By now you’ve likely seen the flyer for the upcoming Sound Noir party happening back at Cameo on Sept 24th. As I have with previous events and previous flyers, I’d like to elaborate a bit on how this last flyer took shape.

Since reorganizing, we’ve been floating a bit in terms of the creative direction of visuals for our crew. We’ve moved into a new chapter and I’ve been working to differentiate where we’ve come from and where we are now.

The original flyers incorporated strong lines and angles formed by the neon lights we’d frequently mine for raw material. That changed gradually, often times incorporating elements from the installation work being showcased at the events. While the designs would stray a bit from our original branding, they somehow felt cohesive simply based on the way text was consistently treated.

One motif that struck with me was bokeh. Lenny had used it in the flyer for the John Roberts party. Also, I’d previously utilized bokeh in the projections for the fateful party we’d done in Long Island City in March of 2010, as captured in the image to the right by Jonathan Rhamani, so there was some sort of loose consistency.

Is it a stretch, or can you see the evolution of the theme being drawn through the two instances leading up to the finished product at the top of this post?

With influences and history out of the way, let’s take a look at how the most recent flyer was actually produced.

The image directly above is a sample of the screenshots I took of Bjork’s fantastic Biophilia app in action. I wrote about the app a short while back. The “play” portion of the app’s Crystalline chapter showcases the sounds of the track through moving and bubbling circles animated in tandem with the track itself.

What I’d done was to scroll through the entire track, taking screenshots of portions that I found particularly attractive. Next I combed through the samplings and found a couple that I thought might work in support of the information we were looking to convey in the flyer, namely the lineup. Next I tweaked the copy that was to be utilized in such a way that it flowed nicely with the graphic elements.

For myself, the way I’d justified using the Biophilia app was that the basic shapes mimicked the bokeh we’d been employing in the various places I’ve just described above. As for the copy, I approached it in line with the text in the flyer we’d done for June 11th. It was here, with the handling of the copy, that I thought we could build some consistency. Similarly the same treatment was applied to the flyer for the August 13th party with Chez Damier. From where I stand, the angular nature of the text we’ve most recently employed matches that same angularity that we’d originally started with in using the neon lights.

Then the partners came over.

I’m sure none of us really wanted to, but based on the last flyer, I think I can say we all thought we might be at it all afternoon and into the evening. Sitting down together I brought up the designs I’d been laying out. “YES!” came out of Jacob’s mouth instantly. Andrey was a bit more reserved, but also endorsed where it had come to. With a bit of tweaking we were done in 30 minutes.

Because the screenshot was of such low-res quality, from there it was a matter of rebuilding the bitmapped image of the screenshot in Illustrator with vector graphics. Though I’m not the best with Illustrator, that next iteration of the process took shape relatively quickly, and left us with an infinitely scalable version of the entire flyer.

Taking it back to a bitmapped form, I processed the flyer one last time to prepare it for printing 11×14 posters. I sent those off to AdoramaPix tonight and we’ll be picking them up tomorrow to be distributed in various places to help get the word out.

All in all I’m very happy with how this flyer came together.

I’ve been attracted to a specific scrolling bus shelter billboard for a while. Sometimes shooting works, other times not so much. I’m happy enough with this particular experiment.

A month ago was the last time I brought up the progress of the project. At that time I’d just been charged with adding ribbons to several elements on the site. After having a look at those ribbons, Florian decided to remove them from the posts, leaving the single ribbon accent on the site’s header.

It’s funny, as I was mentioning a month ago, I thought the ribbons were extraneous, but by the time Florian had asked me to strike them, I was actually falling for them a bit. With or without, they were a minor detail. I’m happy enough with the design as it stands.

In terms of the design, I’ve got to say, aside from the input I was getting from Florian and Paula, the look and feel has largely been my doing, and three months after starting in on the project I’ve gotta say I’m happy with the way it’s all panned out.

The site utilizes just the tiniest bits of jQuery. You can see it in the sidebar where I employed jQuery UI to get the tabbed content broken up and accessible. A problem I ran into here was the duplication of entire pages from the site crammed into the sidebar. Even after a couple friends had taken a look I couldn’t resolve the issue.

Instead, in the places where the content was being duplicated we removed the tabbed section from the sidebar entirely. This is far from a perfect fix, but is good enough for us to launch with. Once the final elements are incorporated I’ll likely look to rebuild the tabbed sidebar section from scratch.

Another element where I was able to incorporate a bit of JavaScript was in the field in the backend that accepts each post’s summary:

In the panels that hold the introductions to each post, there’s a summary displayed in italics. We didn’t want the summaries to wrap to more than two lines, so I found that the magic number of characters needed to hold to this length was 125. To hold writers/editors to that number, I setup a countdown display that updates with the number of characters left that will fit in that summary.

At the same time, I held the number of words in the first bit of each post’s content to 30. Again this fills the container with just enough content without growing outside its given size.

