Author: Don

/ Don

PANTONE® Moods Widget

Maybe you’ve noticed that colorful rotating widget to the left of this post (when this post was on the home page). That cool little plug-in was created for PANTONE® as part of our Facebook Moods project. The two panels show realtime Moods posted to Facebook, and a digest of the previous day’s most popular color, keyword and city. In terms of cities and their magnitude of Moods posted, by the way, São Paulo has got us beat by almost 400%:

Popular Locations/Colors

You can see all Pantone Moods trends by clicking here, after you’ve logged in to Facebook and approved the application. And, naturally, you can see your mood show up on the widget simply by posting a new one and waiting for the widget to cycle through the most recent 15 moods posted.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear what you think about the widget. Drop me a line or post a comment below.

Category: Web
/ Don

The Creative Process

The Creative Process

Oftentimes when approached by clients and agencies, we’re asked about our creative process at era404. While people can easily see a step-by-step diagram of our development process, broken down by time, cost and client interaction, we have never really outlined how the creative process works here. This is partially because development, which is creative in its own right, is considerably more objective, pragmatic, and analytical. The process is linear, relying on previous checkpoints to proceed to latter ones.

Design, on the other hand, grows organically and chaotically. It pushes forward and outward in untraceable trajectories. If one thinks of development as a relay race with the baton being passed at regular relay points, design is more like a quixotic multi-player game of capture the flag. It’s undoubtedly the most challenging, gratifying (and possibly frustrating) part of our job here, riddled with stops, starts, reorientation, redirection, hidden doors, trap floors, exploration, and trial and error, relying purely on experience and gut instinct to reach the goal. And while the description above sounds daunting, it’s the primary reason we love our jobs so much.

So, depicting our creative process in a linear diagram like our development process is impossible. But each design roughly follows the same objectives along the uncharted path, which, coupled with client feedback and critiques, act as polestars in guiding us to their completion. Below are those objectives, distilled and organized as they would be in a perfect world, free of the organic and beautiful growth of real-world scenarios…

Read the whole news article on the era404 site

/ Don

Growth of the NYC Subway

Here’s a link to an animated map that shows the growth of the NYC subway over time, from Appealing Industries Appealing Industries (via Spacing Toronto). Unfortunately there’s no time legend, which would have seemed like a no-brainer to include. Still a very interesting animation, though. And if you want to see about eleventy billion more maps from throughout the history of the NYC subway, go here.

Growth of the NYC Subway

Found on The Map Scroll

 

/ Don

What if money was no object?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siu6JYqOZ0g

Transcription:

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do. So I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?

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