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• January 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | From UX to XA: what is this Experience Design dem speak of today?

  Posted by kojanen | January 27, 9:55 am

  image credit: A-dit-ya [Flickr]
  A recent article in the UXmatters newsletter pointed out to a trend among some in the UX (user experience) community to take the U out of UX and refer to the discipline as experience design instead. The reason for this change in terminology is that experience design recognizes the fact that most interactions [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | A Canadian Institution Turns 70

  Posted by mstrickl | January 27, 8:44 am

  The National Film Board of Canada turned 70 this year. To celebrate this major milestone, they’ve launched a new website. It’s a goldmine of Canadian filmmaking which features over 700 films, both old & new which are all available for online viewing, for free.
  From the site itself:
  “Our collection includes animation, documentaries, experimental films and alternative [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Pretty Loaded and the Art of Loading

  Posted by Daniel Turman | January 23, 2:18 pm

  In the great-big world of the Internets, there are so many
  elements that are almost constantly overlooked. Take the loading indicator.
  It’s something that we’ve basically grown accustomed to ignoring. And in most
  instances the reason for that is fairly simple: they are boring.

  Every now and again, however, I stumble across a loading
  screen that briefly stops me in [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Magic Maps

  Posted by mstrickl | January 22, 5:34 am

  Named one of InfoWorld’s top tech startups for 2008, Perceptive Pixel is the company that created CNN’s “magic wall” map during last year’s political campaign:
  http://www.perceptivepixel.com/
  Designers could take some cues from this touch screen technology, especially when creating an interface that allows a user to dig deep and yet have a sense of how to come [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Decorate The White House

  Posted by mstrickl | January 20, 12:39 pm

  In the spirit of Inauguration Day, try your hands at decorating White House with fiscally responsible Ikea furniture:
  http://embracechange09.com/
  As part of their Embrace Change ‘09 campaign, IKEA also set up a mock oval office in the Main Hall of Union Station that allowed passers-by to sit behind the presidential desk, and launched a motorcade of limos [...]

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• February 2009 (3)

  Creative Sensibility | How To Be A Photo Manipulation Genius

  Posted by mstrickl | February 25, 11:02 am

  Christophe Huet is a french artist that specializes in photo retouching. He’s created ads for Playstation, Nike, Motorola & Rossignol to name a few. His website showcases a sampling of his work. Other than a slideshow of all creative work as you visit the homepage, by far my favorite part of the [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Learning to love you more

  Posted by kojanen | February 3, 1:06 pm

  Here’s the perfect site to check out before the 14th. Learning To Love You More is a project put together by California-based artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher with help from web designer Yuri Ono.
  The site features 70 assignments to be completed by users who then submit their results – anything from writings to photos, [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Video Games As Poetry

  Posted by mstrickl | February 3, 12:04 pm

  When I went to Wired’s Next Fest last October, I had the opportunity to play an upcoming game for PlayStation 3 called Flower created by ThatGameCompany. Instead of killing people, monsters, or zombies like the Top 10 Games of 2008, Flower is about roaming in a dream like environment, and helping flowers to bloom.
  Each [...]

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• March 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | Moleskine Storytelling

  Posted by mstrickl | March 31, 7:34 am

  Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
  Designer Mike Rohde was hired to created real time sketchnotes for this year’s SXSW. I am only on slide eight and my eyes are wide:
  1. Love the way this tells the story of SXSW.
  2. SXSW’s brand is catapulted thanks to this and similar types of UGC. What happens when great [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Comcast Goes Indie, Artistic and Isometric

  Posted by Jay Bain | March 16, 5:47 am

  Got that new “C-O-M-C-A-S-T” song stuck in your head?  The catchy indie-folk tune is the only audio in a new Comcast TV spot about all the cool stuff you can do via their Triple-Play service package.  In the TV spot, people sing the song as they move around diagonally on a beautifully rendered isometric grid.
  Online, [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Life Is For Sharing

