4 Digital Creatives doing awesome things

For most Advertising Creatives creativity does not stop at 5:30PM Friday, most have some kind of creative outlet outside of work whether that be writing children's books, tshirt lines or even setting up charities.

Digitally a growing trend that I am starting to see is Digital Creatives using the internet as their canvas. The type of art that I am most interested in is when Creatives are creating cultural statements through their pieces and capturing the attention of the masses. Here are some of my favourite;

1. Jeff Greenspan (Creative Director at BBDO)

Urban Traps (Hipster Traps)
The Most Exclusive Website (Mike Lacher and Chris Baker)
LetterBombing (Chris Baker)


2. Mike Lacher - Creative Technical Manager - Google Creative Labs

Mikala Bierma Youtube Channel
Waiting for Bieber
Shady URL
Geocities-izer



3. Ji Li (Creative Director at Facebook)
The Bubble Project
Goolery
Dummer


4. Chris Baker (Writer at Google Creative Labs)

The Likeable Constitution (Jeff Greenspan)
The Call to Action Generator

As I start to learn Photoshop and Coding I am hoping to start making some of my ideas come to life. Watch this space!

Digital Strategists learn Photoshop in 8 hours

I am really trying to grow the creative side of my brain at the moment. As I discussed in my previous post on Strategy bullets, I have really been limiting the creative side for the last few years. One of the other main barriers to me being creative was I didn't have the skills to be able to execute an idea (e.g couldn't mock it up in Photoshop, couldn't code up the idea).

I was inspired by Pon Kattera, to change this the other day. He recently taught himself Photoshop via online tutorials on lynda.com. With his glowing endorsement I signed up.

I took the Photoshop CS5 Essential Training course and have taught myself the basics to Photoshop and completed my first mock ups for work on Friday. I was surprised with how good it actually was! It is cheap at a flat rate of $25 a month for all the courses you want. You have to give it a good 8 hours and it usually helps if you have someone with you who knows the basics of Photoshop.

On a side note if you haven't watched 'You suck at Photoshop' tutorials before you need to watch them!

The new data capture - Emotional DNA Data

Collecting and creating meaningful conclusions from personal data seems to be all the rage at the moment. One area that seems to have been overlooked but of interest is emotional data capturing. Emotional DNA is left on everything photos, places, people, foods. All these can elicit powerful emotions from people.

My work colleague Kendra Salvatore came up with an interesting concept of emotional geographic mapping. Basically what if we were able to visualise the emotions we tie to different places.


One of the exercises that she does is to manually map emotions from different places. I have had a stab at it for Melbourne and Sydney which was a pretty interesting task. However I think this would not need to be a manual thing, you could hook it up to Foursquare or Facebook Places and give a little emoti on what you are feeling at the time (think Nike Plus).

'Going to your happy place' could now become prompted by technology, with a mechanic that understood what places are that happy place. Fornino's and their White Truffle Oil Pizza

Putting down the Strategy Bullets

'Strategy bullets are the fastest way to kill an idea.' That guy, 2011



One of the biggest brain shifts I have had moving to BBH, is changing from a strategy mainframe to a creative led position. Strategy is a very left brain activity, coming up with creative problems is definitely a right brain activity.



A lot of Strategy revolves around looking for patterns and the inferring meanings from these patterns, whereas creative requires you to look forward and look for new patterns. This creates a lot of tension when the two parties meet.



I noticed in creative concept meetings, I was able to kill a number of thought starters and ideas as I was looking for all the holes of where it wasn't technically possible or the lack of insight of the idea.



After being made aware of this I have really started to train myself to try and find the good in an idea, virtually ever idea has at least a kernel of goodness that you can bounce off. This has also made me be more proactive in thinking about digital ideas outside of work too, so hopefully like Zac Martin I can start moving fast and breaking things.

