I believe that one of the highest accolades must be for a creative agency or design company to ask us to conceive, design and produce their website. This is no more pronounced than in this instance. McCann Ericksons New York business has been a client/partner of ours over the last year or so and being asked to develop ideas for their portfolio web site left us speechless. The process was not straightforward though. The ideas we conceived with creative partner SuperFad were ambitious - at the time, were had no higher option in technology that Flash 8 and attempted to build a 3D site using the ActionScript 2 programming platform. The first version was good but wasn’t a 100% match for our capabilities or the quality of work produced by McCann New York. Without approval of any budgets, we decided to experiment with AS3 in conjunction with the PaperVision3D engine. During that time, Flash 9 / AS3 gained acceptable user penetration and when we presented our experiments - basically a fully redeveloped site - McCann were blown away. Budgets were quickly approved and with some final design direction from the Agency we were done.

Total development time was fraction of that in AS2 - further evidence that whilst AS3 and PaperVision3D demands a higher level of programming skill, it remains a more efficient development tool for spatial Flash projects, whilst providing vastly improved site performance and lower processor draw.

The site displays floating assets representing a selection of McCann NY’s creative output. Rolling over these thumbnails draws connections between related assets, Selecting one will bring that family into a new layout. A further selection will play/preview that piece. In the bottom left, you can select work by media or client and drill down to specific works. IN the top right, you can change the display configurations from random to a grid arrangement and also toggle to and from full screen mode.

Enjoy the site by clicking here: McCann NY

Comments(0)

I am getting excited by the imminent arrival of an Apple Newton, and the year is 2008. This is not normal behaviour, I grant you, so let me explain.

A small museum is growing in the London office of Last Exit - mainly mobile phones, Apple Laptops and iPods - to which I dream of adding some of the earliest Macs - from the 128k through an SE to a Colour Classic. It was while researching these on eBay that I stumbled upon some Apple Newtons. For some reason they have never really been on my radar - but looking back I am not sure why? But they are on my radar now and beeping loudly.

Whatever you may dislike about the Internet I defy you to say that eBay and Wikipedia are not wonderful. eBay has an early Apple MessagePad 100 for sale, complete with box and all the toys, meanwhile Wikipedia tells me all about them. It didn’t surprise me to learn whilst reading the Wiki that the creators of this early Apple user interface went on to found Pixo, the firm that developed the iPod interface. What did surprise me was reading the results of a 2006 comparison test between a 1997 Newton and a 2006 Samsung’s Q1 PDA running Windows mobile. The Newton, by then nearly a decade old, won. That is impressive.

As for that Newton, it might just fill the size gap between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, and it will be just the job for note taking in meetings. In other words, it is not going into the museum when it arrives but back into service.

If you happen to be a client, looking for a new media agency (and we are experts in some modern things, too - like Papervision 3D) then please feel free to request a meeting and I’ll bring it along.

I think I need an ethernet card for it next… I’ll let you know how I get on.

Comments(1)

Brilliant though Google and other search engines are at bringing some level of sense and order to the billions of web pages out there, they all still rely almost completely on our ability to look for something in the right way. Keywords are really that - KEY!

Luckily as the amount of content online grows so does the average level of skill of people using search engines. Two years ago the average number of keywords entered into Google’s search field was not much more than 1.5, today it is more like 3.0. We are being more specific when we search which is a good thing - finding a million or more results is hardly a badge of honour now is it?

In spite of this there remains the ‘Did you mean?‘ problem or the ‘Did we mean?‘ problem as I would describe it.

As an agency advising our clients on SEO or search engine optimisation one of the toughest tasks is convincing businesses to think like customers and ensure the way they write about themselves online does likewise. By all means ‘build it’ but they won’t be coming unless the way you talk matches the way they search!

Take Last Exit and PaperVision for example. We are a Papervision3D agency and would like to be found as such when potential clients search for this kind of service online. Because PaperVision is a new technology however the challenge is to make sure we talk about it in the right ways. The correct description for this Flash plug-in is PaperVision3D but a quick check within Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool reveals a whole host of ways people are looking for it - papervision 3d, paper vision 3d or even pay per vision 3d are all commonly used. 

This wouldn’t be a problem but as I say above search engines rely on keywords in a very exact way. Try it yourself - a query of ‘paper vision 3d agency‘ will deliver very different results to one of ‘papervision3d agency‘ regardless of the fact both may be intended to find an agency supplying PaperVision3D.

Granted this all sounds very anal indeed but the truth is that Google and the other search engines are very anal indeed! Words, and the exact way they are used, are all they have to go on when routing that important query of yours to a handful of those 3 billion web pages!