  Posted by mstrickl | March 12, 11:36 am

  Editor’s Note: Yes… some things are worth sharing, even two months late. Originally a post sent around by Sam Cannon, praise for this fantastic campaign reentered my inbox this week from Adam Turinas as something his “70 something aunt in Canada emailed it to me. Hhhmh! This internet thing could be big”. Proving a [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Imitation Isn't Just Flattery, It's Entertainment

  Posted by mstrickl | March 11, 5:15 am

  Remixing is an often unappreciated art form, but there are some groups out there who take the art of remix to such level, there is no denying that it is exactly that… art.
  I’ve always been a fan of the Emergency Broadcast Network, a multimedia group from the early 90s who use clips of news, music [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | The Rise of the Creative Technologists

  Posted by mstrickl | March 10, 7:24 am

  Today’s marketer has to wrestle with a plethora of new platforms,
  channels, and delivery medium. She needs to deliver emotionally
  resonating messaging to online, offline, out of home, set top, personal
  computer, mobile, laptop, occasionally connected, touch sensitive, and
  always on devices.
  A week or two ago, Randall Rothenberg’s post on “heartbeats and mouse clicks”
  broke open a topic that has [...]

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• April 2009 (4)

  Creative Sensibility | Using Science to Unleash Our Creative Side

  Posted by ssautter | April 24, 1:04 pm

  image credit: grange85
  In the troughs of advanced digital technology, there’s still an underground group of people who are embracing the science of photography in its fundamental form. Yes, pinhole photography is alive. Our own Chad Stoller has been trying his hand at it since he received a 35mm pinhole camera kit from his mom as [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Sometimes Mono Is Better

  Posted by mstrickl | April 23, 7:54 am

  A colleague sent me this interesting article by a Beatles fan who was shocked to discover that the Beatles’ original mono recordings of Sgt. Pepper actually sound much better than the stereo recordings most of us know. Now, even as a Beatles fan, I was ready to write him off as one of those purists [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | 5 Lessons From Regular Architects That Everyone Should Embrace

  Posted by mstrickl | April 16, 8:39 am

  Dan Klyn, a speaker at the IUE2009 conference, is an information architect by trade, and has sought out to create a book via collaboration around the lessons that IAs and XAs have yet to steal from “regular-old architects”.
  regular-old-architects seem to do a better job than information architects in the schematics-and-models phase of a [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Timing and Design Are Everything

  Posted by ssautter | April 6, 6:43 am

  image credit: nerovivo
  There’s been a lot of flack from breastfeeding advocates around the free formula samples that doctors and hospitals give out.
  But from a marketer’s perspective and one customer, they’re doing something right. Is it what was inside the bag? Definitely, according to one new dad at Organic. Is it the fact that it was [...]

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• May 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | Rabbit prototyping

  Posted by kojanen | May 21, 12:42 pm

  Previously, we wrote about ProtoShare, an online prototyping tool that aims to make the process of wireframing and prototyping more collaborative online. Other tools like Balsamiq also exist online, and then there are more offline prototyping tools like Axure, which has, for long, lacked Mac compatibility, but now there is a Mac version in the [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Seven Brands Shaking Up Their User Experience With Accelerometers

  Posted by Jay Bain | May 14, 10:04 am

  (Please note that for this post I only researched accelerometer-based apps on the iPhone; time permitting I’ll post again soon on how accelerometers are being used on a wide range of other devices, vehicles and buildings)
  The recent “Baby Shaker” iPhone app controversy drew attention not only because it highlighted possible issues with Apple’s app approval process, but also because [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Google Goes Old-school to Advertise

  Posted by mstrickl | May 14, 8:38 am

  As part of Google efforts to expand the use of their web browser, Chrome, they have decided to run their first ever TV commercial. This is an interesting decision considering Google hasn’t really had to directly market their products, and they have been such an evangelist in the use of the internet to communicate its [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Looking Forward to Now at the ITP Show

  Posted by Evan Cordes | May 13, 10:50 am

  The ITP Show is billed as “a festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators,” and it is just that.  ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is an arts graduate program at NYU that continually attracts great people and delivers great ideas and work.
  This past Monday night, I got a chance [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Dell Should Have Consulted More Women

  Posted by ssautter | May 13, 8:18 am

  Realizing perhaps that the female netbook/notebook computer market is steadily growing, Dell decided to launch its own specialized shop called Della. Nothing fancy here. Really, it’s just your usual specialty shop highlighting some Dell products designed with the women users in mind.
  Product MakeoverAnd of course, highlighted in the store is Dell’s very own Inspiron [...]

