Write yourself into the future of D&AD, enter the 2012 Awards now.

Our final afternoon at FOTB was duly covered by the very talented Naomi Da Costa, Senior Consultant  in our Creative Team, and is a familiar face at Flash on the Beach, this being her 3rd event. Here are her thoughts:

@evalottchen

Using Playfulness to Spark Ideas

This was my Third FOTB and I had high hopes. Since its inception John Davey and team have consistently bought to Brighton exceptional talent and gifted speakers. I had limited time and so choose to see something a little less techie and I was not disappointed. I chose to see Eva Lotta Lamm and she was well worth the Journey. Eva is a freelance UX designer that definitely knows her onions. Eva previously headed up Skype’s business design team, and has worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! London

Eva was a breath of fresh air and I really liked her way of perceiving the world specifically looking at visual improvisation, how one can use sketching and improvisation to facilitate the creative process. Creatives often are under pressure to come up with the goods in term of generating concepts and ideas. However this can be difficult considering time and budget constraints so the point of this talk was to help identify techniques which can aid this process.

In what proved to be a thoroughly engaging hour (I wish we’d had longer!)  Eva began with looking at some original improvisation artists across all discipline and so started off with a bit of Old School hip hop and Jazz improvisation:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqizFELL1Xw&feature=player_embedded#!

Or even verbal improvisation like: http://tinyurl.com/3e5hko8

It was interesting to see how the artists completely flowed off each other and really took their cues in developing the lyrics / sketches from/with each other. Really helping to demonstrate the value of a collaborate approach which in fact applies to generating any good idea not least within the advertising and marketing industries.

In fact one could say that this is often where they come from.

Another example that really stuck in my mind was Exquisite Corpse (I think we call it Consequences over these days, slightly more user friendly). A game I have played a few times in the pub but was an actually a technique employed by Surrealists  for exploring the what could happen by accident if words and images were juxtaposed by different originators. http://exquisitecorpse.com/definition/Morgue_%5Bthe_corpses%5D.html#0.

Eva’s lecture was a basically a showcase of a collection of techniques and different places we can look to change our perception and help the way we think and generate ideas. She was awesome. You can have a look at some of her sketch notes here http://www.flickr.com/photos/evalottchen/sets/72157607235674386/.

I was particularly impressed that she managed to give the whole speech without once using the phrase “thinking outside the box!”

I guess with the advent of so many channels of social media one point that Eva made which I thought was particularly pertinent was that in this rapidly changing times  Good design is about supplying a framework to which others can add. We may no longer the original look and feel can help to generate but the foundations from which great things can come

On Wednesday, our very own Kim Topham, Technical Consultant, was busy sitting in on the Elevator Pitches, here’s her take on the morning.

Elevator Pitches:

Wednesday’s Flash on the Beach kicked off with the infamous Elevator Pitch, which for those of you who unawares, are a series of 3 minute pitches given by 20 designers and developers in the industry explaining their own innovative ideas. This was definitely one of my highlights of the day, the ideas and pitches demonstrated were not only inspirational but well translated and presented.
A handful of the rising stars included: Jason Stone’s @jason_m_stone ‘Designers Block is Bullshit’, suggesting how designers can use their own environments, particularly outside, to move beyond the creative limitations; Ward De Langhe  @delanghe gave a really interesting insight into his experimentations with Molehill AKA Stage 3D, which is the new 3D rendering API for Flash. Ward gave some exciting insights into how he was hopeful to use this for audio visuals and artwork. Neil Nand  @neilnand , one of Cogs’ own freelancers, gave a really interesting presentation on the versatility of multi sources transferable from one device onto another. Kathryn Rotondo (@krotondo) gave a fun and energetic presentation on ‘Better Code Review’ outlining every developer’s frustrations with too many meetings and how using tools and IDE plugins can assist in making a more productive experience when code reviewing. Finally, I really enjoyed Graham Odds @g_odds depiction of ditching the drawing lines and really appreciating the importance of whitespace. He successfully demonstrated how many UI designs use too much structuring and excessive line usage, which results in designs losing their emphasis and user perception; really interesting concept using the foundations of psychological principles and UI tendencies.
After this I could definitely understand why this part of FOTB had developed such notoriety – watch this space for the exciting new talent.
Keith Peters – Making Tools
www.minimalcomps.com
www.bit-101.com

Next up I saw Keith Peters, a mogul in the flash world with a number of awards and books to show for it. A really interesting and insightful presentation, Keith spends a lot of his career developing tools that assist in the development process and he talked over a number of his most useful tools. This talk straddled the divide between developers and designers and successfully outlined some excellent tools of the trade to enhance creative and technical development. Some of the most interesting ideas I took away from this were Keith’s use of tools to create pixel perfect layouts and his ideas of how tools can assist in the generation of art from code, which translates lines of codes into visual masterpieces – you should check out his websites to get a better idea of this.