The solution is writing for the web, making frequent reference to important keywords, and writing like the customers you want to attract would ask for you.

The solution is really not rocket-science, or should that be rocket science!

Comments(5)

 

papervision3d - paper vision 3d

I have to admit that I had become more than a little tired of the use of Flash online over the last 10 years or so.

Deepend, the original business I launched back in the mid 90s, was a huge fan and follower of Flash. In fact many of the creative awards we were fortunate enough to win in those days were for client website projects built using this technology - launch of the Volkswagen New Beetle into the UK market, creation of the first online presence for Terence Conran’s Design Museum in London, delivery of an aggressive challenge to James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner products for multi-national electronics business Hoover, as well as a wide range of projects for broadcasters like the BBC and Cartoon Network.

What was becoming clear though was the danger of over-indulgence, and I started to ask myself if the ‘whizz-bang’ impact delivered by some of these Flash experiences might be getting in the way of the client messages as opposed to amplifying them?  I began to suspect many of these sites were becoming a bit of a task or challenge to use as opposed to guiding the visitor from query to answer as they were initially intended. Most worryingly I started to suspect that our business might be using client projects to showcase individual designers’ wish-lists as opposed to thinking like end-users as we had always done before to build our success as a client’s digital partner.

I had seen many extensions to Flash like Swift 3D make their mark and then seemingly lose favour since the days when Flash alone was news-worthy. When I saw Paper Vision 3D in action (or Pay Per Vision 3D as I first understood it!) I found myself falling in love with Flash all over again!

At Last Exit, we have quickly become huge fans of this open source development in the world of Flash technologies, and feel that PaperVision might be finally delivering on the promise made by Flash back in the mid 1990s!

So, why is a seasoned cynic like myself thinking like this about what is seemingly an incremental addition to the Flash plug-in armoury?

Some of the key reasons are driven by the ability PaperVision3D has to offer:

• Significantly improved levels of end-user-interaction within a delivered website
• Fluid and intuitive styles of animation and motion whatever the task at hand
• Realistic 3D visualisation and environments including elements such as depth-cueing that were normally reserved for ‘proper’ local 3D applications
• Open source technology advantages when it comes to development and innovation
• Technical speed and agility within play-back - for example the handling of large numbers of media assets without any obvious end-user experience degradation
• Relatively seamless integration within Adode Flash making the development process very effective and efficient
• A significant step forward from what went before in terms of perception - providing that ‘wow factor’ for website end-users
• Ability to provide a genuine web 2.0 level graphical experience engaging even the most jaded site visitors
• PaperVision3D also provides fresh levels of inspiration and opportunity for web designers encouraging new ground to be broken within client tasks

This last argument is clearly an internal as opposed to an external one for any digital design agency, however it is so important that a team of designers feels inspired and engaged by any new project, and PaperVision3D provides this fresh impetus.

Aside from campaign-oriented work, our agency focuses on the CMS or content management of new client websites, making sure any new project is disability and discrimination act optimized, as well as built for the best level of search engine optimisation or SEO. These things are undoubtably important, but they are harder to argue as motivational elements when it comes to putting the same brief to an internal studio team of designers and developers, and are unlikely to lift the end result above the norm. Paper Vision 3D is both the new client and industry buzz word and I am certain this can only be a good thing for both parties!

Sure we face some challenges as an agency when developing iPhone applications given that Apple has still not found a way of supporting Adobe Flash, no matter PaperVision3D. And it would be a lie to say that every client brief that lands on our respective desks in Last Exit London and Last Exit New York is absolutely ideal for PaperVision. There are also limitations from both an SEO (and specifically Google search optimization) perspective with a PaperVision3D delivered user experience.

The fact remains however that, in my humble opinion, there are bigger issues at hand.

PaperVision provides fresh energy to the most exciting and user-engaging technology ever offered by the World Wide Web. Not only does it offer a level of user-engagement and entertainment not seen since the late 1990s - it turbo-charges the inspiration and creativity of both designers and developers working within the digital industry.

Given the ups and downs the digital industry has experienced over it’s short 15 year life I think it is fair to say that any fresh injection of enthusiasm is very very welcome indeed. I think a seemingly insignificant, open-source, non-commercial, well-meaning, incremental Flash plug-in like PaperVision3D could well be one thing to make a big difference in the digital near-future.

