Advertising Age has announced R/GA as the digital agency of the decade.

See the best of the 2000:

http://bit.ly/BestAgenciesofthe2000s

TomorrowFromToday

http://bit.ly/7YYj3c

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

My parents and I will be driving out at 8am tomorrow morning to head to Seattle.  I have my fingers crossed in hopes of (my father) finalizing the decision of whether I will be starting school on January 4, 2010 for the Winter quarter.

I’m extremely anxious and overwhelmed by this process.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very really eager to start classes again, especially in the field of my choice, Digital Design, but at the same time, I’m flooded with the worry of getting eaten alive by my classes.  So far, I’m enrolled for Philosophy 110 (which I’ve taken before but dropped right before finals as I wasn’t confident in getting a high grade), History 212 – Western Civ, and Art 121 – History of Modern Art.  I’m overpowered by the feeling that my GPA will drop, therefore will not be able to have a high enough GPA to study abroad at sister school, Sophia University in Tokyo for Spring or Summer or studio arts in Tuscany, Italy for summer.

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On another note, here are some songs to ease my mind:

This song first popped up as soon as I started typing this post.  I really, really love Emily Haines – her fabulous style, cutesy vocals, and awesome lyrics.
Did you know she has dual citizenship in Canada and India?  She left Delhi at three years old and moved to Petersborough, Ontario.  And now you see why she has an eclectic taste in music, and unique vocal style.  Her father is a musician and used to make her mixtapes of idiosyncratic music of all genres.  She started recording songs at UBC, then Concordia, then moved onto renting out studio space in local spots in New York while residing with members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
New-wave-dream-indie pop Canadian band, Metric, has a song off of the album ‘Fantasies’ (released April 7, 2009) ,”Gimme Sympathy” (via Musical Pairings) – this is the song that has been repeating in my head.  I’m chair-dancing as we speak.  I love Metric, and I adore Emily Haines.  I saw their very compact set on the first day of Pemberton from the middle of the crowd, jumping around like a bunny with glee.

And also, if you’ve heard all there has been released by Metric, here’s a cover they did of Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice” (via Music Induced Euphoria).  I should apologize to the diehard fans of Dylan… I’m sorry if this song offends you or is insulting, but I love it.  I really do wholeheartedly love Bob Dylan with all of me, but sometimes, I just can’t handle him at times of needing a cheer-up.

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This song blows me away.  Every time I listen to it I get goosebumps… maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.  This band is called Immanu El, and their song, “Under Your Wings I Will Hide” takes me to a whole different realm of serenity where I’m in a field, laying on the grass looking up at the stars.  I wish I could right now but it’s freezing cold.  So I lay on my bed, imagining this beautiful scenery, feeling content and fuzzy inside.  Please listen to this song and let it touch your heart, I hope it does it to you like it does to me. Listen to it via Devotion Magazine, “Under Your Wings I Will Hide” off  of Swedish post-rock band Immanu El’s ‘They’ll Come, They Come’.

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And I suppose (if I don’t have wireless) I will talk to you all in a few days.  Have a wonderful evening, morning, another evening, morning, and then will be posting up a whole bunch of songs and goodies.  Hopefully I’ll be able to check out some awesome cafes and eateries while I’m in Seattle.  Good night and almost morning.

Victoria circa Summer 2009 (taken by me)

Today see the official announcement of what we all knew was coming, a partnership between print publishers to help secure a future in digital magazines.

Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc, Meredith and News Corporation have formed an independent venture to help develop open standards for a new “digital storefront” and related technologies.

There are four parts to their agreement:

1) To create a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication
2) To create a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes
3) To create a consumer storefront offering an extensive selection of reading options
4) To create a rich array of innovative advertising opportunities

Beyond the publications of the equity partners, the venture will welcome other publishers to offer their content via this new digital platform. Publishers will derive revenue from content and advertising sales, as well as from print subscriptions.

For publishers and advertisers, the venture will offer an attractive, cost-efficient, consumer-focused environment. Advertisers will be able to utilize innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium. In addition to entirely new magazine and newspaper reading experiences, content selections may ultimately include books, comic books, blogs and other media.

