Fire Island Blog

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.

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.

You’ve gotta hand it to the people at flickr, they do make some cool stuff, check out this neat little flash gizmo, my new flickr badge!!!

<!-- Start of Flickr Badge --><style type="text/css">.zg_div {margin:0px 5px 5px 0px; width:117px;}.zg_div_inner {border: solid 1px #000000; background-color:#ffffff;  color:#666666; text-align:center; font-family:arial, helvetica; font-size:11px;}.zg_div a, .zg_div a:hover, .zg_div a:visited {color:#3993ff; background:inherit !important; text-decoration:none !important;}</style><script type="text/javascript">zg_insert_badge = function() {var zg_bg_color = "ffffff";var zgi_url = "http://www.flickr.com/apps/badge/badge_iframe.gne?zg_bg_color="+zg_bg_color+"&zg_person_id=24424426%40N00&zg_set_id=72057594120970168&zg_context=in%2Fset-72057594120970168%2F";document.write("<iframe style="background-color:#"+zg_bg_color+"; border-color:#"+zg_bg_color+"; border:none;" width="113" height="151" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src=""+zgi_url+"" title="Flickr Badge"></iframe>");if (document.getElementById) document.write("<div id="zg_whatlink"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne"  style="color:#3993ff;" onclick="zg_toggleWhat(); return false;">what is this?</a></div>");}zg_toggleWhat = function() {document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display = (document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display != "none") ? "none" : "block";document.getElementById("zg_whatlink").style.display = (document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display != "none") ? "none" : "block";return false;}</script><div class="zg_div"><div class="zg_div_inner"><a href="http://www.flickr.com">www.<strong style="color:#3993ff">flick<span style="color:#ff1c92">r</span></strong>.com</a><br><script type="text/javascript">zg_insert_badge();</script><div id="zg_whatdiv">This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/21644036@N00/sets/72057594120970168">Grafix</a>. Make your own badge <a href="http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne">here</a>.</div><script type="text/javascript">if (document.getElementById) document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display = "none";</script></div></div><!-- End of Flickr Badge -->

Really simple, quick and easy to put together, and as soon as i saw it, i wanted one too, i have a feeling this will really catch on, bet this isnt the last one you’ll see…

P.S. I chose to feature my ‘graphix’ set in this badge, mostly work created with fantasy festival posters in mind.