The Donut Project

To create something original in the current digital world is rare. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

The Wilderness Downtown, set to Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait,” is an interactive music video that takes over your browser like nothing I’ve seen before.

Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.

Nothing I post here can remotely do this justice, you just need to experience it. Using a modern browser* visit www.thewildernessdowntown.com.

This video/movie/whatever uses modern web technology such as HTML5. There is no Flash involved in this. For more insight into the technologies used, visit www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

*(Safari or Google Chrome, no idea if Firefox works, if you’re using Internet Explorer bookmark it for later)

“The work you find yourself doing while you’re procrastinating is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
—Jessica Hische

Friend of the site Mig Reyes has been making some great short interviews with respected designers.

Humble Pied is a collection of creative professional advice in an on-going project where the formula is quite simple: one awesome creative type sharing one simple and inspirational tip. All over iChat.

“Rip something off.”
—Jim Coudal

“Great designers are never content, struggling with a design is okay. ”
—Nick Campbell

There are plenty more where these came from. Go & be inspired: www.humblepied.com.

Last Friday I received an email from your friend and mine Cee Lo Green (of Goodie Mob & Gnalrles Barkley Fame) simply titled “F You”. He shared the video for his new song F**k You from his upcoming album “Lady Killer.”

Within a matter of seconds the video was everywhere from Facebook to Twitter. It was even posted on my grandmothers blog and if you search for it on Youtube you’ll come across an astonishing amount of covers, remixes and sing-alongs.

Honestly I’m just glad to see the masses gaining such respect for good motion graphics and typography (set in Knockout by H&FJ). The times they are a-changing.

Design is History is a great resource for a glimpse at the history of graphic design. The site is a great collection of the major players, sorted by design era, going all the way back to the beginnings in the 1400s.

The design of the site is well done (it’d have to be!), a credit to designer Dominic Flask, who started the site as a thesis project. Each page shares relevant information on the web, related books and videos for more information. Well done.

Go and poke around www.designishistory.com.

Unsuck It is a site to help wade thru the bullshit buzzspeak of everyday creative/agency/business life.

At [company X], we take [Y] seriously.
Unsucked: We don’t care, but our lawyers do.

Make It Pop
This looks great, but if you can make it pop a bit more, we’ll be done here.
Unsucked: Add cliche elements to a site’s visual design (e.g., ribbon, drop-shadow, bevel).

Social Media Guru
The company’s social media guru thinks we should be on Facebook.
Unsucked: Douche rocket.

www.unsuck-it.com

The Twit Network is a hilarious Twitter-based spoof of the trailer for The Social Network (the movie about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg).

(Don’t mind the unfortunate YouTube screencap. Yipes.)

What would advertising for social media giants have looked like in the 1950s?

Sao Paulo ad agency Moma Propaganda made this series of vintage ads for YouTube, Facebook, Skype and Twitter. The campaign titled “Everything Ages Fast” was used to promote the Maximidia Seminars.

Continue reading for full-size posters :)

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For those of you who haven’t had their taste of summer vacation yet take this moment to travel from New York to San Francisco with this viral video from Levis. The catchy tune you are hearing is titled “Home” by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros coming from their 2009 album “Up From Below” (a personal favorite of mine). Also check out the route they traveled.

Unless you live under a rock in the deepest part of the ocean with no internet connection, you’re probably atleast semi-aware of the Old Spice online phenomenon that happened this week, which we tweeted about several times.

It all started with a few clever commercials that were very well received online over the past few months. The Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa) is a hyper-masculine character along the lines of the many legends of Chuck Norris, who claims that using Old Spice body wash will make your man smell like he looks like him.

This week, Old Spice (and ad firm Wieden+Kennedy) took this already successful campaign and brought it to the people. Old Spice guy began answering questions from Facebook, Twitter & the rest of the internet with short 20-60 second videos wearing just a towel in his bathroom. He made videos for some of the top blogs online, some top celebrities, and many everyday folks.

In all, by my count, they produced 183 videos over the course of two days, posting them in real time. Many of the responses were posted less than an hour after the users’ questions. With this many videos, it’d be easy to be repetitive and get tired, but the writing and delivery as so well executed you can spend hours of your day watching these.

We’ve selected five of our favorites. Continue reading to see them, including a back & forth between Alyssa Milano which included him actually sending her flowers and one true-life marriage proposal (She said yes).

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Etsy, one of the most popular online stores for handmade goods, is hiring staff! They put together a cool little video above to show what it’s like to work at Etsy.

See the current positions available here, but only after watching the video.