Ad Week’s Tweet Freak blog is trying to discern which agency Twitter project is the best. Not that we’re biased or anything (okay yeah, we’re totally biased) but clearly Skimmer is the obvious choice.
You don’t have to register or give anyone your e-mail address, just go click a button and then click Vote. Totally easy. Go do it now!
Psst, pass it on.
Since I know a few of the nerds are playing with Augmented Reality in their sparse spare time, I’ve been keeping an eye out for extra-cool uses of this mind-blowing technology. Yesterday was double-plus bonus Augmented Reality day because I tripped over two posts.
The Cloud Mirror from eric gradman on Vimeo.
First, Uncomfortably augmented reality. This is an art project that gives attendees a special badge and then pulls information about them from their Facebook status or Twitter feeds. Watch the video to see how people reacted to having their online ideas shared in their offline lives. I really like this one because it makes you consider some of the things you say online.
This second one is just cool fun, showing how to scratch a vinyl record without a turntable (more info on Laughing Squid).
AR scratching from vanderlin on Vimeo.
Those are some might fine nerds over there, aren’t they? That’s Minh Vu, Chris Black, and Mike Woods from a Finance and Commerce article about the growth of The Nerdery. Most of the article covers our work on Skimmer and our unprecedented growth when a lot of companies are facing layoffs.
If you read carefully, you’ll notice that the reporter hints at some semi-secret stuff going down at Nerdery.com. Stay tuned, because it’s gonna be awesome.
In still other news, we got a PDF of a Minnesota Business piece that ran back in November. This article provides a nice glimpse at our history and how we’ve grown from integrating legacy systems with the web to partnering with ad, design, and marketing agencies to bring their ideas to life online.
In days of yore sailors used a sextant and the north star to measure their distance from home and to guide them on their journeys. Times have changed. Now nerds can use the Nerdery distance iPhone app and never have to wonder how far they are from The Nerdery.
This handy app was built by our own Jon Rexeisen just for the fun of it and he’s giving it away in the iTunes store. So far it’s been downloaded by people in the US, Japan, Russia, China, Columbia, Brazil, Hungary, UK, Canada, and South Africa because nerds all around the world need to know how far away they are from nerdvana.
35 truly original hand-made type experiments.
40 examples of beautiful typography in advertising
Now that you’re in the mood for typography, you can find out what font you’d be if you were a font.
Problem:
We need a TextField of type TextFieldType.INPUT that has embedFonts set to true and has an inner drop shadow filter. Sounds easy enough right? The first problem is that DropShadowFilter’s don’t work correctly with TextFields created using ActionScript. The second problem is that setting embedFonts to TRUE and leaving default text empty on a TextField with type TextFieldType.INPUT causes the field not to be selectable.
Solution:
Lets tackle the DropShadowFilter first. After many failed attempts at getting filters to render correctly on TextFields the next best solution was to create a sprite that sites right behind the text field that renders the filter.
Read more
When Chris Wiggins, Creative Director at Fallon, set out to create Skimmer he put a lot of thought into the design of the application. Working with freelance designer Andy Gugel, Wiggins said they were specifically going for something that sort of flew in the face of the Web 2.0 “not designed design.”
“We intentionally didn’t approach the design of Skimmer the way typical software developers do,” Wiggins said. “For this we put experience over data, experience over functions.”
There’s be a long-standing precedent of user-experience testing that results in design by committee, he said. “In my opinion, that’s not the best way to go anymore.”
Wiggins pointed to Apple’s steady decline of usability tests and how their products continually win acclaim for their usability and design.
“You just need to take products to a certain point before you even consider getting feedback,” he said. “You can’t always trust people to know what they want until they’ve seen something. Users would never had asked for the iPod, because it would have never crossed their minds to ask for something like that. At some point you have to have a vision and make something that you are confident about.”
Often times, Wiggins said, “design is considered superfluous eye candy that you don’t need for these kind of service.”
So part of their goal with the design of Skimmer was to see what people would think if this kind of application was presented in a beautiful and elegant way. The response to Skimmer as a whole (not just the design but the way it consolidates all social media networks) has been what Brenda Fogg, Interactive Producer, called “almost effervescent.”
“We were warned by our PR person not to get too excited,” Wiggins said. “The app was much more quickly well received than we anticipated. It blew away all our expectations.”
A few of the sites that picked up the Skimmer story right away include: Cool Hunting, AdWeek, TechCrunch, AdFreak, and Mashable.
Wiggins said it was a little hard not to get drunk on the positive buzz.
“Our clients are calling it a spectacular move, a bold move,” he said. “It’s exactly the kind of buzz an ad agency can use right now. One of the biggest fears of most traditional agencies is having the competence in the social web sphere because so many clients are clamoring for it.
“It shows that we’re about finding ways to get your brands out there and to make people do things they already want to do, better,” he said. “We’re a place where you can reliably turn to for this kind of thing.”
