disturb media

Meetings in Feb [Infographic]

12.04.12 Greg Danford

I thought I'd gather some data during February this year, in a way that would require minimum effort on my part.

With a lot of meetings coming up, I decided that maybe they'd be a good place to start...

I then defined a few things that I'd look to record; the way people were dressed, the environment we met in, time and distance.

The outcome is, unsurprisingly, void of any real significance BUT I've previously never had the opportunity to create my own infographic from scratch before, including the first-hand data capture - so there was SOME value in it!

So, here it is, in all its glory. I'm open to suggestion of what to record and depict next - significance is not a consideration.

View large here

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#design #illustration #information-visualization

A Time Travel window to Clerkenwell

23.03.12 Disturb Media

In March / April's issue of the Clerkenwell Post there’s an article displaying some old pictures of places around our office at Cowcross street, Clerkenwell. We decided to take a walk, seize this sunny Friday morning and open a time travel window to the 1900’s. Here're two pics of St. Bartholomew the Great and II St. John’s Square in 1907.

The old photos are taken from a book called Panoramas of Lost London, the post are giving away a copy, if we win it we'll be making A LOT more images!

Want to see the images a bit bigger?

See St. Bartholomew The Great larger See St. John's Square larger

Cheers, Nacho & Jason

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Raf
2012-03-23 14:13

Lovely

FoldBooth iPhone App

19.03.12 Greg Danford

Disturb Media and Luis Carranza have just launched an innovative new iPhone App which aims to bring a smile to some people's faces by removing the smile from other's!

It's called Fold Booth, and the simple premise is, just like you would with a piece of paper, you virtually 'fold' images on screen. What do users create? Well, a whole variety of innovative, creative and often surprising content. How did it come about?...

When asked where the concept came from, Luis Carranza, a consultant Creative Technologist and Social Marketing Strategist said "There’s an App for just about anything. I remember having a proper “LOL” playing with another face-morphing app. I was amazed at how something so silly could bring so much momentary joy. If you make people laugh out loud, there’s a really good chance they’ll share the moment with someone else.

"Fold Booth was designed for a quick laugh. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at ourselves or at others, especially when no harm is intended. Part of the inspiration for Foldbooth came from my days at university. Each year they'd print photos of the incoming class on a wall. Each year, without fail, someone would start folding the photos. Then I saw Kempfolds (http://kempfolds.blogspot.com), a blog where people submit folded images of Ross Kemp’s very foldable face. I thought that if you apply that same type of humour to images of people, animals and objects, we could possibly make a nice little app.

"Unfortunately I’m not a developer, but luckily for me, the guys at disturb media live for creative technology. I approached them with the concept and, fortunately, they're the kind of guys who like to take on fun, experimental work as often as they're able to. So, Fold Booth was swiftly crafted, and the results were beyond my expectations. The designs were amazing and the user experience was perfected version by version.

"I’m really pleased with the App. We’ve create a little tool that people will use in unexpected ways. I can definitely see folded politicians in America, folded cats on the web and maybe even folded porn. Whatever people do with it, we just hope that they get a “LMAO” or two."

The Foldbooth.com site is an online extension of the personality and content of the App, allow the curious among us to take a peek at the variety of uses that Fold Booth's growing community are exploring. The site, along with the obligatory Facebook page and Twitter account was also created by the team at Disturb and plans are afoot to extend the offering further still in the coming weeks.

Who knows where this will lead? The creators certainly don't - but that's the exciting aspect of such ventures and exactly the reason that off-the-wall creations will never cease to exist.

The App's available here. What will you fold?

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#apps #design #games #illustration #work

disturb launch kinnari.com

19.03.12 Greg Danford

Over the course of the last 6 months, we've been working with Kinnari to help them launch their new jewellery brand.

Kinnari and their community of users collaborate together to evolve jewellery designs that are tailored to each individual user's taste; the credit for being the designer of the resulting creation can be equally shared between the brand and the user.

Therefore, it's quite a different relationship to most B2C brands - obviously a transaction takes place for the production of the goods, but the bespoke nature of the journey to arrive at the purchase leaves users feeling a lot less of a consumer and more a creator.

