Fire Island Blog

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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.

Well, this is a bit of a blow for any company building widgets targeted at MySpace users. In order to prevent the spread of Flash based adware worms, MySpace are inserting code into Flash objects that stops external links working. The latest version of Flash Player 9 is required for this ‘fix’ to actually work and you can bet ya life that MySpace are actively encouraging users to upgrade, indeed MySpace’s own video service now requires Flash Player 9.

I’ve just tried it myself and sure enough, Flash objects that have a simple getURL action written into them, which opens a site in new window, now fail to work when they are embedded in a MySpace profile. MySpace are actually inserting an extra parameter into the HTML code that users embed into their profile, namely allowNetworking=internal which prevents the Flash object from any communication with the browser, the chief use of which is usually to open a hyperlink to a third-party website. Now, obviously these techniques can be used for nefarious means and MySpace wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t protect their users from malicious attack. But in doing so they have crippled a great many legitimate, honest service providers.

This is potentially pretty catastrophic for any company that is using MySpace as a way to spread the word about their product or service. We hope that Fantasy Festivals will fall into this category in the future, once we have built our Flash posters.

There’s more detail at Techcrunch… MySpace security measure disables viral spread of widgets.

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.

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.

We’re nearly ready to reveal the early-stage private beta of Fantasy Festivals that we’ve been building over the last few months. There’s still a fair way to go before we reach our shared vision of what Fantasy Festivals will become, but we’re getting there. We’ll keep you posted.