Seattle International Film Festival | Web Redesign

The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) is the largest film festival in the United States. POP has a long history of working with SIFF, as well as other film festivals around the country. These film festivals typically run all event and venue management via a proprietary application developed by POP. SIFF’s primary goals included creating a branded experience that represented the festival’s world class status, offering a richer multi-media experience, and creating an effective market channel for the SIFF Cinema experience which runs 365 days a year.

Melbourne Theatre Company | Web Redesign

The Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) came to POP for a complete overhaul of their existing Web site. The existing site was managed via HTML editing, lacked any kind of dynamic content and failed to reflect the richness of the theater and MTC’s new building. The theater company’s primary goals included increasing online ticket sales, creating a compelling site to encourage return visits, and improving Web site management by implementing a CMS. This site launched in September 2008.

Twitter Me This…

I’m working on sorting out a method to support an enterprise wide desire to “use twitter” in an effective manner.  Currently I’m looking for tips, hints and best practices.  Got any?

Here are a few resources I’m perusing to get my philosophy together.  My goal is to take a managed and targeted approach rather than just allowing deparments to start spamming our audience with unregulated tweets.

All Links Are Not Equal: Why Twitter Links Grow Conversation

Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Tired of Lorem Ipsum, try the Waffle Generator

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the Lorem Ipsum generator when doing site “blue prints”.  The Waffle Generator is a fun alternative that is a little safer to use than the complaint letter generator…

Waffle vs Lorem Ipsum Below:

Waffle:

Under the provision of the overall metathetical plan, an understanding of the necessary relationship between the major faculty and any common extrinsic aspiration focuses on the explicit metalanguage. One must therefore dedicate resources to the empirical substructure immediately.. On the basis of any significant enhancements in the economic rationalization, the criterion of gap analysis must intrinsically determine the philosophy of commonality and standardization. Everything should be done to expedite the negative aspects of any mensurable vivacity.

Lorem Ipsum:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce accumsan odio eu dui. Nulla metus orci, egestas vitae, volutpat consequat, dignissim non, quam. Praesent risus velit, pretium ut, sollicitudin eget, laoreet ac, massa. In facilisis malesuada nunc. Ut imperdiet nulla sed sapien.

Cool Sprint Infographics Advertisement

Yeah, its been a million years since I posted anything and its likely no one is reading this anyway so it doesn’t matter!

Cool infographics in Sprint TV ad.  About the only cool thing that can be said about Sprint these days.  Definitely worth taking a look at!

Sprint Advertisement

Very Cool: Nintendo Wii – Shake It

I’m not sure how this is implemented and/or if this is something that can be done for other videos on YouTube but Nintendo’s promotional video for Shake It has a very cool effect: it shakes the site apart.

As I was watching the game play video I didn’t even initially realize that the screen was shaking and beginning to break down from the “vibration” happening within the video.  Its very subtle initially.  Eventually the whole thing breaks down leaving a “pile” of pieces that can be grabbed and moved around on the screen. 

Definitely check it out!

Amazon Windowshop

OK, its always cool when someone wants to try and “push the envelope” by coming up with some new way to navigate information.  Unfortunately, this one just seems to not make much sense to me.  Windowshop’s call to action is for you to “Lose yourself in Amazon bestsellers and find what you’ve been missing.”  Unfortunately, the experience is a little random and the motion is a bit much, makes me a bit queasy.  Additionally, I don’t like having to move up, down, left, right to see whatever content is being offered to me.  It manages to make my 24″ monitor feel small… a pretty big feat! On the positive side, a graphical view into what’s new does expose me to items I would otherwise have had no interest in or knowledge of.

First draft beta: cool.  I hope they keep up the creativity and come up with a different spin on it.

Adobe CS4 Adds Multi-Touch Ability

This sounds pretty cool.  If I just had enough money to run out and buy a new computer and CS4 I could tell you all about it…

I can see that zooming and moving objects around on the screen would be very handy in CS4.  I work with large digital photos and a Wacom tablet right now but having the ability to pinch, squeeze, and spin the image to inspect and work on various parts would be a great feature. 

I wonder who will follow Adobe and be next to see a value in supporting multi-touch.  It certainly won’t be long until PC hardware supports this across the board.

More >> Wired Magazine

Happy Birthday Microchip!

Seriously, as much as I think I’d love to live in the 50s I don’t know what I’d do without my microchips. Happy birthday big guy!

——————— From Wired Magazine ———————->

Consisting of five components linked by a tangle of wires, the first integrated circuit wasn’t particularly pretty. But it did prove that a device could be built with all its circuit components on the same piece of semiconducting material — in this case germanium — rather than using individual, discrete parts.

The circuit was the handiwork of Kilby, who was trying to solve the so-called “tyranny of numbers” problem. Though the invention of the transistor more than a decade earlier at Bell Labs had rendered vacuum tubes obsolete, engineers faced a vexing new problem by the late ’50s: All those discrete components — transistors, diodes, capacitors and the like — still had to be connected manually to form electronic circuits. This was impractical for obvious reasons, so Kilby came up with a new solution.

Realizing that the semiconductor was really the most-important ingredient in the circuit stew, he found that other passive components — like resistors and capacitors — could actually be made from the same material as the semiconductor. “I … realized that, since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situinterconnect to form a complete circuit,” Kilby explained in his 1976 article, “Invention of the IC.”

Do I Really Need A 4th Browser?

Having recently posted a confession that I’m simply not that into social networking, I felt that I needed to check out Flock “The social Web browser” and see what it was all about. 

Flock is based on Mozilla and purports to be the browser for the modern Web.  Basically, the concept is that you finally have a single point of view on all your Web 2.0 social apps including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, WordPress.com and more. 

Its terrible frankly.  Maybe its just the UX/IA guy in me but all I see is a hyper cluttered browser with what look like old school HTML frames that contain all of a users’ “must see” information.  The more I play with it, the more confused I get about its value and purpose.  There are times that the browser includes 3 frames, multiple tabs, and several columns of info in the main panel.  Each of the columns in the main panel has what would appear to be a set of arrows for cycling through content but I can’t figure them out.  Half the content on the page changes when I press one.

I don’t mean to sound like a grumpy old man and I realize we’re talking about version 1 software here but it seems like everything Flock wishes to accomplish could be handled with a Firefox plugin or two (if it isn’t already) rather than a 4th browser for me to worry about.  I give it a resounding “meh” or at best a “we’ll see”.