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• June 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | Tweets, Volleys, and Layers: How Top Creatives Go Head To Head

  Posted by mstrickl | June 25, 6:56 am

  Have you heard of Layer Tennis? In short it’s two creatives going head to head in battle of skills. The match involves both combatants swapping a single file back & forth in realtime with 15 minutes to complete their “volley”. After each volley, commentary is provided by an independent [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Yahoo Mail Is Stepping It Up

  Posted by ssautter | June 23, 6:54 am

  When new CEO Carol Bartz took the reign at Yahoo she promised to shake things up a bit and she held true to her promise. For the past several month, Yahoo has improved their UI and discontinued less popular services like the ‘briefcase”. Last week they launched access to “applications” right from your Yahoo inbox. [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Your customers may not know what your product is - and they may not care

  Posted by craigritchie | June 21, 11:59 pm

  This video by Google illustrates several issues that have
  been plaguing product and brand managers, UxDs (user-experience designers) and IAs (information architects) and most obviously, the
  general public. Google asks “What is a browser,” only to find that less than 8%
  of those polled have an understanding of the term. (It is, by the way, “a
  software application for [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | AR on the move: SPRXmobile's Layar and Nokia's Point & Find

  Posted by kojanen | June 18, 11:00 am

  Dutch company SPRXmobile has launched Layar – “the world’s first mobile Augmented Reality browser”, as they call it – for Android. However, Nokia has a similar concept, Point & Find, that we first reported on Threeminds in last December, which is now available for download (in beta) in the US and UK.
  The basic concept of [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | More prototyping

  Posted by kojanen | June 17, 7:00 am

  Adobe has joined the list of companies making tools for rapid prototyping with the Flash Catalyst. Formerly known by its codename Thermo, Catalyst – according to Adobe – is “a  design tool for user interface designers” that will enable them to develop rich UI.
  Currently available for download in beta, Catalyst first appears like a Flash [...]

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• July 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | The best user experience design blogs

  Posted by kojanen | July 27, 7:15 am

  New York-based UX designer and writer Whitney Hess recently listed her top ten user experience design blogs for blogs.com. Whitney’s list includes Joshua Porter’s Bokardo, Michael Angeles’ Konigi, and David Armano’s Logic + Emotion, as well as Jared Spool’s Brain Sparks and Catriona Cornett’s InspireUX.
  I think I could drop some of Whitney’s choices and make [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Bridges to Babylon: Awesomeness Overload from Chinese Shoemaker Li Ning

  Posted by Daniel Turman | July 24, 11:04 am

  Three NBA players recently took part in a week-long tour of
  China courtesy of shoe and sportswear manufacturer Li Ning: Shaquille O’Neal
  (above), Baron Davis, and Jose Calderon. The tour showcased a campaign that
  associated each player with a spirit animal. Yes, their spirit animal. And if
  that isn’t awesome enough, once the spirit animal was successfully devined,
  Beijing-based agency, [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Turning A Car Into A Stylus

  Posted by mstrickl | July 22, 9:40 am

  Forget what you know about typography. Two Brussels-based designers, Damien and Pierre from Pleaseletmedesign, decided to find a completely innovative new way to create a font… by using a car (specifically the Toyota iQ) as a stylus. In order to do this, they employed professional driver Stef van Campenhoudt to do incredible automotive [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | The Next Salvo in the Marketing Vs. World War?

