An amazing eye for image whose style will live forever in her work and whose influence will live on in the work of those she inspired.
At 16 it was a monthly pilgrimage to hit my local Yorkshire indie newspaper shop to request my copies of Face, i-D, and Dazed & Confused magazines.
I’d steal my mum’s copy of Vogue and look for the raw within the couture. I’d trawl and scrape and cut and paste and take with me when I could many and most of the images you can see below.

“I get my ideas anywhere, at any time; I don’t have to be specifically doing anything. I keep a diary at home and make notes of any thoughts I have, and then when a job comes up, I see if there’s anything in it that applies. I’m a workaholic, and I’m quite driven. I can’t switch off. Even when I was on holiday recently, I wanted to get away from taking photographs and just go somewhere else in my mind. I wouldn’t take my camera out with me, but I would still see pictures all the time and think: ‘Oh god, I wish I had brought my camera.’” Corinne Day, 2002

Corinne Day brought a hard edged docu-drama look to fashion image making – borrowing from the British tradition of honest, low budget film making exonified  in the works of Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh.

This style has helped pave the way to bring back the low-quality, over exposure and miss-colouration of photography that was so prevelent in the age of the cheap 35mm holiday cameras – now more prevelent than ever through the use of Lomographic cameras which in turn has inspired a camera app explosion on iTunes for the Apple iPhone.

I guess you must learn to be creative. I learnt photography when I picked up my first camera at 19. I started by taking photographs of my boyfriend and then my girlfriends. I have a very distinctive taste for the things I like to photograph, and that’s a very solitary creativity, in a way. I’ve always known what I’ve liked and I’ve always gone in the opposite direction of everyone else. I get bored easily of seeing the same thing over and over. Corinne Day.

Part of being able to take good documentary [read: not staged] photography is IMHO about the relationships you form with your sitters and subjects, and Day was good at this (most famously with Kate Moss for Face magazine in 1990).
This honest and intimate lo-fi style also can be associated with the new fashion style at that time called Grunge, which was also semi born out of the look being captured in interviews with the Seattle rock bands at the same time such as Nirvana and Perl Jam.

A very big source of inspiration for me is music – it brings atmospheres alive. I really believe you have to have time off to be creative, which is why I don’t have a darkroom. If I did have one, I’d spend my whole life revolving around photography, and then I wouldn’t get any inspiration to take pictures. I wouldn’t say that documentary photography is more creative than fashion photography, it’s just that documentary photography is more important for me because it’s something I’ve lived. It’s much more deep. Whereas when you’re creating an image, you’re just using your imagination, so it’s not so emotional. Corinne Day, 2002

What makes Corinne day both important and interesting to art and post-modern era culture is that despite being credited with an endless selection of enviable epitaths like “having discovered Kate Moss and creating the “waif” look”, and “changing the British fashion scene forever”, she conciously moved away from the magazine fashion scene saying ”they’re stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty.”

“People can be very inspiring – they can make you see that there’s a life beyond what you’ve learnt at school. When I was 12, my grandmother knew a painter who was friends with Modigliani and Picasso. I used to be painted by her and she would talk to me about art and imagery, and I think that was my first introduction to the creative mind.” Corinne Day,  2002

Day’s critics accused her of an anti-glamour snobbery, and ask what is the point of so much drabness in much the same way critics of Loach and Leigh speak after wiping the snot from their noses as they leave the pokey cinema review rooms. In any case Day left Vogue in 1993 after a particularly un-groomed set of photos showing Kate Moss in her underwear, baggy tights and no makeup. Again, Day was blamed for encouraging anorexia, drugs, even paedophilia, and promoting her own brand of “heroin chic”.

