prototypes, etc)

A keen interest in & understanding of digital technologies

Desirable though not mandatory to have visual design & / or frontend code skills

Passion for design & a wish to inspire & learn from others around you

Please send your CV & portfolio to Gavin Bargus at  gavin@mediafront.no . You can contact Gavin at 92412033 if you have further questions.

NetCom’s Youlekalender came second, and we think the case movies qualify for a medal too. (Photo via INMA)

We invite colleagues, competitors, clients and other skilled people from (or relevant for) the industry, for a coffee. Todays guest is Anders Gottlieb-Nygaard. Anders is the founder of Pocket&Comms – a communication/adverting agency with simple beliefs and grand ambitions. He believes in creative problem solving and making interesting things happen on client’s turf. He loves to collaborate with dedicated people and thinks wanky agency rhetoric sucks.

What inspires you?

I find people who can do more than one thing well highly inspiring. Our industry tends to breed talents in silos and then put them in one area to develop. I love when brainy people break that pattern and produce wide-ranging bits of magic.

In my mind, the guys from Tomato or/and Hi-Res! are spot on. – Dedicated, hard working, interested and genuinely nice people.

How do you keep exploring and learning?

We learn from the people we collaborate with, the day-to-day running of the business and the mistakes we make.

Since we’re a small and agency, we have the opportunity to bring in a wide range of skill-sets to the task at hand. In 2011 we used more than 50(!) different people to help us finish the projects. Different brains, more input.

And, we always try to benchmark and evaluate our campaigns pre and post. We learn from our mistakes. I believe it’s bad for business to sell the same errors twice.

When were you amazed last?

Music: Femminielli 

Art: Cy Twombly

Web: Check my StumbleUpon-links.

What is your favourite resource library?

I always tend to read a lot of varied stuff – and I’ve been collecting thought-provoking magazines, article cut-outs, photos, designs, viewpoints etc. for years. Now, this has become a little library of ‘stuff’ in our office. It works as a good resource in conjunction with the mandatory pages we read relevant to the brief.

What’s the biggest challenge the digital communications industry is facing right now, and do this lead you to some predictions?

Agencies are looking for ways to make money in digital – and as a result they keep recommending the same executions over and over. Microsites with content (ie. films), apps for smartphones or Facebook – or primetime TVCs encouraging people to go online.

I think there are too many ‘social media experts’ in our industry, not doing much more than blowing hot air out their overpaid asses; whilst showing some cool Keynote slides with large typefaces.I believe no one really ‘gets’ digital or is able to fully utilise its enormous potential, and I find this very intriguing. The best is yet to come, and I’ll love to have my stab at the ‘dark’.

My prediction: The death of Apps and the (re)birth of mobile Internet. HTML5 drives down the cost of cross platform development and takes mobile to the next level. As a result the consumer experience will be simplified and less fragmented; and we don’t have to go via AppStore to prolong the brand experience.

What inspires you?

It changes regularly, but I admire people who do the exact opposite of what I do. At the moment I’m tired of all the talkers in creative circles, me being one of them. I want to be more of a doer, and people like my friend Masa inspires me:  He moved back to Japan when everyone else left after the earthquake, and started PARTY creative lab in Tokyo. And Zach Lieberman, who I’ve never met, but would love to work with.

How do you keep exploring and learning?

I love going on Social Safaris. Usually places I end up by accident, or where I’m the pink elephant in the room. Could be eating pretzels in an Amish town or fistpumping in Jersey. I never talk to the hot guy at a party, but usually the weirdo that studied insects for 5 years. It’s not a brilliant way to reproduce, but I meet a lot of interesting people.

When were you amazed last?

I wish there was a better word to describe it than interactive, but this play kind of is: wearing a white mask you walk around in an abandoned hotel where actors appear/disappear. Feels like you’re in a David Lynch movie, drifting in and out of the storyline. Sleep No More: If you’re in NY, go!

(Oh, and yesterday when my brother told me I have the introduction book to Scientology in my bookshelf. Amazing. And very disturbing)

What is your favourite resource library?

Google for everything, really. I never got the hang of rss feeds, so I’m rediscovering blogs these days. And I’ve found adding them to twitter is the best trick. Then I can get all the beautiful/geeky/funny updates in one feed. But no, I’m not giving much back.

What’s the biggest challenge the digital communications industry is facing right now, and do this lead you to some predictions?

I think a lot of people in the industry are blinded by the endless digital possibilities. Just because an idea is feasible it doesn’t mean people will interact with it.
People’s needs will obviously change with the devices they use, like Foursquare apps are useful now, but wasn’t 3 years ago. But our job is interesting because we (still) communicate with human beings. And if our ideas are not entertaining and/or useful, why would anyone want to engage with it?

It’s very easy and quick. Try it!

See it in action.