Make Something Cool Every Day

Members of the Flickr group Make Something Cool Every Day are making cool things every day, in a social experiment that looks like a lot of fun.

The group’s rules are simple:

ONE upload per day.
Each piece must not have taken longer than a day to make.

So with these in mind, here is a slideshow of their submissions, best viewed fullscreen (but it can take a while to load):

So far the group has attracted 2,972 members, who’ve contributed 33,950 unique creations. That’s 11.4 submissions in total, so it’s evident people aren’t being religious about uploading every day, but what the hell.

What I find really interesting about the group is that there is very little conversation – a lowly 97 comments in total – in the main group discussion forum. All of the chatter is around individual works of art (especially the best stuff) . This tells me that viewers and contributors are far more interested in the content than in the delivery framework. Rightly so, I think.

The lesson to learn here is that despite Flickr enjoying a highly creative user base, it is very hard to engage those users with a campaign idea (and I’m not just talking advertising). Flickr just wasn’t designed for community engagement, as I’ve learned on past advertising campaigns that have used it as a platform.

But that’s OK, because people upload great art to the site every day, and the quality of comments that they do attract far outweigh Facebook’s throwaway commentary and (largely) poor photography, any day of the week.

Beautiful Social Media “Book Covers”

Here’s a followup to this post that I thought some of you might enjoy.
It’s designer Stéphane Massa-Bidal‘s spin on social media sites, presented as if they were paperback books. Lovely, especially the Facebook one.

What’s your favourite? Let me know.

via Abduzeedo

Self-Pixellation

In his recent work “Papercraft Self Portrait”, 3D artist Eric Testrole did something really cool for Halloween. He pixellated his own head!

It was kind of inspired by big-head mode seen in videogames. I really wanted to get the faceted geosphere look with wireframe.

He’s been a character designer in the video game industry for nine years, so this is a case of life now mimicking his art, as his skills having now ‘absorbed’ his very being. Very spooky. Here’s how it happened:

The head was created from a blocky 370 polygons, using 3ds Max
A model was created from a blocky 370 polygons
He then used Mudbox 2010 and Photoshop CS3 to add texture
Texture was added to match his appearance using PhotoShop
He then printed, cut and folded up the pieces using high quality paper.
The ‘polygons’ are printed, cut & glued together

The finished result is the surreal creation you see prowling the streets in the below Flickr photoset. Hit fullscreen for best effect:

Mobile Telephone

The Internet and the mobile phone are two mighty forces that have bent contemporary culture and remade it in their form. They offer immediacy, connectivity, and social interaction of a wholly different kind. These are technologies that have brought profound changes to the ways academia consider technoscience and digital communication. Their relationship was of interest to academics in the early 1990’s, who declared that their inevitable fusion would be the beginning of the age of Ubiquitous Computing: “the shift away from computing which centered on desktop machines towards smaller multiple devices distributed throughout the space” (Weiser, 1991 in Manovich, 2006). In truth, it was the microprocessor and Moore’s Law- “the number of transistors that can be fit onto a square inch of silicon doubles every 12 months” (Stokes, 2003) that led to many of the technologies that fall under this term: laptops, PDA’s, Digital Cameras, flash memory sticks and MP3 players. Only recently have we seen mobile telephony take on the true properties of the Internet.

The HARVEE project is partially backed by Nokia Corp. which recognises its potential as a Mobile 2.0 technology: user-generated content for mobile telephony that exploits web-connectivity. Mobile 2.0 is an emerging technology thematically aligned with the better established Web 2.0. Nokia already refer to their higher-end devices as multimedia computers, rather than as mobile phones. Their next generation Smartphones will make heavy use of camera-handling systems, which is predicated on the importance of user-generated content as a means to promote social interaction. This strategic move is likely to realign Nokia Corp.’s position in the mobile telephony and entertainment markets.

Last year, more camera phones were sold than digital cameras (Future Image, 2006). Nokia have a 12 megapixel camera phone ready for release in 2009, and it will be packaged with a processing unit equal to the power of a Sony PSP (Nokia Finland: non-public product specification document). MP3 and movie players are now a standard on many handsets, stored on plug-in memory cards and viewed through increasingly higher resolution colour screens. There is a growing mobile gaming market, the fastest growing sector of the Games Industry (Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) sales chart). The modern mobile phone receives its information from wide-band GPRS networks allowing greater network coverage and faster data transfer. Phone calls are the primary function, but users are exploiting the multi-media capabilities of their devices in ways not previously considered. It is these factors, technologic, economic and infrastructural that provide the perfect arena for Mobile AR’s entry into play.

