A lovely piece of digital art from the very talented Bård Edlund. Thanks to Angela Natividad @luckthelady for pointing us in Bård’s direction.  Beautifully hypnotic and it could be the difference between hitting your audience just at the right time or tweeting into space.

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

Hi there,
Hope you’ve managed to enjoy the most of this English summer so far!

Here I am, only two months into recruitment, and already loving it (and I would go on about how much I enjoy working alongside to everyone here at Cogs, but I’ll leave it for other times).

My name is Dianne and I just wanted to say a quick hello. I’m a Trainee Researcher, so I’m here to help the consultants stay connected with you. Would be lovely to hear from you: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/diannehummal

But enough about me, and more about what’s happening on the digital landscape:

It was a few days ago when I grabbed my friend’s iPad and looked through a few applications he had downloaded. And this Vogue Homme Japan iPad Edition really caught my attention. I was just so fascinated about the movement, and intrigued by the surprise-moment I experienced as I was ‘turning the pages’. The more I looked at the pages, the more it felt as if the magazine was about to come to life. More fascination and movement on New Kids On the Blog site: http://newkidsontheblog.net/vogue-homme-japan-digital-gif-ipad-edition/.

I came across this really clever piece of Stop Motion by ‘Blu’ who have animated their take on the evolution of life and how it’ll all end. Apparently it’s been available for viewing on YouTube and Vimeo for 4 weeks and has already raked in almost 3million views.

Audi has just released the first Car calender with…. no cars. The idea is that you buy the landscape calender and download the i-phone app, which then projects a digital car image onto the calender image when hovered over. Great idea and concept. If you have an iPhone and are a fan of Audi cars of course.

All credit to Digital Buzz for flagging this up – http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/audis-augmented-reality-calendar/

‘Flash on the Beach’ or FOTB was established over 5 years ago, with the principal aim of trying to get the best minds in the business together in order to sow their seeds of Flash knowledge and wisdom. The event is sponsored be none other than Adobe, and has numerous supporters including Toca Me, Flash Goddess, Urban Collective and Flashform.

The conference is located in Brighton, one of England’s most popular and buzzing seaside hotspots and is held in the beautiful Brighton Dome. The conference is spread across three days and each day has a well organised and exciting schedule of speakers to keep your Flash taste buds fully satisfied.

Tickets are rapidly selling out, but it’s not too late to be apart of this Flash phenomenon event. For more information, prices and queries, visit http://www.flashonthebeach.com/.

Have you been to Flash on the Beach before? Or are you heading there this year? What are your thoughts?

North Kingdom Showreel 2009 from Designchapel on Vimeo.