Video: Kate Moss by Corinne Day

“Photography is getting as close as you can to real life, showing us things we don’t normally see. These are people’s most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad.” Corinne Day

Video: “Inside the Secret Garden…”
Model Rachel Alexander, photographer Corinne Day and video director Mark Szaszy between the shoot for H&M.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Corinne Day will always be remembered for her outstanding contribution to British fashion, art, documentary and culture.
Find out more and see more here: http://www.corinneday.co.uk/

Here is a collection of QR barcodes in business cards.

by pixage

by EEPaul

by 5Volt

by 5Volt

by zipckr

QR Code generator: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

My website URL QR code:

Yousuf or Josuf Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire. He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, “I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.” At the age of 14, he fled with his family to Syria to escape persecution. Two years later, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill.

[From Portrait Photography by Yousuf Karsh]

IPhone 4G in hand

Dimensions

I will avoid specific measurements on this post as you can find out these kinds of details on the Apple site, and will instead focus on how it feels to hold it in comparison to previous models.
The phone feels really well built and exceptionally solid. The metal casing with glass front and back makes the iPhone not only sit well in the hand but also reinforces it’s solid build qualities. It is reasonably heavy and as such you can certainly feel it in your pocket, but it’s extremely thin so what it gains in trouser weight it more than makes up for in slide-in-to-back-pocket agility.

Look and Feel

Because of the phone’s amazing build quality it really is a stunner to look at.
It’s still early days and still a rare sight to be seen with around the office, so be prepared to have people rock up and ask to have a play on it. Any self-assured and confident person should have the where-with-all to remind them that this is not a book in a library and that your phone is in a long-term relationship with your Social Networks and therefore should not be pulled, grabbed or man-handled like a bit of steak at an all-you-can-eat buffet :)

The buttons on the side of the device feel nice and solid with no ‘give’ or loose feel and the addition of etched ‘+’ and ‘-’ symbols will obviously add some extra accessibility to those that need it.
The speakers and cable slot are located in the same place and are the same size, as is the main circular call-to-action button on the front.
The addition of a front pin-hole camera to the right of the ear-phone speaker is the only noticeable change to the phone when comparing and looking straight on.

Side by side: the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4G

Speed, battery and reception

The iPhone 4 seems faster when loading apps and navigating the menus. I recently updated the OS on my iPhone 3G to version 4 and had felt it made the phone slower, and drained the battery faster. But not so with the new iPhone 4. The battery life on the new version is much much better. I’ve found that despite extensive use the battery showed only 50% loss in 24hrs. However I’d say that I rarely use my phone for music and multimedia – instead tending to pull on the WIFI and 3G capabilities to read and update social tools.

I’ve noticed that the reception on the phone can be temperamental. I’ve read up about the antenna issues and ways to hold the phone etc, but I’ve not noticed this as a real issue. Instead I have noticed that where on previous models of iPhone I might have had good reception (such as at home) it seems to register a weaker signal; and other places where previously reception was notorious (at work) it seems better.
This could be to do with interference of particular types of other signals as at home I have a cordless phone, and next door have SKY television. I also have quite a strong WIFI signal beaming out from two Apple routers. Whereas at work, our phones are wired, we have no SKY TV (unless there’s something they are not telling me) and no WIFI (??!!) in the Design-Bunker.

Screen

The screen has been one of the most talked about new features to the iPhone 4 and it really is something that should be seen to be appreciated.
The actual screen size has not been improved upon since the early iPhones but the rendering process really has come a long way. Text is the most appreciable thing to view on it as it really does display pixel perfect, leaving icons and buttons some way behind.
A good example of this is on the Guardian app where the article text renders perfectly and is a joy to read, but the header graphic showing the Guardian logo is pixelated and cheap-looking on the new screen (whereas it looked fine on older models).
Note: For those who know about such things, the advent of HTML5 and CSS3 (the coding language [and version] used to build and display websites) should begin to address the imbalance of button graphics and logos to text, as new ways to render web graphics and logos that might include rounded corners, drop-shadows or non-web accessible fonts can be created at any resolution on-the-fly through code rather than by displaying a pre-designed image. This means that web pages load quicker, but also can render to take into account new screen sizes such as iPads, netbooks, mobile and smart-phones.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other noteworthy features

The front camera adds additional features such as the ability to swap between front or back camera while framing a shot; and the inclusion of FaceTime which is basically video chat. FaceTime is currently locked down to calls between iPhone4 users only but I think pretty soon they will open it up to AppleTalk users and eventually even further to take advantage of the Jabber chat framework (which Facebook also uses).

