First ever iPhone 4 music video

Posted on July 6, 2010 by IdeaMonster

It was pretty obvious that when the new iPhone came out with it’s 720p HD video someone would make a music video using just the phone. That someone is a one man band (and the guy who shot and edited it) called Flakjakt and the video came out pretty nice. So as I expected there will now be a stream of good quality (and bad quality) videos for bands, projects, short movies shot while drunk etc. This one was edited (in Final Cut, not the built in iMovie) and there are some color changes added, but overall it looks interesting and very retro like.

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

Posted on May 5, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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.

Means to an end can influence the end

Posted on March 5, 2010 by IdeaMonster

wrench

The truth and fact is that if you’re doing something long enough you get better and better at it. Seriously, unless you’re like totally not doing your thing – you can get pretty good at things if you put in the effort. But there are also some other truths about what happens in time. First of all you start seeing things differently. Second of all you get repetitive and it’ll be hard to “think” creatively. Don’t worry though these are some normal symptoms. Of course a nice computer-less vacation would help a lot in such a case, but that’s not always possible. What to do then ?

Continue reading →

ease of use

Posted on February 17, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Our show has slowly gained momentum thanks to many nice bloggers and webmasters who shared it. Ok now we got that topic out of the way let’s talk serious.

The web is slowly dividing between a google found, self made brochures (barely interactive) and the facebookalistic social revolutions on any scale. Did you know that there’s a fairly large (and growing) group that thinks facebook IS the whole internet? scary?

In a social media frenzy the regular sites will go aside for a while but they’ll be back, since terminator2 was better than #4. And while online we might want to be alone from time to time, right?

All the perspectives and prospects of the social cannot ibviously be underestimated – this is an important part of the upcomin web 4.0

Let’s just hope for some competition (buzz? orkut? myspace?) or there will only be facebook to compete. ;)

Let’s think outside of the box

Posted on February 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

We are bound to repeat something someone else did before one day or another. Actually it’s more often than we think. Sometimes we do it knowingly, and that’s called being inspired (or stealing, the line is thin) and sometimes we simply think of something very, very similar to someone else’s work without knowing the person or the work. Maybe there’s an universal mind somewhere up there that’s sending in ideas and has mixups from time to time. But even aside from all that, it’s important to try and rethink how we can do things that CAN be done creatively. Some things are supposed to be just useful and standard, so the end user won’t get lost in them. But sometimes we can run wild and unleash all our ideas on the world. So which type of projects should we do? I believe doing a bit of both balances both the worlds and keeps the wit sharp. Soon we will post some new textures, tutorials and insights into the web 3.0.

Think before you design

Posted on January 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

creativity_usability
I recently give a lot of thought to two things: usability of a project (be it a website) and creative communication so the ideas are easy to grasp/read for a majority of readers. The time of “pweety weebsites” is over. It’s time for thinking at least as much as the design process itself. Think what you want to say in a claim, before you type it and add a dropshadow. Analyze other successful projects and copy only what you think is important. And by that I dont mean the 30 layer header background. If it’s a business don’t add people in business suits, unless it’s the suits you’re selling. This is so overused now that for a business to stand out it just takes to come up with something different.

Think about mobile use, it’s growing at an unbelievable rate, you don’t want to be the last on the wagon do you?

And remember that form and function should be equal without one praying on the other!

Creativity can be squashed

Posted on January 11, 2010 by IdeaMonster

creativity_can_be_squished

The less people in a creative chain, the better. And in some cases, a small team can deliver much greater impact than a big one. But it’s the general marketers and know-it-all’s who really ruin it.
So what can we do ? Sit quiet and watch our work being changed into something we won’t really put our names under ? Or maybe start something on our own and then face the same with the clients of our own? It’s important to keep one’s identity at all times, since it is what defines our creativity. And if others don’t want usability at all in their products then it’s their problem. We can make our own stuff, that’s useable, creative and pretty cool for everyone.

OmmWriter Equivalent for the PC ?

Posted on December 14, 2009 by IdeaMonster

I am a mac person. But at work I’m forced to reckon with the evil empire outburst known as microsoft windows. I discovered ommWriter and got hooked on how easy it is to silence all the shit from around and focus – think. At first I thought that experience cannot be duplicated for the bulky, ugly PC world. But I was wrong. Of course it’s not the same, but the differences let me have my sanity intact – the mac and pc worlds are different after all anyway. So here it is Ladies and Gents : DarkRoom
Of course it’s free, and reminds me a bit of the good ol’ days of hackers in 80’s movies and stuff like early DOS.
The cool thing is the simplicity, combined with a way to make the black screen transparent a little bit (while set to 98% opacity it has a nice “texture” from what’s behind but nothing’s really catching the eye)
The ugly green font is supposed to be retro, but we can change the font and background colors to anything we like. This time I think white text on a semi-transparent black background does it for me!.

Your mind is a wild monkey, so let’s write

Posted on December 8, 2009 by IdeaMonster

Sometimes revolution is in simplicity. And when my wild monkey brain gets wilder and more distracted, someone thinks of stuff like the OmmWriter
A beautiful, ambient writing app. Currently available as a free beta (for the Mac only). I got hooked. The main idea here is that it hides everything else, including the dock and navbar. All you can see is that beautiful image of a winter hill with a couple of trees. And well … text. This is all about text. Generating ideas without the blinking “new message” icons, and “you’ve got mail” icons, and many other distractions. As they say in the trailer on their website – you are alone in there, with your thoughts. And after a while the thoughts jump right through, ideas are generated, the work is flowing. Try it.