  Posted by ssautter | July 21, 5:14 am

  I opened up the add-ons tab of Firefox 3.5 the other day and discovered the recommended 5-star add-on Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out (TACO). It works by permanently setting tracking cookies that are nonsense, and making them persistent across cookie cache clears. With Ad Blockers already popular, is this the next salvo in the marketing versus [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | The Hypercube: Buzz, Content and Brand Community Building

  Posted by craigritchie | July 16, 6:27 am

  50 new Nissan Cubes are driving off dealer lots this month. Each one’s being driven by a brand advocate, the reward for months of creation and promotion by musicians, DJs, dancers, programmers, designers, bloggers, podcasters, poets, writers and artists, and all kinds of creative thinkers. Nissan openly called The Hypercube a social media marketing experiment, [...]

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• August 2009 (4)

  Creative Sensibility | Humanity: Celebration and Critique through the Eyes of Google

  Posted by mstrickl | August 27, 5:53 am

  Eagle Point Dr, Sherwood, Pulaski, Arkansas
  On the blog Art Fag City, there is a fantastic photo essay from the IMG MGMT series featuring a recent work by Jon Rafman, a Canadian artist previously known for his Kool-Aid Main in Second Life project. His current series called the Nine Eyes of Google Street View features [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Can advertising improve the online user experience?

  Posted by ssautter | August 21, 6:05 am

  Old experience without ads

  Let’s talk about ads. Some people love them and some people hate them. As brand stewards, we’re looking for places to put our messages; aperture moments in which consumers are receptive and likely to pay attention. But to consumers, all they see are roadblocks to desireable content. Roadblocks often manifesting themselves as [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Online Buzz In The Offline World

  Posted by mstrickl | August 11, 7:31 am

  Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.
  Consider it a real life version of Twistori, an online social experiment that aggregates all the status updates on twitter associated with common human phrases (i love, i hate, i think, i feel), or similar site We Feel Fine. Christopher Baker’s Murmur Study also searches Twitter and Facebook status [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Digital Agencies Could Have a Future in Car Design

  Posted by ssautter | August 3, 3:59 am

  image courtesy of doozzle
  With the advancement of sensor-laden networked vehicles, the future of automobile design is converging with interaction design. Fiat’s eco:Drive is a great example.
  Now Nissan is developing an iPhone app for their upcoming electronic car that allows the user to check the battery level, among other things, remotely. This is a great [...]

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• September 2009 (5)

  Creative Sensibility | Bring a little psychology and game-play to Web design

  Posted by kojanen | September 30, 7:00 am

  Image credit: qisur
  Lord Byron said about card games that “one can game ten times longer than one can do anything else.” But what could card games do in the planning of online services?
  Cards, if not really in a game-like manner, have been used to help plan the information architecture for websites for a long time. [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Go Ahead Eat the Donut. She's Not that Skinny.

  Posted by ssautter | September 25, 5:11 am

  image credit: the prodigal untitled13
  Do people really think that people are born that hot? I thought the Dove’s campaign for Real Beauty was great at revealing the truth about how much work goes into making people attractive.  We all know that Hollywood, magazines and strippers aren’t real, right?  I mean they are spackled, airbrushed, fake [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Raising The Bar

  Posted by mstrickl | September 15, 9:37 am

  Anyone else see the last episode of Shark Tank? If you don¹t know what it is, it¹s a show where entrepreneurs present ideas to investors for capital and support.
  The last episode featured a guy that creates customized health bars. There¹s a really simple health bar configurator that lets you add your own ingredients and shows [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Social Knitworking

  Posted by mstrickl | September 14, 8:01 am

  Knitting and social media does it get better, yes, when you use different colored yarn. However, Hilary Grant is working with Distance Lab on Social Knitworking, taking our conversations and turning them into an ugly scarf that nobody would wear.
  “The intention is to provide a way to celebrate our online friendships by taking an [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | It's Beautiful And Bold, But This Site's Interface Is Polluted

  Posted by craigritchie | September 4, 3:30 pm

  Nice Visual, But What’s Your Story?There are hot debates here at Organic, as our creative minds passionately discuss and share points-of-view on trends, tactics and technology; media, messaging and all-things marketing. The latest debate centered around the Canadian National Film Board’s web site for their new film, “Waterlife.”