There is apparently two microphones now built into the body which in theory should make voice calls better as between the two it can distinguish one primary sound source and attempt to block out any additional background noise. I’ll be interested to see future apps that are released to take advantage of the two mics especially those in the music recording category.

Conclusion

What I especially like about the new version of the phone is something more than the sum of it’s parts: not just the shape and feel of the phone, or what it can do (all of which we have seen before in other smart-phones like the Nexus One and Desire) but actually the feeling I get from owning and having a practical use for such a well designed and engineered bit of kit. It reminds me of watching my dad coveting his Sony Pro Walkman in the 1980’s – a beautiful, heavy black professional and portable recording machine often seen under the nose of a reporter at the BBC. This phone’s slick silver metallic edges harps back to the 1970’s and 1980’s when media equipment was analogue and solid and had needles and dials instead of displays and buttons. Yet it’s ability to be controlled by voice, to pin-point the stars above your location in the sky, to create 16 track music recordings, to record in 720p HD at 30 frames a second and upload to youtube where ever you have a signal… all these abilities and more put it safely at the front of the current crop of freshmen multi-media phone devices.

The new iPhone 4 will not change everything again, but it will change our design tastes for the better and give us a lingering more-ish taste of the cutting edge of technology. It doesn’t take a genius-bar frequenter to predict that what starts with physical functional mobile phone design from Apple will permeate out through the ranks and end with better looking consumer products in every category. Products with one digital footprint in the present and another in the re-presented and re-imagined past.

Free wallpaper for iPhone from: http://ju5t.in/aWsMaz

Hitler reacts to the iPhone 4 antenna issue and Steve Jobs’ response to customer complaints.
The original video was made by Michael Ingram, Jr. – check out his website: http://mingramjr.com/

Click here to view the embedded video.

OR Books

WORKac

More here.

(Via Logo Design Love.)

Original title and location of post: Project Projects

In just 24 hours, Coca-Cola’s first Promoted Trend garnered 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6%, according to the company’s Global Interactive Marketing Vice President Carol Kruse in an interview with The Financial Times.

Following in the footsteps of Disney/Pixar, Coca-Cola is the second company to reach Twitter audiences by advertising as a Trending Topic on Twitter.

The cost for this particular Twitter ad buy is said to be tens of thousands of dollars, but Kruse indicated that the expense was small relative to other ad buys and that Coke is pretty pleased with its initial Promoted Trends experiment.

The company choose to run with its Promoted Trend campaign during Wednesday’s World Cup matches, a peak time for Twitter activity. The decision was a risky bet that could have yielded mixed results due to Twitter’s inability to keep the service up during World Cup online hysteria. Fortunately for Coke, its risky decision paid off.

Coke listed Promoted Tweets atop the Trending Topic search results for the sponsored #WC2010 Promoted Trend that ‘congratulated the England and US teams, linked to videos on YouTube and invited people to ’share their celebration’ of their teams’ success.’

Given that the soda-making giant has gone on record with its Promoted Trends results, we definitely expect to see even more big brands follow suit.

(Via Mashable!.)
Original post: Coca-Cola Promoted Trend Nets 86 Million Impressions on Twitter

So, just a quick heads up on what the new Twitter advertising ‘thing’ really is – as I understand it so far – as I hear quite a bit of speculation and hearsay about this, its potential reach, and what it means for Twitter.

First, what is Twitter again?