Comments(1)

IBM T30 Thinkpad / Thinkpads aboard the International Space Station

Serial ports and parallel ports remind me of years gone by - of a switch box to select a printer and floppy discs to move data around. Cars with onboard diagnostics, it seems, still use serial ports - and so I found myself on eBay in search of a used PC laptop that could ‘talk’ to my (frequently poorly) BMW. I could sketch almost every incarnation of Apple’s Powerbook from the 3400c through Wall Street G3, Titanium G4 until the MacBook Pro of today - and argue the case for their inclusion in any museum of industrial design - but a PC laptop? If there was an iconic design among the 8,148 laptops listed then I couldn’t remember it.

You realise you are a geek when you find yourself strangely excited by wading through people’s cast off laptops (viewing eBay’s list by ‘time ending soonest’ helps). But it was on another site that I saw the link ‘RS232 computers’. (If you think DOS is something you do at the weekend then those characters specify a serial port, the things we used to use before USB came along). For sale were a war chest of IBM T series laptops. Now I remember those machines for having a nipple instead of a trackpad and as anyone in the design profession knows that is no way to operate Word let alone Photoshop. They were not, therefore, on my radar. But if you look past the nipple you find a design that has stood the test of time far better than any of its contemporaries. And build quality that means they are still around, and still valuable. Why?

As ever, Wikipedia has the answer. Product of a collaboration between corporate head of the IBM design programme Tom Hardy and industrial design legend Richard Sapper, the ThinkPad is a monument to the realisation that design can be a powerful differentiator in any market; a design that is somehow so ‘right’ that it makes a modern Sony Viao look ever so slightly off the pace. No wonder Nasa’s astronauts took them on the Space Shuttle. These things are cool. They are also from IBM, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of a brand that, now it has departed the PC market, I find I quite miss.

They even made the machine for me - a 2002 ThinkPad T30 - the only model that came with a trackpad and a serial port, and mine is arriving from specialist Viper IT today. I can’t wait.

My tip for the new design leader in the land of PC notebooks? Dell, by a country mile.

Comments(0)

There are some distinct advantages to being British and doing work in the US but there’s also a few disadvantages. Today I am reminded of one in particular: modesty. It’s a blessing and a curse all by itself and very often I’m prompted to be less shy about boasting our company’s achievements.

Last Exit was borne out of a company called Deepend. Started by three Royal college mavericks, one of them the inimitable Gary Lockton, the company was twice named world’s #1 creative interactive agency. We were a design powerhouse and also a technology pioneer, notching up firsts in Flash development, iTV (interactive television), mobile, integrated campaigns and online video. When I started Last Exit with Andy Beach, online video was a speciality of ours and as one of Apple’s technology partners we produced boutique encoding services and development services for interactive QuickTime. Interactive video, we were sure, would be big and bigger, would be distribution and sharing of video. To that end, we developed the first interactive QuickTime powered by a full content management system. Long time friend to Last Exit, Eyeball NYC was our first commercial success as we produced a video library for their archive - all in QuickTime. The amazing thing was that you could senf the QT skin to someone via email, it would launch and draw the content over the net from our servers. It was a bloody masterpiece and was such a success that we went on to develop several iterations, finally going for an HTML interface and branding it “WaterCooler”. Ken McGorry wrote an article about it back in early 2003 (click here to see the article) and we won several contracts including one with Voltage Video - a traditional tape house/archive - for whom we customized the entire system and built out transcoding infrastructure at their New York city HQ. This enabled their clients to securely long on, and manage all their video based assets and even distribute in any media via Voltages distribution channels. But technology was merely transportation for the creative campaigns we were developing and other fantastic tools started to emerge that we began to use also.

We now utilize a range of solutions as best fit our clients and have built a very successful creative agency. I do want to pin a big fat medal on our collective chests though as (very) early mover in the world of online video. We now continue to exploit all the best aspects of video online and it is now part of almost every campaign we’re involved with. Good job we have the nous to to deploy it properly, effectively and relevantly.

Some examples:

My TiVO Gets Me

Canon

Control Freak

Comments(0)

Need help demystifying video compression / encoding / transcoding?  Here’s a great book by a close friend and ex-Last Exit-er - Andy Beach - see his blog post here.

Comments(1)

A very impressive presentation of two pieces of amazing technology by Blaise Aguera y Arcas speaking at TED. A must watch. If MS handled it right and it was embraced in the same way as Flash, the ramifications of a resolution independent system to how people view / interact with digital content is incredible. His photosynth tech is also jaw dropping.
His realization of mapping the earth with people’s photography is fantastic, like he suggests, this might upset some possessive photographers and lawyers!
Rather clever fellow!

Comments(1)