Archive for the 'Design and More' Category

July 23-25 2008

It’s 3am in Seattle. I have just returned from a day and night out meeting the ’movers and shakers’ at Seattle’s Casual Connect Games Conference. Attended this year by over 3000 professionals, a whole lot of busy people from such companies as Sandlot games; Play First; Microsoft Casual Games; EA’s Pogo ; Iwin and Big Fish Games (to name a few companies) have converged on Benaroya Hall to discuss the future of casual gaming. And how does the future look? According to the Casual Games Association, the industry which was reported to have represented 2 billion dollars in revenue in 2007 looks not just bright, but optimistically stellar! In fact, projected earnings alone have been estimated this year to represent an overall increase of 20% from 2007!Furthermore, it was noted that innovations in platforms and gameplay including the hugely popular Nintendo WII, mobile, Nintendo DS as well as new experiences represented by games such as “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” have brought “casual” games to a whole new audience hungry for fun and engaging experiences! And that means of course that ‘casual’ games are becoming more and more ubiquitous with each passing year.

The Casual Connect Conference began with a good start expounding new ways of thinking in a field ready to pounce on innovative approaches. In this hodge-podge of emerging talent and business models, new deals that will revolution game play as we know it are as I’ve come to witness, already in the works!

We’re excited to announce our latest client project, which quietly launched today:

http://shiftcontrolmedia.com/

ShiftControl is a company that represents the best of the advertising, video gaming and the pop culture spaces, synthesized to create memorable and meaningful brand experiences for consumers. For the new website, mod7 turned their philosophy of “seek first to entertain” into a fun, immersive Flash experience.

The best part? It’s full of little pixel people with kooky attitude and story arcs worthy of Shakespeare (err… or maybe a slow Lost episode)…

I’m out on the East Coast, and I’m attending Flash Forward 2007 in Boston. It’s been a great trip so far, meeting new people and seeing new places (my first time in Boston, can you believe it?). The conference is good, but, as usual, the most rewarding parts of any conference are the in-between and afterwards where you get to geek-out face-to-face over lunch, dinner and drinks. Some personal highlights to date:

Finding a Starbucks before the opening keynote
Though I’m quite sick of Starbucks coffee lately, it sure was critical to information retention that I get that morning injection of coffee after a late night and jet-lag. Also, there was entirely too much applause going on at this keynote. Ok, some AIR apps are cool, but c’mon…

OOP for N00bs
Peter Elst is a pleasant chap from Belgium who finally straightened out some ActionScript 3 OOP concepts. Well, at least for me anyway, judging by some of the blank stares around me.

Grabbing some quick snaps of Boston during lunch
Boston is a beautiful–and pretty clean–city. I was impressed by how small it is, relatively. And the fact that most of the major traffic arteries seem to go underneath the city.

Reconnecting with mod7 Alumnus, Jeff Weir
Jeff came out to FF2007 because his amazing Viscosity project was a finalist in the Festival. We eat fresh lobsters afterward the awards show. Sweet.

“Receiving” an award
My friend, Loc Dao, couldn’t make it to the festival so he asked me to collect the award for him, should his project win. It won. I collected. I acceptance-speeched. The award and I celebrated on the town. I just hope it isn’t too sticky… congrats to all the other winners for Flashforward Film Festival 2007.

Craig Swann’s Session
Craig Swann dazzled the audience at FF2007 with creative experiments using webcams, onboard mics, time, and alternative interfaces like the Wii remote. Neat.

Mario Klingeman
Mario presented his project to quantify the essence of Art into n-dimensional space using genetic algorithms and Flash, thus allowing a program to generate “art”. Very cool. Very German. Very Berlin. Oh, and he gave out pins! Awesome touch.

It’s strange being in place where you can talk to a group of strangers about properties, event handlers, and document classes, and they know exactly what you are talking about. 

More to come…

Crowd-sourcing is being utilized again by our advertisers, this time for the next great Heinz commercial. (more…)

This site parses web design “award” sites to generate a Top 40 each week. Now we just need some payola action, and the analogue is complete… but how does one bribe an algorythm? (more…)