blog

Vol: 001 | Issue: 005

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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UX this week

Looking to fill possible gaps in your design process? Perhaps http://styletil.es/ is your thing: “Present clients with interface choices without making the investment in multiple Photoshop mock-ups. Style tiles are for when a mood board is too vague and a comp is too literal. They establish a direct connection with actual interface elements without defining layout. They work well for clients who have established brands and need them to translate smoothly to the web. Whereas the word “mood” is often associated with brand and identity design, the word “style” was chosen to mirror “cascading style sheets” and reinforce that Style Tiles are specific to Web design.”

Content! Content! Content! It’s the most important piece in web design and with device sizes fragmenting and the context in which you are using the Internet changing so much, we need to rethink how we approach our content. Read Brad Frost’s great For a Future Friendly Web for current thoughts and some great tips. This passage is especially poignant: “To remedy these problems we need to analyze our content and establish strong content strategies to ensure our content is meaningful to our users and our businesses. Every product feature, every line of copy, every included script needs to have purpose and needs to be relevant to a growing number of contexts. We need to be ruthless in stripping away cruft to deliver strong, focused user experiences.”

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Blog post of the week

Joy to the user

In this excellent post, Teknision brings us a very interesting (and yet obvious) topic: When it comes to User Experience, the user have to have FUN! Simply like that.

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Illustration of the week

When it comes to Editorial Illustration, one of the biggest challenges is to to communicate daily facts with creativity without being cliché.

This illustration above (Time-consuming Facebook) by Tuomas Ikonen is a great example of success because of its originality and subtle irony. Great job!

Click here to see more illustrations by this artist from Finland.

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Photo of the week

This photo is captured inside one of Sweden’s most secure data centres. Inside a mountain, and built inside an old bunker designed to withstand a hydrogen bomb sits this Bond / Star Wars inspired space. Gardens have been planted, waterfalls flow, and people live and work within this amazingly designed place.

Check out more photos and stats of the Pionen data center on Royal Pingdom

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Video of the week

Wes Anderson’s Trailer for Moonrise Kingdom. (not new…but amazing)
Looks like Wes Anderson is at it again with his next movie Moonrise Kingdom which is slated to be the opening film for Cannes. The film looks to be exactly what we expect from Wes, with artfully crafted sets where every piece in the scene has meaningful importance.
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Web-font pick of the week

At bv02, we’ve been working to build a web font library with some good alternatives to the traditional web fonts used in most web sites out there (such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, etc).
Museo Sans is a sturdy, low contrast, geometric, highly legible sans serif typeface very well suited for any display and text use.
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Vol: 001 | Issue: 004

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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UX this week

At bv02 we have been thinking a lot about work flow as our team grows and as the number of devices and screens that users view our sites on skyrockets. The industry as a whole is working out how best to approach the research, project structure, design and development phases of their projects. The mighty Mark Boulton lays out some of that thinking in a summary of conversations he’s been having. Great read: “Responsive Summit Workflow”

In “Responsive-Ready Content”, Sara Wachter-Boettcher talks about content strategy for responsive design and “demonstrates why we need a foundation of content types, micro structures, and business rules if we want to keep priority, relationships, and meaning intact.” Using the new responsive Starbucks website as an example, she takes us through how to align your sites content with your goals across multiple sizes.

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Blog post of the week

Floating cloud installation by Berndnaut Smilde

It may seem a Photoshop trick, but the Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde managed to create an artificial cloud inside a hotel. Lasting a few minutes, long enough to produce a photo essay, the project was held at the Hotel Maria Kapel, in the city of Hoorn. Although the author does not reveal the secrets of the work, the sculptural installation was developed for the online gallery probe. Can anyone guess how he did it?

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Illustration of the week

“The Nightmare Before Christmas” storyboard, by Tim Burton

This illustration is part of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” storyboard, by Tim Burton. The American film director has always attracted people’s attention because of the singularity of his universe. And for those who are planning a visit to NYC, MoMa hosts an exhibition providing unprecedented access to a entire range of Burton’s drawings.

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Photo of the week

Last week bv02 held its first ever creative night. We kicked off the new event with a style of photography called “light painting.” To get the fiery effect, the subject waves a light source around (glowsticks, sparklers, or flashlights) while the camera shutter stays open for an extended period of time. See all the results on our Flickr page.

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Video of the week

During a recent TED talk, Cesar Kuriyama spoke about, and showed his latest project in which he is filming every day of his life and then splicing it together in one second increments. In fact, he has already been at it for about a year. If you compare this video to ‘photo-a-day’ videos, this one really gives you a sense of what is happening in each clip. I guess if a picture is worth a thousand words, 29.97 pictures is worth exponentially more .
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Web-font pick of the week

http://www.type-together.com/bree

Bree was originally released in 2008 and it became an immediate success because of its originality, charming appearance and versatility.
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Interesting website of the week

Myownbike is no ordinary bicycle shop . This web site offers an unique and enjoyable user experience.
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Vol: 001 | Issue: 003

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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UX news this week

UX Blog “52 Weeks of UX” released a new article this week, entitled “The Ghost of Decisions Past”, with Josua Brewer discussing design process, saying “… as a project goes on and more people get involved, decisions continue to informed by constraints that existed at one point in the process but either no longer exist or have changed in such a way to be virtually unrecognizable.”

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Blog post of the week

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

Its a pretty technical article, but dont be afraid. This post explains some of the methods and systems in place behind Amazon’s massive “used” book market, and how a price war is being fought over books that sometimes dont even exist.

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Inspiration of the week

How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries

John Locke has started a new manhattan art project, turning phone booths into mini public libraries. This really reminds me of the swap boxes in Ottawa, or the knitivism, but with a slighly intellectual edge. No word on if the books remained for long, but I am sure these were turning heads all over Manhattan.

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Illustration of the week

That’s an impressive illustration by Charis Tsevis. The artist creates a portrait of Steve Jobs using only images of Apple devices. Very nice.

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Photo of the week

Life Magazine just published a slideshow of their best photos from 1937 to 1972:

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Video of the week

Glowing Man HD from Jacob Sutton on Vimeo.

What happens when you take a 4K camera, 2000 LEDs, and a snowboarder outside at night. This epic piece of digital cinematic art.
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Web-font pick of the week

http://nodeca.github.com/fontomas/

Not a traditional web font, but the ability to create an icon font on the fly is really neat!
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Interesting website of the week

An art project by Jon Rafman, 9-eyes documents interesting photos captured by Google Street View from all around the world, from scenes of war, crime and sometimes just funny.

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