The whole press release can be found here

So there we go, a big announcement indeed and a good one to end the year on. 2010 will be a significant year for eMags and digital publishing in general. What does this mean for smaller, more independent publishers? And how will some of the other bigger companies respond? What will the likes of Future, Bauer and Dennis do next year?

Only time shall tell…

Is it just me or does the news seem to be particularly disheartening at the moment? Seldom is there a page that doesn’t report tragedy, economic decline or corrupt politicians. Don’t get me wrong – I’m thrilled that Tiger Woods is no longer making the headlines – but amidst all this doom and gloom, it’s nice to take a break and kick back with something more lightweight…like today’s selection of design news.

mydeco’s pick of the top three news stories:

1. The Telegraph: The cupcake effect

Image credit: The Telegraph

It can’t be a good reflection of the nation’s dietary habits when a borough’s house prices are determined by baked goods. The ‘cupcake effect’ refers to the added prestige that cupcake boutiques bring to residential areas – so desirable have these sweet treats become that houses within walking distance of a posh bakery may go up in value. Forget counting the calories; if you’re lucky enough to live near a cupcake shop you can start counting the cash instead.

2. V&A: Decode: Digital design sensations

Image credit: Wallpaper

A new interactive digital design exhibition opens at the V&A museum in London today. The title pretty much tells you all you need to know: on show are the latest developments in digital design, including works by Julius Popp, Daniel Brown and Golan Levin. Highlights include an eye that mirrors the blink of the visitor’s gaze and an interactive Radiohead video which allows you to mutate Thom Yorke’s face. Follow the link for more info.

3. Interior Design: Best of the year awards 2009

Image credit: Interior Design

Last week the winners of the BoY Awards were announced in a glitzy event at the Guggenheim museum in New York. Essentially the academy awards of the design world, this competition celebrates both interior and product design in 65 categories. The winning products were rather uninspiring (but this was to be expected considering there is an entire category dedicated to window treatments). I was impressed however by the winning institutional project: the Genexis theatre in Singapore (see above) combines both art and technology to create a truly innovative design.

The best of the rest:

Interior Design: pop-up design clinic rises in New York

Daily Mail: You can’t bank on riverside living, says secret millionaire as he sells up

Daily Mail: Hollywood goes to Devon: Art Deco mansion recreates the ritzy times of Tinseltown in the racy Thirties

The Telegraph: Spa Spy: Gilpin Lodge, Windermere

The Telegraph: Beauty – but at what price?

The Telegraph: Design notebook: Novelty bin bags

The Telegraph: Word on the street; Jimmy Carr on the hunt for an interior designer

Wallpaper: Wallspace: Vladimir Kagan

That’s all we have for today, but make sure you join us again tomorrow for your next fix of scintillating design news.

“GradComD Emotions Survey” is a program to encourage our students at GradComD community. More specifically, we separated it into 2 parts. First part was with five interactive posters of 5 different expressions of confident, excited, confused, nervous, depressed, and then asking our schoolmates to express their emotions through stickers before Survey, Dec 19, 2009 at our community. Secondly, we will spread the symbol stickers of a heart (like it) and a blank space. (you can write some words to encourage our schoolmates) If you love the artwork at Survey, you may place the heart sticker on his or her work, if you want to encourage our schoolmate, you may place the blank space sticker by writing some words on the his or her work. Finally, supporting GradComD community to overcome the difficulty during the Survey, releasing their stresses, in order to keep our community balanced and progressed!

We started with making the “Emotional Stickers.” We did 10 symbols of the expressions, such as an exclamation mark, a questions mark, a musical note, and all, in order to ask our community to express their feelings about Survey through stickers, interacting with the emotional posters.

Our final 10 Emotional Stickers!

Secondly, we made five different emotional words in typography compositions: Confident, Excited, Confused, Nervous, Depressed on the boards. Afterward, we asked our schoolmates to hold the boards and then photograping them!

We picked the final 5 photographs, making them black and white version to emphasize the pink color of the stickers and then we collected everything together by placing the “Emotional Interactive Posters” and the “Emotional Stickers” on the GradComD bulletin board.

It is our launching day of  “Pop Event” with the Emotional Interactive Posters and the Emotional Stickers. As you can see, it pops out!

Stickers are growing more!

We created a survey. The data we collected we compiled into Daytum. Check it out here!