  The film hopes to create awareness of the [...]

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• October 2009 (4)

  Creative Sensibility | Audi Car Configurator: Good on the Surface But Could Be Better

  Posted by ssautter | October 28, 5:44 am

  Audi Car Configurator on Surface @ IAA 2009 from Neue Digitale / Razorfish on Vimeo.
  Interaction on a touch screen has come a bit closer to the mainstream with iPhone interaction and news casters using them for presentations. The Audi configurator for Microsoft surface is an interesting next step for automotive configuration.
  The Audi surface demo has [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Hold On, I'ma Let You Blog....

  Posted by Daniel Turman | October 23, 12:16 pm

  but Spike Jonze Just Made the Best Short Film Ever About Me Killing Off My Giant Ego

  WE WERE ONCE A FAIRYTALE BY SPIKE JONZE & KANYE WEST

  Oh Kanye. First you go all meme-ish the other week after the VMAs. Where, predictably, just about all of us with a computer had to go and Photoshop up [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | A Portal To The Chairman: Virgin Makes It Social

  Posted by ssautter | October 22, 4:47 am

  Virgin Companies have built a web portal that not only represents the Virgin brand really well, it’s a simple way to see and interact with all the Virgin companies  — and by “all” I mean all 80 of them. 
  That’s a big undertaking with potential for clutter, chaos and agnostic branding. Many brands have attempted [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | UNIQLO goes (way) below the fold, by design

  Posted by Jay Bain | October 16, 4:00 am

  How long is too long for a web page layout?  In his 2007 post “The Fold is an Unnecessary Design Limitation” here on the ThreeMinds blog, Rod MacQuarrie pointed out that using the “above the fold” design principle inherited from the print world isn’t always a best practice, and not always applicable to how online [...]

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• November 2009 (1)

  Creative Sensibility | Esquire's Augmented Reality Issue: Going Beyond Digital Print

  Posted by mstrickl | November 10, 9:48 am

  This month, Esquire Magazine launched their anticipated Augmented Reality issue. The issue features an AR cover, where Robert Downey Jr. performs an intro and also a pitch for his upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie. In addition, there is other content, such as a fashion supplement where the weather changes based on the way the user tilts [...]

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• December 2009 (4)

  Creative Sensibility | The Thread: Dec. 17...To Fold or Not to Fold?

  Posted by mhudson | December 30, 7:26 am

  (drawing via designofsites.com)

  Here’s a discussion of page folds in Web design and user experience. And we’re presenting it as it happened because we are cutting edge. Feel free to pipe in, take issue, make a point, agree, disagree or even compliment anywhere you feel like it.

  –Ed.

  —-Original Message—–

  From: Craig Ritchie

  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:55 AM

  Subject: [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Spam=$: A Christmas (and YouTube) Miracle

  Posted by mhudson | December 24, 9:30 am

  This year, Mother London put together a Christmas card that communicates the real spirit of this ancient celebration better than anything else I’ve seen in a long while. Give it a watch to see what I mean. With this, I want to wish a peaceful, merry, absolutely awesome holiday time, winter solstice and celebration to [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | Digital Campaign of the Decade Didn't Really Reach Its Potential

  Posted by ssautter | December 22, 6:56 am

  The Digital Campaign of the Decade isn’t an ad campaign – it’s a self-sustaining platform – and that’s what’s so great about it. As a runner, and a former Nike Plus user myself, I must say, however, that there is so much more they could do with it.
  1. Use it to fuel offline campaigns. Contests, [...]

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  Creative Sensibility | The city with the most effective design

  Posted by kojanen | December 14, 6:00 am

  The last century has seen a rapid urbanization of the world’s population. In 1900 only 13%, but now more than half of all people live in urban areas. Cities are facing dramatic changes in how they adapt to their rising populations and effectively provide services for the people and businesses that they need to feed [...]

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