Fire Island Blog

Channel 4 have added a few new “exploding four” idents to their line-up, one of which is this music festival stage where the speaker stacks become the 4…

Check it out…

Win tickets to this year’s sold out V Festival

Quite nice little viral, not much of a game as such, but interesting for us here at Fire Island for the choice of graphic style and employing those little musical characters.

Peter Cashmore at Mashable is reporting that Cooqy has managed to bypass the recent MySpace Flash link blocking fix. Cooqy provides a Flash interface for searching and browsing eBay auctions and it would appear that their MySpace profile carries Flash widgets that (on my PowerBook at least, with Flash Player 9 installed) can successfully open new browser windows.

I’ve taken a quick squizz at the code and it seems that MySpace has not inserted the crucial allowNetworking=internal attribute into Cooqy’s widget embed code. Check it out:

<embed src="http://www.cooqy.com/cooqyMain.lzx?lzt=swf&debug=false&lzr=swf8" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="lt"  width="500" height="600" bgcolor="#ffffff" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="server=http://www.cooqy.com&title=<i>Cooqy</i>"/>


So what’s different about Cooqy’s code and why has MySpace interpreted it differently? Well for a start they’re using Open Laszlo to power their site and to serve the widgets, just take a look at the src attribute above. Another thing that’s different is the string they’re inserting with the flashvars attribute.

It’s the flashvars line that seems to be causing getURL() actions to work, even when Flash Player 9 is installed. On closer inspection it seems to be the extra italic tags inserted into the flashvars attribute that causes the MySpace code parser to fail and to not insert that crucial allowNetworking=internal attribute. I’ve posted an example on my own MySpace profile and those extra italic tags do the trick. I too have a Flash widget (sort of) that can open new browser windows.

Try it yourself, does it work?

UPDATE:
MySpace have closed this loophole now

I often use Flickr to look for interesting photos to use in mockups. I’m usually looking for a certain subject, so Flickr tags are a great fit for this. Trouble is it involves a few too many clicks and becomes frustrating if you do it repeatedly, plus Flickr searches default to ‘Most recent’ which are usually a bit dull.

So I made a little bookmarklet that I keep in my browser toolbar. Click it and it gives you a prompt box, enter the subject/tag you are looking for and you’ll be redirected straight to a Flickr results page filtered by ‘Most interesting’. Six clicks reduced down to just one!

Just bookmark this link or drag and drop it to your toolbar…
Find interesting pics of ‘whatever’ at Flickr

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian Technology supplement today titled What is the 1% rule? which looks at “an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

The article references statistics from YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo Groups and suggest that “a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.” This is clearly something to take into account when designing the new Festival Builder app.

Yahoo have launched a new AJAX-rich homepage and they’ve taken the bold step of designing for screen resolutions of 1024 x 768. Good to see one of the big hitters recognising that things have moved on. I’ll take that as confirmation that we don’t need to worry too much about people stuck in the dark ages. (Until we get our own meaningful stats, of course).

There are some great tutorials and design assets on offer at Design Melt Down. They take various themes or styles, such as Drips, Sprays, & Splatters, providing a little analysis and insight into how they might be incorporated into a design, backed up with great examples from the web. If that wasn’t enough they also link to tutorials on the subject and downloads of hi-res textures that you can use in your own designs.

Just read a great post called Outsourcing Choice, over at 37signals’ blog, about how too much choice can lead to “analysis paralysis” and actually prevent people from being productive.

“Options seem like a nice idea. But each one adds up. Once you realize the evil impact they can have, you start to look at them differently.”

Maybe it’s time to look at those Festival Builder screens again and ask ourselves if we really need all those options.

Following on from my last post where I learnt about the ‘Rimpa’ school of Japanese painting, I thought it might be interesting to compare my artwork before and after I had seen the original paintings. Is it any better? You decide… 

Before:

After:

One of the most interesting (and fun) early tasks as a designer for Fantasy Festivals is working on the ‘festival posters’.

For version 1 of the site (just going into beta now) all of the posters had to be created to work at relatively low resolution (900×600 at 72dpi) without too much noise or detail adding to the file size for download.

We wanted to create a few choices within each genre, so we were almost looking for design clichés to represent different musical tastes and there are some obviously punk, hip-hop, reggae etc examples that do just that in the beta version of the site.

However for version 2 of the site (in development now) the design shackles came off and our brief was to have fun, make beautiful images with quirky, interesting layouts and not worry about the resolution because they would be rendered in a funky new Adobe Flash format.

We were also after some more generic backgrounds, not specifically tied to any one musical taste.

So I had some fun with some of my old ‘texture’ photos, favourite colour palletes and some funky new Photoshop brushes I found on the web. You can check out some example designs on Flickr.

Through posting these images in my Flickr photostream, I got some feedback inviting comparison with both Gustav Klimt (who I was familiar with) and the Japanese Rimpa school of artists (who I’d never heard of), both of which are very flattering.

The Rimpa work was fascinating and I particulary like “Autumn Flowers and Moon” by Sakai Hoitsu which I will try to use as inspiration for the next set of designs, be interesting to see if my work is enhanced or intimidated by the comparisons.