This is my final video for COM 220.  I documented a goldfish’s life as it tried to get back to its original habitat, by using stop animation filming

View my most recent Digital Design project as an online book!

CLICK LINK BELOW:

http://issuu.com/dcwdesign/docs/escapelog_book

Places to eat near Pratt Manhattan: Swich (Chelsea), and Dogmatic (Union Square – sooooo good).

<3

Lots of good info in this one.

photon death ray. yes.

who wouldn’t want a shot?

nice colours.

This is a continuation of previous post, in this post, we will see the NOR gate as a univarsal gate and create different gates using NOR gate.

As we know that NAND and NOR Gates are called Universal Gates since they can cerate any of the Logic Gate

Lets see to how to make all other logic gates by using the NOR Gate

1. NOR gate to NOT Gate conversion

Refer the following diagram –

Digital : Image – NOR to NOT

NOR to NOT Conversion

Here the same input is applied to the both inputs of a NOR Gate

According to NOR Gate – If A and B are two inputs than output equation will be (A+B)’

For this case :

= (X+X)’
= X’
= Inverted Input

2. NOR Gate to AND Gate Convertion

Refer following diagram for NOR to AND Gate conversion -

Digital : Image – NOR to AND Conversion

NOR to AND Conversion

According to diagram –

s1 = (X+X)’ = X’
s2 = (Y+Y)’ = Y’
s3= (s1+s2)’ = (X’+Y’)’
=> (X’)’ .(Y’)’
=> X.Y
=> AND Gate

3. NOR Gate to OR Gate Convertion

Refer the following Diagram

Digital : Image – NOR to OR Convertion

NOR to OR

For this case – X and Y are the two inputs to a NOR gate and the output of the First NOR gate goes again to an another NOR gate’s inputs.

=> s1 = (X+Y)’
=> s2 = (s1+s1)’ = s1’
=> s2 = ((X+Y)’)’
=> X+Y
=> OR Gate

4. NOR Gate to NAND Gate Convertion

Refer the following Diagram

Digital : Image – NOR to NAND

NOR to NAND Conversion

According to diagram –

s1 = (X+X)’ = X’
s2 = (Y+Y)’ = Y’
s3 = (s1+s2)’ = (X’+Y’)’
=> (X’)’ .(Y’)’
=> X.Y
s4 = (s3 + s3)’
=> s3′
=> (X.Y)’
=> NAND Gate

5. NOR to XOR Gate

Digital : Image – NOR to XOR Gate Convertion

6. NOR to XNOR Gate

Digital : Image – NOR to XNOR Gate Convertion

Google Wave is the company’s latest offering in their trek towards complete world domination.  If you haven’t already heard of it, the pitch is “What would email look like if it were invented today?”  Email was invented over 40 years ago to emulate snail mail.  Google Wave aims to be a series of collaborative ‘living’ documents that multiple users can update simultaneously.  Here are some introductory links and my thoughts for how design and construction teams might use this tool.  If you have your own ideas for how you’ll implement Wave, share it in the comments. I have Wave invites to offer with the first 10 commenters. The email field in the comments is not published on the site, I’ll send your invite to this address.

Links for Getting Started

YouTube: What is Google Wave?

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

LifeHacker: How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave

How Architects Might Use Wave

• Meeting minutes: Instead of one person publishing minutes, all parties could contribute their notes to ensure no detail is dropped.  This could happen live with attendees on laptops or smartphones adding their responsibilities to the document.  One party might still be chiefly responsible for moderating the minutes, but an increased participation in record keeping could help ensure all parties are clear on the next actions to take.
• Collaborative notes: Aside from architecture, there is discussion on how students can use Wave to crowdsource their notes on a class.  If a student dazed during a certain portion of a lecture, they might find it in the class Wave.  The professional equivalent of this might be notes on:
  • office-specific drawing and software procedures
  • shared notes from a presentation
  • notes from professional conferences
• Problem Solving: Some design issues require long email trails to find resolution.  Such circumstances might be aided by a Wave that allows each party to contribute their ideas to the collaborative document.
• Job record: If a construction project recorded major decisions and intentions in Waves, the result would be entirely searchable  and ‘rewind-able’.  This could benefit a complex project in the later phases of design or construction.
• Research: If architects increase their participation in Wave, ‘public waves’ could enable  architects to find new expert voices to help solve technical problems.
• International Projects: The real-time translating feature of Wave aims to break language barriers.
• Fun Stuff: Organizing lunch, drinks and parties without long trails of emails.