Twitter is a really simple messaging service that allows a user to write a short text message (a maximum of 140 characters in length) which instead of being sent to just one recipient is posted online for any other user to read. Those readers can choose to follow the sender of the message and expand their ‘social network’. By reciprocal following each user can send a tweet as a private message (much like a mobile SMS message) to just that one other user. The content of messages or ‘Tweets’ are usually based around the theme: “what are you doing/thinking right now”.

How does Twitter make any money?

According to Mashable last month Twitter was valued at 1.4 billion dollars. But it has yet to make a profit. What we are starting to see here is the beginning of a strategy to start to recoup some investment that has been put into the company since it launched in July 2006 to the public.

Ok so what is this new advertising feature?

Twitter have introduced a new advertising feature – Promoted Tweets – which launched today. At the moment they have several marketing streams to work with including Starbucks, Sony and BestBuy.

How does it work?

If you do a search for the word ‘Starbucks’ on Twitter or through a Twitter aggregator (Tweetdeck, Tweetie etc), the very first ‘tweet’ you will see in the list of relevant tweet results will be a marketing message for Starbucks.
More about this here in Twitter’s own blog: http://bit.ly/promotionaltweets

So how does this new ‘feature’ make money?

At the moment it’s unclear whether this way of ‘promoting’ tweets is an income earner for Twitter. Twitter themselves have said they are experimenting. It’s also unclear how a recipient generates income for advertisers from these types of tweets – whether it’s by pay-per-click (I’d assume it’s this) or otherwise.
How much this costs and how much an affiliate can hope to earn is also unknown just now as well as how far the brand reach will stretch.

Brand reach at the moment is hard to quantify in terms of ROI and remains the elephant in the room for small-scale, just launched, social media agencies (we have to look towards the likes of well established Social Business Agencies such as Headshift and their parent the Dachis Group for a hope of how we might measure social media engagement in short-tail currency value).
But in terms of long-tail measurements, through the work that I do with Comet I can see that it *is* possible to capture a change – something that can be measured – in the form of brand advocacy.

If advocacy becomes a more prominent currency within enterprise 2.0 I can extrapolate and assume that these kinds of promotional tweets will be a high earner.

In any case from an enterprise perspective Promoted Tweets is certainly something to keep a close eye on.

I missed lunch today.
By mistake I sat making changes to laskysezine (a blog site I set up for Laskys.com) and munching through my Graze nibbles box.
If you’re not spending at least one lunchtime shovelling the contents of a Graze box into your face you really are nobody in Shoreditch (and Rickmansworth) these days.
Graze have a great concept of delivering a totally recyclable, healthy and nutritious box of seeds, fruit, olives, nuts, etc before lunchtime to your work or home address for just under £3.
Check out the graze.com website – the simple and friendly form you fill in is a real design and UX treat in itself (reminds me of when moo.com launched) – and get a box free on me by using this voucher code:

1MT6RXZN.

If this Graze wasn’t enough to fill your chubby design-node up, then also check out: The Typography Manual at http://typographyapp.com/. It’s an iPhone app that “has several useful features and resources for designers, including a visual type anatomy glossary, a font size ruler, an em calculator, and enough content to fill a 60-page book. It has all the essentials of a desk reference in a regularly updated pocket resource” and it looks good too.

Be friendly.
So earlier today I was looking around for some nice online design and UX inspiration and came across http://bjango.com/apps/. It’s just nice and friendly.
Something that reminded me of a conversation I’d had with my dad (@popadog) on Skype the other evening about how unfriendly the web could be was when a friend asked me to go through a use-case for a new website design with him. It involved typing in a search term and landing on a search results page with various refinements. It was interesting how in the prototype the search results page simply said

“viewing [search term]. Refine your results”

or words to that effect.
I instantly felt a bit upset.
So we looked at a previous wireframe that had been discarded because of the desire to simplify and reduce the refinement area. It had a big heading that read

“You can choose more options to give you better results below”.

