Archive for May, 2010

Overlapping interests

Monday, May 31st, 2010

smart-monkey Expansion in the creative field is a must nowadays, since everything seems to be running faster than us. The technology, other designers, recession of the currency. And so on. So we either try to outdo ourselves in one area – focusing on being great at one specific tasks – and hoping that we will be chosen because of the amount of skill we have. Or we try many different things like adding flash animations, video editing, sound editing, and not being too good in any of them.

But is it really that bad? I mean come on! It’s our ideas that matter. And in fact the myth of doing stuff to the point, and working long hours on every single project is bullshit. Some people work faster. And I’ve never seen a flawless project either. So is someone bullshitting us into thinking that we should be sticking to one thing, because they fear for the competition? I can make a pretty good video if I have the right material, choosing the right trimmings, effects and music. Does it mean that I shouldn’t do it because I’m not a pro at it? And I’m not talking about birthday party videos for my sister here. I’m talking about something I take the money for and I can put in my portfolio. That kind of video.

I think that creativity is not limited to a medium. It’s limited only as far as our own limits go. And if we truly commit , we simply don’t have any. Allright? Allright. So go out there, be creative. Accept criticism and turn your back on the hate because when they put their time into hate towards you and your work, you’re already on another project.
Good luck!

David and Goliath

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Today something a little bit creepy had happened. For the first time (probably ever) Apple’s Market Cap exceeded the one of Microsoft. Yeah, I know. We’ve been always under the impression that the Microsoft empire will forever be there as the most powerful and evil monopoly. As they say in cheesy movies – with great power comes great responsibility. And since Apple right now has the upper hand, we’ll probably see a lot more “influencing the world” on their part. Remember apple fans being mad that people were choosing Windows platform and PC’s? Well right now they’re forced to choose HTML5 over flash for instance. And there’s a new iAd (html5 of course) going to be released soon. So is apple going to be evil?

Or maybe in the modern world, where google, apple and microsoft each try to stand by google’s “don’t be evil”, no big corporation can actually be the good guys or they’ll loose the fight? As I always said, I use apple products and I like them, both the operating system and the devices. But I don’t want MSFT to fall, just like I don’t want to see Google fall. There needs to be competition! There need to be windows7 tablet devices. And Android tablet devices! And if both of those run flash, we’ll just wait and see who comes out of that little fight alive. Because being first doesn’t always guarantee success.

I personally hope that we’ll be able to still creative memorable and innovative advertisements instead of being stuck with all that “interactive html5 toy story bullshit” that we’ve seen a few months ago.

Youtube is 5 years old!

Monday, May 17th, 2010

youtubetimeline

5 years. And yet it seems it had been there forever, right? Well apparently 5 years ago if you wanted to watch an online video you had to download a crappy MPG file or wait for those quicktimes to stream. And then along came two guys and their garage, and they changed the web forever. Without them we wouldn’t have the amazed lemur, the skateboarding dog, the laughing baby and many other classics of web 2.0 entertainment. Happy birthday Youtube! Too see (among other things) the Youtube timeline click on the number 5 next to their logo.

Testing Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

I downloaded the trial version of CS5 today and of course the first thing I wanted to see is how well does it really handle the hyped content aware fill. Below are my results.
Note that sometimes I had to use the content aware fill a couple of times to fix little mistakes previous fills had done. But overall it’s a very powerfull tool. The results are not as perfect as their promotional video but jaw-dropping nonetheless.

Test 1 – removing me and my snowboard from a cellphone picture. So there’s dirt and heavy jpg compression at the start.

contentawaretest1b

The before picture you can see above, the after just below.

contentawaretest1a

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Current design in the past?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

How would apple’ website look if it was designed right now but they had the products of the past? Well a guy named “newtonpoetry” made nice mockups of the apple site circa early 80′s. It’s really fun to watch. Enjoy!
apple1
apple2

Internet Explorer web share is shrinking

Monday, May 10th, 2010

browsers
According to a recent survey by “Net Applications” this is the first time in 10 years when IE had less than 60% of market share. This is of course a good trend since this browser is obsolete, buggy and doesn’t follow the standards. Plus it’s hard to make cross-browser sites look the same and it’s usually IE’s fault. The fastest growing is actually Google Chrome which might in fact overpower firefox in a few years. That is all good news, even though microsoft is working on HTML5 supporting IE9, they’ll probably be at 50% in two years.

Google vs Microsoft myth – the bigger they get the less creative they become? Not!

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

I was always wondering that for most big brands there comes a moment when they become less creative and more profit driven. Sure both microsoft and google are both big, both still generate large profits. So is it time for them to stop being creative? Apparently not quite. Google despite being “evil-is-not-evil” does a lot of useful things for people that just work. And mostly for free. Microsoft sells products in shiny packages, but there’s not much backing all of that up. Or is there?

Apparently money is just a factor, not a turning point. And we’re talking BIG money here. So google still hires good creative directors that can come up with ads and ideas that are original. Like this google chrome ad below. This is just awesome in its simplicity and the coolness-factor.