(Ok, that’s possibly the worst headline ever I know… and Phil Collins has naff all to do with Adobe, but heh!)

So with Time Inc’s announcement that SI Tablet be be built using Air, we take a (very brief) look at what it actually is…

Air or Adobe Integrated Runtime is a cross-platform program meant for building rich internet applications using Adobe Flash, Flex, HTML or Ajax, resulting in an App that can be run off your desktop as opposed to online.

Over 100 million installations of Air have taken place since launch in February 2008 with over 500 applications now available on the Adobe Air marketplace.

Air allows existing Flash, actionscript, HTML or JavaScript to be used to build a more traditional like desktop program. Basically you can get access to internet and rich media content through a non-browser desktop app. A good recent example of this would be the interactive trailer for upcoming movie Avatar, found here.

Because Air is a desktop app, it uses local systems and storage and is thus more flexible and efficient than a more limited, browser integrated application.

Because it is a desktop application it can also be operated offline meaning some aspects of an Air application can be used off line.

NYTimes Reader 2.0 allows yo to download a newspaper and then read it offline with updates happening only when an internet connection is re-established.

Adobe Air applications can be built using Dreamweaver CS4, Adobe Flash Builder or Flash CS4. It’s also worth noting that the Beta for Air 2.0 is now out and offers support for multi gesture interfaces, meaning even more options are available than what has been shown by Time Inc. Oh, and lets not forget; it’s free to build Air apps. So what ya waiting for!

More information on Adobe Air can be found here.

Brilliant.  I loved the tiny details that must have gone into making this.  My favorite part is when the Rocket Launcher is fired and it goes into a POV shot toward the hippo…  I also liked the silliness and freedom of their choices, like the surprise T-Rex defending the bad guy.  The  music was great.

I liked the “Fast Food Challenge” Visual Narrative because it was based on a really cool concept. Clearly Daniel is a fast food aficionado because one must be to come up with that idea. I liked how the font used throughout the Visual Narrative matched that of McDonald’s- white and blocky letters. The upbeat music in the background really made it feel like a challenge. This group also did a great job of using a variety of shots- such as close-ups of the food and then exterior shots of the welcome/exit signs.

My second favorite Visual Narrative was “Flowers”. I liked how it started off with “Liz and Reed Productions” and had different named parts (“The Ex and Exlax” was the funniest). This group incorporated a wide variety of shots, such as close-ups of facial expressions, medium shots of Liz and Reed talking in Scales, and long shots of Reed and his new girlfriend in Paris. The French music really set the mood for this romantic piece. I loved the incorporation of the Mac Photobooth shots because I love using that application with my friends. “Flowers” was quite long but told an interesting, unique, and even somewhat vulgar (with lots of middle fingers, punching, and bathroom shots) story.

“The Great Rescue!!!” was the most entertaining Visual Narrative to watch. I really enjoyed this unique and modern interpretation of a classic storyline- saving the princess. The motion of the pictures was so fluid that it seemed like a movie and not just a series of individual pictures. The screaming and hippo voiceovers were a nice touch.  My favorite parts of this Visual Narrative were when the dinosaur ate the soldier’s head off and when the soldiers pulled the rope to open the Bacardi gate because these actions seemed so real. This group also did a great job editing- making all of the figurines have the appearance of moving without any human help.

I was blown away by this one.  I can’t even imagine home many pictures were taken but the stop motion animination was incredible. The theme was funny, and the stop motion played off of that. I was really impressed with this one, it just looks professionally done and is extremely creative.

I loved this one right away – it’s a great storyline. The French song was a great choice – I think it really added to idea of romance and love.  My favorite part was when they were “in different places” (Florence, Paris, etc); that was funny to me.  I liked how the video was segmented into parts as well, it made the events more dramatic – Part III was classic.

I really liked the composition of this video.  The effects they used made it a great parody of old movies… I really like how they manipulated pictures to transform them back in time.  The music also went perfectly along with the theme and composition and added a nice flair.