Lee Brimlow – Render For Speed
www.leebrimelow.com
www.gotoandlearn.com
www.flashermag.com
@leebrimelow

My final talk of the morning was by Lee Brimelow, who discussed in full rendering methods, and touched on Android development and the very newest version of Stage3D APIs AKA ‘Molehills’. The talk aimed to outline the various means of rendering, being associated with generating an image from a model by the use of computer programming and largely being applied to 3D computer graphics. The types of methods that Lee outlined included blitting, partial blitting, dirty blitting, GPU caching, as well as the new Stage 3D APIs. I’d love to say I walked away from this discussion with complete comprehension of what was said, at times I did feel slightly out of my comfort zone in terms of understanding the principles of rendering, however I felt like I sponged up enough information to be able to get a more rounded view of how these emerging technologies and methods are going to impact on the industry, relating to both Flash and the future of HTML5.
This was the first time I had visited Flash on the Beach and overall I came away from the event with not only useful information to help me to understand more about Flash in the industry, but also a great opportunity to have exposure to some really talented individuals. Technology is such a rapidly changing entity and as a recruiter specialising in this area it is essential to keep up to date with how things are developing. FOTB was definitely an experience I would love to have again, and hopefully Cogs will be there to represent next year.

The first six months of this year has been positive for the digital creative and design industry with day rates and salaries maintaining a good level.

A gadget recently invented by a 22-year-old programmer living in China, appears to convert Apple’s  iPod Touch into the iPhone. The device works via a case fitting around the outside of the Touch and compromises a popular media player , Wi-Fi-enabled pocket computer with e-mail, maps and other applications.

The Apple Peel 520 then uses a dock connector, a battery and a SIM card, in order to allow users to be able to make phone calls. All that remains is for the user to install the special software to allow text messaging functions, and hey presto! you’ve got yourself an  iPhone!

It still remains unknown whether or not the Apple Peel 520 will have much impact upon iPhone sales, or even whether or not it will appeal to the market, but the device is being sold on some e-commerce sites. Until they can be given the go ahead for mass manufacturing, research has to be conducted to ensure no intellectual property right violations are occurring.

For more check out this and demo here.

What are your thoughts on the Peel? Do you think that it threatens the iPod? Will it impact on Apple’s sales?

The hype amongst iPad owners and Apple’s incapacity to support Flash technologies may finally be coming to an end after recent studies have revealed that a new application for jail-broken iPads can now run a version of Flash in their safari browser, called Frash.

Frash was coined and created by a company called Comex, who you may recognise as being the founders of the Spirit jailbreaker for the iPhone 3.1.3 and iPod touch 3.1.3. The idea of Frash is that it can run all Flash related programmes, games and applications bringing harmony to the Flash loving iPad owners.

However, Frash isn’t quite there yet because it’s currently not available for wide release due to the fact that it is still technically unstable for mass usage. But Comex aren’t stopping there, Frash is available at GitHub for developers who fancy tweaking and improving the software with the aim to make it stable enough for release on the market.

What are your thoughts on Frash? Do you think that it can be stabilised for mass usage? Do you think that it will solve the Flash/iPad problems? Have you played around with the software yourself?

Frash demo here

http://www.livbit.com/article/tag/android/

Have you ever thought of an App that would be incredible useful, but don’t have the technological knowledge to put the idea into motion? Well that maybe a thing of the past…

According to an article published by the BBC, the days of App ignorance are finally behind us, due to Google’s release of tools that “make it easy for anyone to create programs for Android phones”.

The App Inventor was created by a group of super tech wizards at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the idea is based around the structure of Lego blocks, whereby you move the boxes of code around to make the applications.

Don’t believe how simple it is? Check it out here

What are your thoughts on The App Inventor? Have you any brilliant app ideas that you’ve been dying to get your hands on?