Mobile Internet is the natural convergence of mobile telephony and the World Wide Web, and is already a common feature of new mobile devices. Mobile Internet, I would argue, is another path leading to Mobile AR, driven by mobile users demanding more from their handsets. Mobile 2.0 is the logical development of this technology- placing the power of location-based, user-generated content into a new real-world context. Google Maps Mobile is one such application that uses network triangulation and its own Google Maps technologies to offer information, directions, restaurant reviews or even satellite images of your current location- anywhere in the world. Mobile AR could achieve this same omniscience (omnipresence?) given the recent precedent for massively multi-user collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, Flickr and Google Maps itself. These are essentially commercially built infrastructures designed to be filled with everybody’s tags, comments or other content. Mobile AR could attract this same amount of devotion if it offered such an infrastructure and real-world appeal.

There is a growing emphasis on Ubiquitous Computing devices in our time-precious world, signified by the increased sales in Smartphones and WiFi enabled laptops. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mobile Internet use has increased as users’ devices become capable of greater connectivity. Indeed, the mobile connected device is becoming the ubiquitous medium of modernity, as yet more media converge in it. It is the mobile platform’s suitability to perform certain tasks that Mobile AR can take advantage of, locating itself in the niche currently occupied by Mobile Internet. Returning to my Mixed Reality Scale, Mobile AR serves the user better than Mobile Internet currently can: providing just enough reality to exploit virtuality, Mobile AR keeps the user necessarily grounded in their physical environment as they manipulate digital elements useful to their daily lives.

Wrigley to Launch New 5 Gum in UK

A new gum brand is about to hit the shelves. 5 Gum is designed to ‘stimulate the senses’ and it’s one of the most exciting new brands of the year.
I was lucky enough to get hold of a sample set:

IMG_0558The marketing lifecycle is about to kick off here in the UK with a heavyweight branding campaign designed to encourage product sampling. Let’s look at how the product was launched in the US, taken from the Wrigley corporate site:

  • 2007 In March 2007, Wrigley introduced U.S. consumers to 5, the most exciting development in sugar-free stick gum since the launch of Extra® more than 20 years earlier.
  • 2007 In August 2007, 5 gum unveiled its marketing campaign titled ‘Stimulate Your Senses.’ The advertising spots described “what it feels like to chew 5 gum.” Set against an industrial, futuristic backdrop, the cooling, warming and tingling sensations created by 5 gum flavors Cobalt,
  • Flare and Rain are expressed through dramatically stimulating visuals and sounds. The campaign also strongly leveraged magazine, cinema and online media advertising to showcase our new brand.
  • 2008 In 2008, 5 brand launched two new fruit gum experiences. Lush gum provides a crisp tropical sensation and Elixir gum is a mouthwatering berry sensation.
  • 2009 5 gum takes it to the next level with unique, game-changing flavor experiences. Solstice, a warm and cool winter, and Zing, a sour to sweet bubble, are new-to-world flavor transitioning experiences.

Do check out the 5 Gum YouTube channel for examples of the TV/Cinema creative, but in this post I’d like to review the packaging, which I believe is a point of difference that will give the product luxury status.

So to begin with, we’re starting with an initial three flavours: Cobalt – a cooling peppermint; Electro – a tingling spearmint and Pulse – a crisp tropical. Packs will reportedly go on sale at £1.50 RRP, to reflect that they are a considered rather than impulse purchase.

I’ll be looking at Pulse – the tropical flavour, which comes with little speckles of sharp citric stuff that actually gets your mouth watering when you first start chewing:

IMG_0560Notice how slick the box looks. Think about the colour of the last pack of gum you bought, and now say that 5 doesn’t look cool on this front alone. It does not look clinical like most gums do with their greens, whites and light blues. They look more like smart trading cards or a packet of condoms for that matter – gum for grownups.

IMG_0567It might be hard to tell from the above but the packs are slightly textured, with a heavy feel in the hand like holding a deck of cards. They slide into a back pocket pretty well. Build quality is excellent, made from a thick card and high gloss colour.

IMG_0569OK I admit the above is a shit picture, but it’s just to give you an idea of how you open and close the box. That flap of paper is embossed with glossy material so you can easily slide the box open with your thumb. Very James Bond. A bit like a book of matches, it’s an old school but perma-cool ‘paper technology’.

IMG_0570And there’s the money shot. You would not be ashamed offering someone a piece of this stuff, rather than one of those pocket-lint covered chiclets you have to fight the foil to thumb out. The designs on the inside are different for each flavour. This would be a great place to feature a QR code or even exhibit work from young artists.

And that concludes my short assessment of 5 Gum’s packaging. Look out for the TV, Online and Print creative coming soon. If you can’t wait, 5 have teamed up with Vice Magazine to generate early interest and reach into the difficult to please Hoxtonite crew – more info at Viceland whose readers have been asked to work with band Hot Chip to create a Launch Event in London that will stimulate the senses.

If you would like more of these sorts of reviews from me, please leave a comment. I look forward to hearing your feedback. Happy chewing.