Super Hero Clubhouse chat solving a number of fundamental problems to online chat

Super Hero Clubhouse is a new site/thing from the people from Texts From Last Night/Bnter it is a massive step forward in the online communication/relationship space. Anyone who has had to study online communications will most likely be surprised at how many fundamentals online problems they have solved with this product.



Please go have a look around and then come back. Here is the massive problems that I see that they are resolving.



Problem - Lack of conversation starters/passion points

Most online communication are usually formed around a passion point - (Forums - IntheMix - Dance Music, 4Chan - Anime, BigFooty - AFL). With ChatRoulette where they struggled was having a passion point (which wasn't wangs). SHC starts in a role play scenario - you can talk about superheroes but they compliment this with 'Ice Breakers' which are conversation starters which you can drop into the chat.



Problem - Creeper Stalker Pedo Stigma

Online chat has always struggled with the Creeper Stalker Pedo Stigma, SHC starts conversation in a state that is the furtherest place away from creeper single stalker male territory, role playing superheroes. We aren't going to get to A/S/L questions of the bat.



Problem - Sign Up processes suck

Signing up is slick, Facebook Connect - remembers you for the long term. Then finishing the sign up is a bit of a game in creating your own character, which is a nice easy process.



Problem- Actually connecting with people after the experience

You can reveal your mask at the end of it, such a nice simple fit with the whole superhero theme



They have a created a number of nice solutions/mechanics which I will be taking and using in future projects.

Q: What's after Social Media? A: Social Data Curating

You know when three of the biggest Digital agencies in America start putting out projects using the same technique that something is about to change. CP+B, R/GA and Zeus Jones have all created Social Data Curated projects for brands in the last 3 months and it feels like it might be a growing trend.

We have come to a point where we have so much data thanks to Social Media and there is a real opportunity to make this data meaningful. Enter Social Data Curating - the ability to take these numbers of present it back as a by product that adds value to consumers.

Social was always a difficult one for Digital Agencies to get their heads around, they needed to get new resource in, Community Managers etc, the metrics for success were quite different. However the current trend of Social Data Curated Projects in which Agencies are now creating products/applications/websites lets coders and developers get back front and centre and involved in Social. The following are three projects that are going down this road.

CP+B and Jello

Jello Pudding Face aggregates the number of :) and :( tweets and then in turn effects their Jello Pudding Face meter, which is also a billboard. When the global voice goes :( they start giving away pudding to the people who have tweeted :( to try and make them happy again. Great tie into sampling, CP+B were also great at doing this with Kraft Mac + Cheese which gave away the product when two people tweet Mac and Cheese at the same time.

R/GA and Nike Basketball

Nike Basketball have arranged their athletes in terms of the how many tweet per hour that player gets, so that the data visualisation captures who are the most popular players of the moment.

Zeus Jones and Cheerios

Cheerios have taken the data around what people were searching for on the internet around Cheerios and made their website to answer those questions

Design for Entrepreneurs and Hackers

I did a great course 'Design for Entrepreneurs and Hackers' at General Assembly when I first arrived in NYC. The course was run by Jack Cheng and David Cole from Disrupto and I have finally got around to doing a write up on it.

They have got a solid framework on what makes good design. The basis of their theory is that good design is making and breaking patterns to achieve desired outcomes. A large portion of the course was talking about patterns. Patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. They are shortcuts that people understand, similar to schemas. They had a number of great resources on patterns for mobile and web;

Mobile
Pttrns
Mobile UI Patterns

Web
Pattern Tap
Welie (User need patterns)
Yahoo's Patterns

Here is a great site on Dark Patterns, they are patterns that deceive the user, if you have ever had that feeling that a design is being tricky, then there is probably a case study on this site of where it has hurt a company online.

When designing anything for online they suggested there were three layers that designers needed to think about - Product Strategy, Product User Interface and Visual Design, within these you want one of these objects to be remarkable and then the others to be patterns that people are familiar with.

On a side not, on a scale of 1 to mind blowing how good is the K-Swiss/Kenny Powers entertainment????