Welsh Village Covers Itself in QR Codes, Linked to Wikipedia, in Tourism Effort We recently considered the heretofore blasphemous notion that QR codes are not, in all instances, a complete waste of time. Here's more evidence that they can sometimes be interesting and useful—the Monmouthpedia project. The town of Monmouth in Wales (pop. 8,877) recently embarked on the "Monmouthpedia" project—a huge communal six-month initiative to affix QR codes to its notable landmarks, organizations and even people, and write Wikipedia entries on each of them, which the codes link to. The idea came from a TEDx talk in Bristol, where a Wikipedia editor suggested that Wikimedia's U.K. chapter should "do a whole town" using QR codes. Residents and businesses in Monmouth stepped up, did all the legwork (there are more than 1,000 QR codes in total), and introduced Monmouthpedia this weekend.
Improve your logo design Great logo design requires a complex mixture of design skills, creative theory and skilful application. Any designer worth their salt can create a fit-for-purpose logo, but truly mastering all aspects of the craft takes time. Exclusive offer: Save 15% on Adobe Creative Cloud now Of course, logo design is just one small sub-set of branding, but the logo or brand mark remains the centrepiece of most branding schemes. We've spoken to branding professionals about the intricacies of good logo creation, and what qualifies as a great logo. To Go from Big Data to Big Insight, Start with a Visual - Sinan Aral. Visualization by Nikolaos Hanselmann by Sinan Aral. Visualization by Nikolaos Hanselmann | 8:00 AM August 27, 2013 Although data visualization has produced some of the most captivating artistic displays in recent memory, some of which have found their way into exhibits at the New York Museum of Modern Art and countless art installations around the world, business leaders are asking: is data visualization actionable? I think so. In my role as the Scholar-in-Residence at The New York Times R&D Lab, I am collaborating with one of the world’s most advanced digital R&D teams to figure out how we can draw actionable insights from big data.
How Brands Get Buzz At South By Southwest "A lot of great products and services have really taken off in Austin," says Ricky Engelberg, an experience designer who helped craft Nike’s Fuelband-centric marketing at SXSW, the annual Austin, Texas technology conference that helped launch brands like Twitter and Foursquare. SXSW is no longer just for scrappy garage startups, as big brands are just as eager to make an impression with tech titans, bloggers, and media. The brands making the biggest splash adopted a "provide utility" strategy, helping participants navigate the crowded tech space with transportation, finding the hottest parties, or getting access to exclusive equipment. Nike quickly sold out of its exercise-quantifying wristband, The Nike+ Fuelband, after its launch last January. With incoming data on activity around the conference, Nike publicized a unique data set of the active areas throughout the conference grounds on a massive LED billboard.
If Content is King, Visual is Queen In the quest for content that users of brand social assets will appreciate and interact with, imagery continues to surface as a key driver of engagement. All you need to do to understand this is consider your own social media behavior. While you may check your social streams multiple times a day, the odds are good that you fly through these “social checks” at quite a high rate of speed. It’s also likely you’re prioritising your focus first on who posted the content. RHINO: GRASSHOPPER DEFINITIONS - RHINO / GH This definition was developed for my final thesis project to generate a louver system based on functional requirements within the building. The performance was then tested in Ecotect. A large part of my thesis design involved invertible arena seating with many moving parts. I used Grasshopper as a means to develop the seating testing clearances, site lines, and many other variables.
Winning With Google+ - How Ferrari, H&M, Cadbury & BMW Reach Millions More Customers More has been written about Google+ over the past 26 months than almost any other social media site. While Google+ has had its share of press, there are still many skeptics. In the face of the sheer amount of time consumers spend on Facebook and Twitter, how do brands solve the dilemma of where to spend their time and how to justify their presence on yet another social network?
The Evolution of SxSW Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad is a new infographic from Rocksauce Studios just in time for SxSW 2012 this weekend. Since 1987, SXSW has morphed into an interactive, film and music conference and festival that brought together 19,364 attendees in 2011.Austin-based app development firm, Rocksauce Studios, has created an infographic that dissects the interactive portion of SXSW, and proves why this conference is the new popular techie playground. The topics and cited statistics covered in “The Evolution of SXSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad” include: - History of SXSW- 2011 Attendance Demographics - Top 10 Types of Business of Interactive Registrants - Geographic Breakdown of Total Interactive Registrants - Successful SXSW Startup Launches- Recent SXSW Web Awards / Interactive Awards Winners- Reasons So Many Companies Chose to Launch at SXSW- The Accelerator This design does a really good job with the visual basics.
Long live the consumer So many things are being pronounced dead these days, the business concept morgue must be working overtime. Recently, we’ve had Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts announcing that both marketing and management have bitten the bag, while a recent Guardian blog by Scott Hendry of Gyro imparts the sad news that the consumer has thrown a seven. (It’s entitled ‘In marketing the consumer is dead, long live people’ and is worth a read, as are the comments.) Roberts’ pronouncements are insane showboating that he’s probably hoping his clients won’t read. But Hendry’s piece is more interesting because it sets out a position that is fast becoming orthodox in much of the marketing world. TUTORIALS A lot of people have been asking me how I create my renderings. Since I am finished with grad school, I decided to develop some tutorials that explain techniques I used throughout architecture school. Many of the techniques only require Sketchup and Photoshop. Others later on will be a little more advanced and involve rendering programs that can be downloaded for free. .
Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner Innovations like this present great challenges for designers. Today’s app and software designers already have a deep understanding of how customers interact with their products. They know down to the pixel where to place a button, how fast a screen should scroll, and how to make an app simple without making it simplistic. But as designers move off of screens and into the larger world, they’ll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behavior every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that has unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)
New York Festivals Piece #1 - The Code Company: DDB Colombia Customers getting VIP service with social media compared to traditional call centres Brands are becoming ever more sensitive about how they are perceived online – nobody wants to become the latest Addison Lee. This has led to them become more receptive to responding to complaints and queries posted by consumers in social networks. A new study by Fishburn Hedges shows that 65% of those polled felt social media was a better way to connect with a company than the traditional call centre. Only 7% thought they were worse off using social. It’s not just young tech savvy types using social media to bypass the call centre either. While 18-24 year olds were unsurprisingly the group most likely to conduct customer service queries through social media, the report found that 27.4% of over 55 years olds have dealt with a brand through social media.