Mmmmm this is nice (I thought).
So anyway, here’s to nice friendly websites.
See more nice “well placed pixels” at this website dedicated to nice design: http://wellplacedpixels.com/

Chairman Ting’s digital graffiti art performances at the Salt Building inside the Athlete’s Village were commissioned by The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) using Tangible Interaction’s unique digital graffiti wall technology.

During one the 5 nights inside the Olympic Village Chairman Ting collaborated with U.S. Short Track Speed Skaters, Travis Jayner and Jordan Malone for a few digital graffiti sessions.

Music:  Holy Fuck – “Frenchy’s”

Website: http://www.chairmanting.com
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/car

by vividBreeze

First off is ’10 Easy jQuery Tricks for Designers‘ [http://to.ly/rnc] – featuring things like automatic cross-browser rounded courners, and scrollable content boxes, all of which without the use of JavaScript can make for some *huge* CSS. One of the problems with maintaining such huge (and often multiple stylesheets is that over time we forget which selectors are redundant. Often it could be a week-long job of tirelessly cross referencing styles, which frankly is enough to make anyone put that job on the back-burner! Fortunately a list has cropped up called ‘Detecting unused CSS selectors‘ [http://to.ly/rII]. In this post is a list of the top programs, addons and web-based apps for detecting and cleaning those unused classes. It includes a firefox plugin that looks particularly interesting.

Of course this post and lots like it list items in a top-down fashion, and it’s often hard to know whether semantically this is an un-ordered list or tabular data. Both of these have taken on new properties and should be styled accordingly (XOXO Microformatting for un-ordered lists, and the use of <th> etc for tabular data). It can be a real pain to properly style these, so often it becomes an after-thought.
So when I spotted the ‘CSS Table Gallery‘ [http://to.ly/rIL] with free templates, I thought it would be worth sharing as something invaluable to a designers arsenal. These kinds of background knowledge reference sites can be so important when trying to improve your own skills as a designer/coder.

One of the things that I think is also very important is cutting down the use of long-hand styles and repeated references. A bookmarked site like ‘CSS Shorthand – A Guide to Cleaner and Faster Coding‘ [http://to.ly/rIJ] can be invaluable, and so useful to creating cleaner, smaller CSS.

Things / links and mashes that I’ve spotted so far this morning that make my fingers and toes go woooooo :)

Quite impressed by the idea of the Nikon camera as this IMHO is the beginning of realised projection hardware in small and compact devices. Only a matter of time before the first mobile phones come out with this imbuilt. At that point we will have the suck and punch result of being able to watch MP4′s large anywhere, but be hounded on public transport by socially-unaware fuckwads desperate to draw attention to themselves in any way possible blasting out Hanna fucking Montana songs into the eyeballs of unsuspecting commuters in glorious Technicolor.

Still we might be lucky enough that some of them project the new Bo Selecta MJ special that’s due soon as a one off special. Failing that I guess at the very least the reactions of such projection devices will have on individuals could be interesting, in the same way that the designs behind speed signs on roads are getting smarter, and are being designed better in order to get the desired reactions. Like, drive slower.

Elsewhere on the web, I had a good old laugh at Cassette Boy’s new vid on YouTube, and had a jolly inspired read through an article on best practice when designing a *dark* themed website. Also looking at 27 horizontal scrolling site designs – reminded me that I should dig out my old site designs asap as I had one portfolio site that I build using Iframes way back before CSS came along. It was good enough to be featured in .Net magazine in 2002.

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/aug/05/nikon-projector-camera
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8185156.stm
3. http://www.fubiz.net/2009/08/05/slower-is-better/
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRLqLACXFC8

5. http://nambu.com/
6. http://dzineblog.com/2009/07/web-design-ideas-27-horizontal-scrolling-websites.html
7. http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/08/the-dos-and-donts-of-dark-web-design/