Incidental

We were really pleased to find out recently that The Incidental had been nominated in the interaction category for Brit Insurance Designs Of The Year 2010, an exhibition of which is being hosted at the Design Museum until June 6th. The winners will be announced in March (but with category entries including the BBC iplayer and the Amazon Kindle 2, we're just happy to have been nominated).

Ad_synopsis

I've started a little side project called "Advert Synopisis" on twitter.

Here are some examples:

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1. Leathery punk rock Stooges frontman Iggy Pop golfs with rabid Spitting Image marionette of self. (product: insurance)3:11 PM Jan 16th from web
   
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   Sir Ian Botham, OBE, shrinks self in order to walk through shredded wheat. Checks for superflous ingredients by shouting (product: cereal)3:07 PM Jan 16th from web
   
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   Talking charicature CGI bulldog goes skiing with ironically popular Olympic ski jumper Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards. (Product: insurance)2:58 PM Jan 16th from web
   
   

Advent Calendar

Last Christmas I did a series of thematic status updates on Facebook over advent. It was kind of stupid but I got quite a warm response. This year I thought I'd go for something a bit more tangible, and with a bit more scope for experimentation. My only restriction is that content needs to occupy a 400x400px iframe. This is also a chance for me to test my (puny) html/css/javascript skills and apply some of the concepts that I've been learning recently. The page isn't much, but I built it from scratch, and it does at least work. I'll be bolting bits on as I go along too (I'm also planning on some big overhauls in my web stuff from now through to the new year)

The calendar is here

Stephen King Gigapan @ St. Pauls

This is a GigaPan shot of St. Pauls Cathedral region of the north bank in London, taken from the roof of the Tate Modern (by Nathan Gallagher). If you zoom-in you should be able to spot about 25 people hidden amongst the landscape, holding large banners containing words. These words are from the last paragraph of Stephen Kings new novel Under The Dome and this event marked the end of an extensive real-life and online game of "hide and seek" for fans of Stephen looking to find clues into his latest work before the UK release (I also hid an extract on Unity's landing page)

Oscilloscope

A Gould Advance OS 3300A oscilloscope.

Does it work? No. No it doesn't. Why would a physicist give me an expensive, fully functioning piece of lab equipment?

Lego

One of the red-tops has been giving away Lego over the last week or so. After a cost-benefit analysis Stu and I decided it was worth the slight moral and environmental compromise and bought nearly every issue. I mixed the acquisitions with my small but growing collection (my little brother has all my old Lego now) and obviously had a couple of building sessions.

V&A Workshop

We ran a little workshop at the V&A on Sunday with the V&A's youth forum CreateVoice. The focus was on branding, and we had just enough time for a discussion on the CreateVoice brand, a contextual look at what we think is interesting in contemporary brand-culture, a primer tutorial on CS4 and a bit of an explanation of our background and how we got into design. This was the first workshop that we've facilitated, but we've been asked to come back for a second session on the 21st of November which is available to forum members (membership is free and available to anyone aged 16-21).

Instead

I found this little fella in a pile of 2p's in the corner of my room a few days ago.

It's from one of those fridge-magnet-poetry sets. I used to keep him in my wallet. If I owed someone money I would fish around for a bit, then explain apologetically "I haven't got the right change, can I give you this 'instead'?" They would laugh (the first time) and forget for the time being. I had to retire the diversionary gag in the end because - as you can see - the thing got covered in wallet-crud.

Periodic Desktop of the Elements

The Periodic Desktop is a back-burner project I've had on the go for a while, and it's evolved a fair bit as I've lived with it - grouping, positioning and coding my most frequently used programs in various ways.

I use my desktop PC* as a work-station and an entertainment centre, occasionally the latter when it should be the former. I've borrowed the metal/non-metal parameters from Mendeleyev's Periodic Table and tried to use the asymmetric distribution to create a digital space that encourages work over play.

I've also setup direct links to my most frequented sites and favourite blogs (Dezeen, BoingBoing, It's Nice That et al) in place of the Lanthanide and Actinide series.

Unfortunately the above .jpeg will only work properly on a Vista 1680 x 1050 px display, but if anyone expresses an interest I may adapt it for other resolutions or operating systems.

Below is a screenshot of the wallpaper in use. I've created a template for making quick custom icons in Photoshop based upon the Periodic Table 2-3 character standard (this required a "save as...">"_.ico" extension plug-in):



* Yes, that's right, I'm a designer and I use a PC.

We Have Moved

We have moved offices with Unity and Chalk down the road to 5-13 Hatton Wall. It's a fantastically large, open plan operation. There has been some excited talk of an office-warming party. Stuart and I now have our own decently sized dedicated studio space which will really help us increase the scope of our projects.