Starwars Uncut

This website was brought to my attention by none other than Stephen Fry via his Twitter account. Starwars Uncut invites visiters to remake 15 second clips of Star Wars which will later be strung together to make a complete film. The last I looked there were only 19 free clips left, so you'd better get a move on if you want to get involved. Go and have a look!

Also, from a web design point of view, check out how the stars scroll behind the death star image in the bottom left, nifty.

FutureMe.org

FutureMe.org is a website that allows you to send an email to yourself at a selected date in the future. Maybe it's the thought of nostalgia or the idea of time-travel that makes this idea appealing but I went ahead and sent myself a message that I will get five years from now. I guess the payoff will be when I actually receive the email.

On the website, you can choose to make your post public, and these are made available for reading. A spin off book of public messages has been complied and published.

To me, this feels a bit like a poor man's postsecret project, but that produced a much better looking book and blog, but Future Me still a nice idea.

The website is ugly and badly designed, but this just shows, sometimes ideas can be more powerful than aesthetics.

André Michelle

André Michelle is a Flash developer whose cool retro-looking website is full of projects that as far as I can see, he has developed for his own purposes. He is really pushing the boundaries of what Flash can do, often working within the audio-visual domain. He has created adjustable flangers, adjustable EQs, a scratchable record and a host of other mind boggling audio flash toys.

My favourite is the Tonematix.

Each square on the horizontal axis represents a beat in time, while the squares on the vertical axis vary in pitch. Just select and highlight a selection of squares and listen to your creation. You can work out a musical composition or literally hear a pattern but as the tonematrix uses a pentatonic scale, it always sounds great.

It seems Mr Michelle is well respected within his field too - he was a guest speaker at this years 'Flash On The Beach'. I urge you to go and have a look round his site and play with his inventions, the only downside is how long you could spend there.

How Do You Spend Your Day?

Displaying data graphically is a huge part of visual communication, and this is a great example of it being done well.

This fascinating interactive graph, posted on the New York Times website, is the result of 2008's American Time Survey in which thousands of Americans over the age of 15 were asked to log every minute of their day. The interactive nature of this graph means you can filter the results for different groups of people as well as find specific data. For example, I have discovered that even in 2008 men spend more time working than women and that white people are more likely to have set meal times than black people who's time spent eating and drinking is more spread out through the day. I don't know why I'm interested to know this and I certainly can't explain why it's true but I could spend hours playing with this graph.

Go and play with it yourself here.

Challenge Swound!

In a strange Danny Wallace meets Radiohead mix-up, Nottingham based band 'Swound!' are selling their album for a price of your choosing but only once you have set the band a challenge. The results can be seen in the form of videos on their 'Challenge Swound' website. So far they have asked a chip shop to deep fry some Haribo, spent a whole day in Derbyshire village Eyam, faked an alien sighting and been to try and find the Loch Ness monster among other things.

Meanwhile Steven Fry went on record at the iTunes Festival in London last Monday saying consumers who download copyrighted material for free should not be treated as criminals. Personally, I really respect artists, like Radiohead and Swound!, who embrace the ever changing way in which consumers purchase music. Top marks to Swound! for that reason and also because this stunt is dead funny. Oh and their album - 'Hello Future, We Are Swound!' - is great too.

Boom! T-shirts Website

Boom! T-shirts' online shop is a website that is really making use of Adobe Flash CS4s new 3D capabilities. Normally I might think this was backwards design ("ooh look what our fancy new piece of software can do, now how can we use it") but this site genuinely has a sound little concept for showing off t-shirts and it has been executed really nicely. What's more, this is clearly made by graphic designers, for graphic designers and in these cases companies really have to pull out all the stops in order to impress.

Well, it's really impressed me. Check out the 'About' section too - it's written with a really nice tone of voice.

Logotournament.com

This post is about a website that I got quite addicted to in April called Logo Tournament. The basic premise is that when a company wants a new logo, they set up an online competition and designers submit entries of their logo designs. The contest holder picks a winner who earns a pre-determined sum of $250 or above. If there are fewer than 30 entries, the holder gets their money back. Simple.

I heard about the site through one of Facebook's targeted ads - which I invariably ignore. What was different about this one I wonder? Whatever it was, I immediately thought this sounded like a cool idea and started submitting entries. Despite having a 9 to 5 job in Sheffield, I put in a fair amount of time into this new venture, often working on the train to and from the office. Within 2 weeks I'd won 2 competitions and, to my surprise, actually seen payments go into my paypal account (minus the website's commission) that added up to a little over 300 quid.

You can see my entries here. One of my winning logos was for an American iPhone App development company who are now using the logo on their website, although I don't like the design of their site. My other successful entry was for a skate shop also based in the U.S who have used a part of my design on their website too, again in pretty bad taste.

The more I think about Logo Tournament though, the more doubts I start to have. For what the client gets - often hundreds of different logo designs - it's very good value for money. Maybe a site like this cheapens the art-form of graphic design. On the other side of the process, good designers can put hours in and only one designers earns any money.

I do think there are some positives: quite a nice little online community, fledgling designers being able to work on real briefs, established designers having a punt for fun, the client having a big choice for a small amount of money.

I stopped going on Logo Tournament after about the third week, mainly because I didn't have time but I might start submitting entries again. Anyone else have any thoughts? Is Logo Tournament cheapening design as a trade or mutually beneficial for both parties?