Ffffound is my favourite website

http://www.ffffound.com is a site were users upload interesting pictures, sometimes photos but mostly illustrations, that appeal to an aesthetic. These aren’t jokey pics, so don’t expect to see kittens falling off tvs. The best bit is that when you click an image you go to a page with similar images. Hours can disappear from your life by just following the images. Its awesome.

I’ve made a screensaver by batch downloading a whole bunch of ffffound images and then point my slideshow screensaver to that folder. I’ve got about 5,000 images and the best screensaver I’ve ever had. Coolest thing is I got 3 screens at work and each of them displays different images. Bliss.

Weylandts is Live!

The new Weylandts website is live. Emma Carpenter (Art Director), Neil Garb (Senior Developer) and Carrie Davidson (Copywriter) have created a beautiful informative site that is chock-full of functionality. The CMS backend is just as beautiful functionally as the front-end is aesthetically.My involvement was only right in the beginning, drafting the first wireframes of the new site. Emma then took those and improved upon them immeasurably – later with the help of Neil.

Our stats are immediately showing a huge increase in average page views (25) and time spent browsing (12 minutes). Which is testimony to all the seriously hardcore thinking that went into this build.

I’m tremendously proud of their achievement. Go have a look at what they made.

The site: http://www.weylandts.co.za/

Audi A5 microsite goes Live!

I’m very please to announce that the Audi A5 microsite went live yesterday. This is a culmination of 8 weeks of work and I’m tremendously proud of the final result. Thanks go to Rudolf Vavruch who was the actionscripter/developer on the project – he also has quite a developed sense of the aesthetic and can be relied upon for some cut-throat critique (the only & best kind) even if its 3am. Carrie Davidson wrote the deliberately minimalist copy. David Orridge created the first conceptual 3D model which helped to sell the idea to client. Ferdi Dick from Disko (a subsidiary of “Am I Collective” based in Cape Town) built, animated and rendered the 3D – thanks Ferdi for keeping it beautiful.

This is the largest microsite (in terms of mb) I’ve ever built, relying on quite a bit of sexy video. It also has the most photographs (something over 40) and the most wallpaper downloads (21) of any car microsite I’ve ever built.

It is Ogilvy Interactive’s singular Cannes entry this year. I hope it does well.

The link: http://www.audi.co.za/a5/microsite/

Tales of Mere Existence

Lev Yilmaz is a genius. Not only has he cottoned onto the cheapest form of “animation” possible (filming himself drawing on the opposite side of a back-lit sheaf of paper that “hides” his drawing hand sufficiently for it to appear that his simple line drawings are animating into being – just watch the youtube clip to understand) he also is a genius in his droll monotone delivery of a human insight. Be it about procrastination or getting a girlfriend; there’s truth (and sadness) and humour in what he has to say. Its only a matter of time until he’s either ripped off or gets paid some serious dosh for a very cool technique to deliver dry commentary on the human condition.

Visit: Youtube listing page for all his shorts

The Wacom Cintiq is pure gold

I’m loving this device. Oh my lord. This is digital drawing. Digital painting. Digital organic expression. I’ve loved Wacom graphics tablets since my first one 8 years ago. I even enjoyed the Zen art of not looking at your hand where you’re drawing but rather focussing on the screen at what is been drawn, it was something you had to learn. But now, you just draw on the screen. I didn’t realise that it would’ve been so easy. So intuitive. So… gob-smackingly brilliant. Corel Painter brings the natural media to life. Makes pencil look like pencil.
My work is getting several for the office (one for my department) and when I can afford one, I’ll get one for my home use. It’s made me want to doodle all over again. I cannot wait.

VW Touareg Xmas e-mail

I like how this idea turned out. David Orridge was the designer on the job. It was sent to Touareg owners December 2007 wishing them compliments of the Season.

Website design

Websites are hard things to design. A balance of content, user interface, site goals, client CI all constrained by pixel size, kilobyte size, browser compatibility issues and content management systems. And then one hopes it looks kinda nice too. Then 2 years of adding content to the site makes it look old and second-hand and you want to start all over again with a fresh photoshop file.

I’m usually involved in the creation of the wireframes and site map, but as building a website takes many people, there are too many people to name who were involved in the creation of the websites below – but as to my involvement – suffice it to say if I didn’t design it, I was responsible for the design of it.

Websites
www.volkswagen.co.za
www.myaudi.co.za (username: myaudi@myaudi.co.za ; password:myaudi)
www.audi.co.za
www.mytouareg.co.za
www.mweb.co.za/productsservices (only this section)
www.weylandts.co.za : coming soon

Flash Microsites
www.audi.co.za/a3sportback/microsite/flash.html
www.audi.co.za/a4/microsite/flash/site.html
www.audi.co.za/tt/microsite/
www.hansa.co.za

Audi Widget

The first Audi Widget. It has Audi South Africa News feed, 3 day weather for any city, 4 customizable currency converters and the local time. I designed it in Photoshop and Flash. Dylan Smith and Rudolf Vavruch wrote the actionscript and configured the server-side feeds.

Visit: Widget Download Page (Mac & Win)

Audi Q7 Prescience

This idea came from a magic book. Add a little mathematical nonsense and you have a small little application that can read your mind.

Visit: Audi Q7 Prescience

Castle Lager 9644

Castle Lager was the big beer brand in the South African market. It started rapidly losing market share as South Africa’s political landscape changed. The brand was struggling.The cool crowd, the young progressive black urban market, saw Castle as a dated brand drunk by older men. The challenge was to get it back into the hearts and minds of the identified target market, 25-34 city living black males. But how?

Castle Lager ran the 9644 project, very successfully I must add, for 2 years. In the third year, a new management team on client-side stepped in and didn’t see the benefit in continuing the programme. A fellow designer, Vumile Mavumengwana, worked on the print material and we fed each other ideas throughout the project. If he was a little too rough in his design, I was too refined – together mixed up we found an original style we both loved to work in.

View some of the scamps for the never-seen third year of the 9644 programme.