CNN just redesigned their website and its quite a change. I have just gotten use to the their last redesign but this one feels a bit more pronounced.
Right off the top items to note are the global navigation, led by Home, Video and Newspulse, a new digg-like news story stream.
As you scroll down you’re greeted by more New York Times reader-style content buckets each representing a content bucket.
All in all a great redesign. Curious to see what others think.
Gap’s newest campaign (courtesy of akqa), Born to Fit is a powerful sign of the times. What would have been a few years ago a TV campaign is now squarely digital. Experts, pundits and amateur marketers alike should have plenty to dissect. With mobile being a centerpiece and more importantly audience participation this is a great example of a great integrated campaign which utilizes all our favourite social media destinations (twitter, iphone, youtube and facebook) in a great way.
A Game trailer which acts and looks like a real movie trailer is nothing new. Heck we’ve been subjected to sub-par game-inspired movies for a while now. But with the advent of better storytelling and the judicious use of CGI (which has greatly improved), games themselves are fast catching up to their feature cousins.
The Halo 3 ODST trailer should dispel any myth that games today are not as powerful an emotional construct as any movie being made.
Did you think I would let this blog go uncared for more than a few months. A recent project for a large software company in Seattle had me thinking about social media and government. This is why the Obama’s administration latest “widget” (I use the term loosely” is an excellent example of what I (and others I am sure) call Crowd Building using Twitter. That is the idea of building a vocal and pronounced social majority when it comes to a specific issue and/or cause.
ExecTweets.com is a portal sponsored by Microsoft in conjunction with Federated Media and Twitter. That’s right you’ve heard it right. This is by my account the first real foray towards a revenue model that Twitter is exploring. It will be interesting what other vehicles they come up with over the next few months.
Aviary.com‘s mission according to their bio on the site, “is to make creation accessible to artists of all genres…” That’s nice and all, but the tools they’ve built around that mission are unmistakably cool and remarkably powerful for browser-based application. There are four tools at your disposal, Toucan (a color swatch tool a la Adobe Kuler), Raven (a vector tool), Phoenix (an image editor tool) and my favorite Peacock a sort of visual laboratory.
In addition to cool tools, they’ve been a small community around member submits. There you can see what other creatives have shared. A lot of it is very inspiring even if it’s a community still in its infancy.. So join me in congratulating them on their ’09 SXSW Technical Achievement award by testing it out and letting your friends know about it if you enjoy the experience.
here.
To announce a new store opening in New York, Diesel took a decidedly different approach. Instead of the cult DJs and celebrities and fashionistas descent for an evening, they staged five real life intimate parties that would normally be no access for the rest of us. The dinner parties featured various NYC celebrities spawning a wide cultural swath from DJs to Athletes.
World Builder is the work of VFX artist Bruce Branit. It took him just one day to shoot, but nearly 2 years in post-production to build. Obviously a labor of love, you can tell Bruce spends a lot of time with 3-D software packages as the controls used to create the world seem to take inspiration from the UI of 3-D software packages like Maya.
World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.
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Just when you though it was safe to open your browser of choice, Apple releases a beta of Safari 4. So far the experience is very positive. Go ahead and download here.