From a digital agency's point of view, this was a fantastic project for disturb to be involved with. Firstly, we were thrilled to be awarded the job of designing the brand's identity - a process with which the brands founders were extremely closely involved. We feel that the end result is an identity that really captures the simplicity and elegance of the brand without stealing the show from the jewellery, which does a very good job of selling itself visually.

The design of the site then really fell into place. We wanted to create a sleek, uncluttered vehicle for the presentation of the visually rich content. Jason Turner, digital designer at disturb said "The first challenge in designing the Kinnari site was about finding the right balance between the branding and the jewellery. I felt that the company identity shouldn't try to compete for attention with the jewellery, because the product certainly looks good enough to sell itself and the less clutter around it the better.

"The next challenge was around the navigation of the design tool. The experience itself is fun, but we didn't want to push this too much further with the look of the various controls and options, due to the risk of devaluing the premium feel. We netted out at a place towards the 'charming' side of fun, which I think is a perfect position for Kinnari."

On the development side, the highlight of the site build for us was the creation of the Design Tool. It allows users to immerse themselves into the creation process, changing the collection, base model, finish, gemstone colour and size, while seeing an updated 3D representation of their jewellery all the way through the process, as a 360° view that they control.

The fact that the site has been built to perform equally well across many devices and platforms is, most importantly, beneficial to Kinnari's community of users because they can design across tablet devices and smart phones as well as desktop PCs. It's something that's also beneficial to disturb because it's a great demonstration of our capabilities in this area and serves us well in our quest to dispel the myth that we're only about Flash!. Without getting too into the technical side, and just for those who are interested, the front end of the site is an HTML / Javascript build, making very good use of jQuery. The back end comprises of a Symphony CMS build and integration of the REALEX payment system.

This all makes for a really slick, enjoyable experience. See what you think and have a go at designing your own jewellery at kinnari.com

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#design #disturb #javascript #jquery #work

Illustrator Script: Save Selection Coordinates

07.03.12 George Profenza

In my previous post I mentioned JS and scripting Adobe Creative Suite applications. Starting with this post, I will release tiny tools written for various CS applications (Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) that can make some of the tedious tasks a lot easier.

This week I share a script which allows developers pixel perfect precision when dinamically placing assets based on layouts specified by designers.

This is a pretty simple script: it saves the x,y coordinates of selected objects in Illustrator so they can be used by a developer. The most common scenario is when a designer creates a complex layout with many elements tediously placed, that need to be animated/made interactive.

One way to this is to use MovieClips in Illustrator and import them in Flash, then loop through symbols and analyze, which isn't very flexible.

The script I am sharing now gives you a few options for saving coordinates: either as XML (which can be used with HTML5, Objective-C, Java or other technologies) or as ActionScript 3.0 and the data can either be instantly copied to the clipboard for quick use, or saved to a file so it can be loaded later in an application.

You can download the script from as zxp or jsx. files(*).

To use it:

Select elements inside an Illustrator document
Choose File > Scripts > Save Selection Coordinates
Select your options and save !

as the images on the side show. I've also recorded a quick screencast which can be viewed here.

Also, the script offers these extra options:

offset to top left - when selected, the original coordinates are translated so they align with the top left corner (0,0)
sort from centre - when selected, the order of coordinates is sorted based on the shortest distance to the centre of selection, otherwise, it's the order in which the assets were placed inside the document.

According to the xkcd graph this should be handy to someone, at some point :)

* The small print: zxp is the packaged version of the script so you can just open the file and Extension Manager do it's job. The annoying thing is I couldn't find a clean solution for a problem I had with locale and Extension Manager, so the installer will place a lot of copies of the same script just to make sure it works for all locales. If you want to install the script manually, simply download the .jsx file and place it in {Illustrator}/Presets/{locale}/Scripts, where {Illustrator} is the path of your Illustrator installation folder and {locale} is the language/locale used when installing Illustrator. If you have more elegant suggestions for the locale issue when packing scripts, please don't hesitate to post a comment.

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#extensions #illustrator #javascript