12th Independent Games Festival
The Independent Games Festival unfortunately doesn't get a lot of main stream media coverage but I think showcases innovative ideas in interaction, game design and art.
Designers and consumerism
The evolution of graphic design over the past 100 years from purely aesthetics to meeting functional, cultural, social and production requirements has helped to develop the change and growth of consumerism.
Using real world objects in graphic design
A collection of impressive Album cover designs all created by designers based in London, UK.
Adopting radical design
Radical new approaches to design are often controversial, especially if they challenge a 'traditional' model -- where many are instantly dismissed by their potential audience as being ugly. I recently experienced this while looking at purchasing a new scooter. It's an interesting process and made me wonder.. are we missing out on mass improvements within design -- instead restricting ourselves to incremental design improvements?
25 years of cyberpunk
It began with a fascination with the Commodore 64, an interface in to virtual worlds, that lead to my passion for cyberpunk culture -- literature, games, art and music.
An artist’s visions of hell
I've been exploring visual executions of The Inferno through painting and sculpture to modern interpretations in digital media. Here's a few examples of some of the more intriguing images I've found.
OFFF Oeiras’09
I spent the last few days in Lisbon at the OFFF design festival. It was inspiring to listen to people talk about work that I have a lot of respect for, though I didn’t get as much out of it as previous design conferences I’ve been to.
Games as interactive art
The Independent Games Festival took place at the end of last month in San Francisco, along side GDC. The finalists are listed on their website.
Future of interaction
I see games as one form of media that is advancing trends in interaction design. Two recent trends which I've begun to explore are Augmented Reality and free Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games.
Immersive virtual game worlds
Advertising often embodies worlds that don't exist, at least in the physical sense. It makes use of myths and portrays an appropriate moment or environment in order to prompt a certain emotion or reaction in the reader. Like film or TV it often provides guidance when handling real life events. Advertising and media act as a powerful informers of local culture.
Differences between design disciplines
The differences between designers from different disciplines is not one of process or evaluation, or even the specific interests and abilities of the designer, but of constraints. Product designers work with the constraints offered by every day objects, graphic designers with 2D mediums and typography, interior designers with the relationship between people and space while architects with the built environment.
Games lead UI movement towards complete diegetic interfaces
I've been looking at ideas based around 3D information systems recently, as research for a project I might be working on this month. While I haven't finished researching, one of the topics that has got me interested is the redundancy of interactive elements such as icons and scroll bars when navigating a 3D space.