London Underground Victoria Line ceramic tiles

The Victoria Line that opened between 1968 and 1971 "provided the opportunity to produce a new and consistent look across the whole line, from the trains themselves to the stations and platforms. All aspects of design were overseen by Misha Black, the Design Consultant for London Transport (1964–1968), who previously had a similar role with British Rail. He employed the talents of the The Design Research Unit (DRU) – a collective of designers, artists and architects who designed all aspects of the VIctoria Line.

Each platform was designed with a very muted colour scheme, described by some of the press at the time as the 'late lavatorial style' (1, P58). The tiled designs in each seat recess provided much needed colour and decoration, and gave each stop its own visual identity. The results were a mixture of direct inspiration from the station name and references to historical details of the local area."

(Ian Moore, Design Assembly, 3 May 2010)

Fig.1 Stockwell by Abram Games - a semi-abstract swan, representing the nearby pub of the same name.

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Xtranormal: Text-to-Movie authoring tool

"xtranormal's mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century.

Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill-typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop."

(Xtranormal)

[The Xtranormal Text-to-Movie authoring tool allows you to produce short films. It does so through adding your typed dialogue (in the form of 'text to speech') to supplied animated character assets.]

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Martin Klasch: Weblog of vintage design ephemera

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Monster Media 2010: NTU Multimedia student final year exhibition

"Welcome to monstermedia10.com, here you can find out more about the 2010 Nottingham Trent Multimedia Summer Exhibition and it's graduates. ...

Jonathan Hearn has produced this fantastic time lapse video of multimedia students preparing the exhibition space."

(Wil Thomas)

[The 3 RGB monsters represent the Multimedia pathways of: Moving Image (red), Interactive Media (green) and Virtual Environments (blue).]

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PlaySport: naming by consensus

"For those companies willing to make the cultural commitment to the instantaneous praise and bashing served up 140 characters at a time on Twitter, the rewards can be considerable.

Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak's chief marketing officer, said that he learned firsthand after the company originally debuted its Zi8 waterproof, pocket-sized HD video camera earlier this year. ...

Most companies would either ignore the panning or, perhaps, send the product back to the sales and marketing gurus to come up with a better name.

Kodak didn't.

Instead, this summer it took the naming process to the people via Twitter, asking the great unwashed masses on the microblogging site to see if they could come up with something better. The winner, or winners as it turns out, were promised a free trip to Vegas for this year's CES and will have their likeness displayed in some way on the product's packaging.

From the thousands of tweets received from the crowdsourcing experiment, Kodak combined two fairly mundane suggestions -- 'Play' and 'Sport' -- to derive the new moniker 'PlaySport.' It's not rocket science but, according to Hayzlett, it's a damn sight better than Zi8."

(Larry Barrett, 7 January 2010)

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