Nike Air Troupe Design Battle
Once again, another fantastically concepted and executed site by Nike.
The Air Troupe Design Battle website has been created to launch a new range of Hip-Hop dance shoes that took over 2 years to develop.
Alongside the dance inspired developments of the shoe (more durable for multi-surface wear and 360-degree dragging/sliding) comes the ability to fully customise its look - everything from the colour of the laces through to the colour of the under-sole tread.
Once designed, you can purchase your shoe, send it into battle against other designers and judge other people’s creations.
Like all Nike sites, the Flash work is excellent and I particularly like the judging section - two opponents (shoes) are shown, and the user has three seconds to click on their favourite before the next challengers are displayed.
Australia’s Next Big Thing
Just saw this new Bigpond campaign by BWM titled “Australia’s Next big Thing“.
A clever concept sees us following the father and son team around Australia as they search for Australia’s favourite “Big Things” - think the Big Pineapple in Nambour or the Big Prawn in Ballina.
Try jumping online and creating one of your own or just checking out some of the ridiculous propositions from others. This is my version below… The Big Bacon!
‘Skimmer’ social media application by Fallon
I’ve been using Skimmer, an Adobe Air application by the folk at Fallon, for over two weeks now and just love it. It pulls in things like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blogger so your browsing time should be greatly reduced.
There’s plenty of these apps around, but rarely do you find one that’s been designed with the audience/users in mind from the ground up. The interface is incredibly intuitive, the transitions between features seamless, and stability (so far) seems great.
Nice to see an agency, known for being uber creative, developing useful tools.
Virgin - right music wrongs
So, the campaign is over, Vanilla Ice is innocent and Virgin wins another round of applause for clever ideas.
Drog5 Sydney, created the Virgin Mobile ‘Right Music Wrongs‘ campaign which was originally launched on YouTube. A video of Vanilla Ice apologising for his singing, baggy pants and bad hair appeared, with a followup site encouraging users to vote for not just him, but the likes of Milli Vanilli, Right Said Fred and David Hasselhoff.
Here’s the video:
I really liked this idea - Vanilla Ice plays his part beautifully (make sure you watch the video’s), the execution was great and the seeding seemed to work - it appeared everywhere for a while.
I do think they probably could have pushed the user interaction a little further, as simply voting for something like this is perhaps a little pedestrian.
Streaming games platform debuts
A new video gaming system has been debued by ex-Quicktime developer, Steve Perlman, after spending 7 years in development.
The system, known as OnLive, claims to stream games seamlessly to either a Mac, PC or TV (with attached Onlive MicroConsole). They claim that “OnLive turns games into video data sent across the net to a hardware add-on, or software plug-in, which decompresses the data back into video”.
Sounds great huh? Well, I’m guessing that the proof will be in the pudding here. True HD supported graphics streamed in real-time sounds pretty audacious to me, especially in Australia.
They’ve already signed up the big content partners including EA, Ubisoft, Take2, Eidos, Atari, Codemasters, Epic and THQ to deliver games such as Burnout, Fear 2, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Crysis: Warhead.
Read more about it on the BBC website.
Offline shopping experience goes online
Imagine shopping online but still being able to browse the racks, drag items to have a closer look, and finally add them to your own rack of chosen goods before purchase.
Japanese website Hoop has done just this for their new online store. While I can’t read/understand much of what’s going on, the idea behind it seems pretty cool. Not sure if it’ll prove to be a success or failure for the customer, but good on them for giving it a try.
New Mini viral video - or is it?
This is an interesting approach to the notion of creating a ‘viral’ video. I loved it - well executed, funny and a little tongue-in-cheek - perfect for the Mini Clubman.
Flickr video visualisation
I love this simple clock visualisation on Flickr created by Stamen, a design and technology studio in San Francisco. It’s not the first Flickr visualisation they’ve created, but certainly their best.
It’s essentially a video browser set against a timeline allowing access to recent uploads from the flickrclock group. The interface allows users to scroll back and forth in time giving a broader perspective of Flickr activity.
Uzbeki training camp?
I came across this great little viral piece by Lowe Sydney on mUmBRELLA yesterday which promotes the Socceroos World Cup qualifier with Uzbekistan next month. A series of ‘leaked’ training videos purporting to be the Uzbeki team have appeared on YouTube with a previous version already recieving 186,000 views. I love the idea of using the opposition as the bait. Check it out.
Vote Earth
It’s been around a while now but I still love this campaign for Earth Hour 2009 by Leo Burnett Sydney. Leveraging the hype of the US Presidential election, the campaign urges us to ‘Vote Earth’ by using our light switches - simple, effective and topical. There’s the usual send-to-friend, share socially and show us your support by registering functionality, but the real winner is the concept - it’s great to see big ideas in practice.
The artwork has been done by Shepard Fairey who famously created the iconic ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Progress’ posters of Barack Obama. He’s also known for his “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker campaign and subsequent “Obey Giant” clothing range. He recently curated an issue of Lost At E Minor and collaborated with DJ Z-Trip on the Obama mixes - amazing live.
This could be the biggest election of our lives…