Well, there certainly is more I can say about the site, but apart from a few people, this is likely getting boring for most. If you’re interested, I’ll simply leave it to you to explore.

At CScout we’re approaching the opportunity in a couple ways. First, we’re experimenting with a normal day to day tab that features the different CScout outlets/online properties. Not everyone knows all there is that we give attention to, and even though the information is repeated in several places, we know some of it is falling through the cracks.

Second, there are projects that we feature from time to time. In some cases we draft up white papers focused on different bits of information/research. Other times there’s an event we want to highlight. For these types of info we’ll draft up custom Facebook Tabs to draw attention to them.

Here’s a very early mockup of the typical, day to day type Tab:

Not everybody is doing this at the moment. Nike and Audi are, but Adidas and Chevrolet aren’t. I don’t know how long this functionality has existed, but it’s integration should get more popular very soon.

So you can do this for a Facebook Page of your own, check out Static HTML: iframe tabs.

As it stands, running on my local machine, below is what the homepage is looking like, the image linking to the full size screenshot.

In the previous post announcing the start of the redesign, I mentioned that Limitless Pulse might be a good place to collect ideas and inspiration for the project. Before I go further in regards to the screenshot you see above, let me quickly link to the project’s collected inspiration. Not all of the collected screenshots are especially attractive, the reason for this being that I was finding sometimes ugly sites that had some element I found engaging.

Now onto the current state of the homepage. The first thing I want to point out are the ribbon treatments on the header of the site and on the titles of the posts. These ribbons I don’t particularly care for as I’ve seen them implemented on a few too many sites these days.

The reasoning behind the inclusion of the ribbon motif is that we’re trying to unify the designs employed across the CScout properties. This consideration is especially recent, coming only after designs and implementation of the Trendpool local install were basically finalized. That said, it wasn’t terribly difficult to make this fairly minor tweak. I just had to air that concern.

Now that I’m this far into this post, I’m realizing that the elements of the site that I’d like to point out aren’t worth talking about without a working example for you to play with. Therefore, I’m going to pause for the moment, and return to this soliloquy in a separate post in the near future.

Stay tuned.

There are others that I like as well, but something special came about in this snap.

At CScout we’re moving forward with the redesign and relaunch of what has historically been our locked down Trendpool. With it we’re opening up a lot of the premium content we’ve had hidden behind paywalls.

We’ve got a fairly basic structure in mind, but I’m launching into collecting inspiration for some graphic elements we’d like to incorporate.

I’m thinking it might make sense to collect some of that inspiration here on Limitless Pulse, but before I start building out that collection and analysis, I just wanted to share two resources I’ve been using to find those influences.

As far as I’ve found, the most focused and relevant collection of links to design blogs is the What are the best design blogs? thread on Quora.

Similarly, I came across a list on Facebook, initiated by Ghostly, in which they posed the question, ‎“What are the best music and design blogs?” We get asked this all the time. What should we tell them?

The hunt is on. Watch this space to see what I fall in with.

I’d have thought this video would be more popular, and therefore less likely that I’d post it. Seems though that it hasn’t gotten the exposure I’d have expected.

This falls into place here as you’ve seen I tend to gravitate toward projection mapping projects.

There’s one aside in the clip that shows one of the artists working the display manually. I’ve got to both experiment more with the interfaces I use, as well as find more examples of people tweaking things in realtime. There’s likely a wealth of examples online, I’m just realizing that I want to search those out now.

via @shakermaker341

I was excited when the alpha for jQuery Mobile came out a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t until this week that I’d had a chance to dig in and experiment with it.

The two screenshots above are the jQuery Mobile based layouts I’ve built for Limitless Pulse. I haven’t checked it yet on the iPad, but this is what it looks like on an iPhone.

To build this iPhone version of this WordPress site, I utilized the tutorial on CatsWhoCode.com. The tutorial is pretty basic, and from it I’ve built a fairly basic implementation, but I’ll be experimenting in the coming weeks on adding complexity in the layout and functionality.

Once I’ve gotten more familiar with implementing jQuery Mobile for WordPress, I’m looking to mobilize some of the sites I’ve built, namely cscout.com. And going forward, I want to be able to build out mobile versions of others’ sites.

This is the direction I’ve been headed in for a while, it’s just now with the advent of this framework that I’ve felt confident enough to tackle it.

It had been a long time in the coming, but a couple weeks ago we launched the updated version of CScout.com. I’d held off on telling people about it until the bugs had been worked out, and now it’s finally at that point.

Today I made just one more adjustment to the site. The displayed image for the Trend Blog panel in the lower right is dynamic; it pulls the first image in the latest blog post. Initially it was grabbing the full sized image and only displaying its upper right portion, but today I coaxed the images to scale to 300px wide and have any vertical overflow hidden.

Have a look, and let me know what you think.