Posted by Brett Tackaberry on January 15th, 2010 
1 Comment
How many people does it take to handle the crux that is a paper jam? Turns out – all 9 of us housed in the pit of 76design. In a surge of energy usually reserved for client work, we turned our attention to a self-imposed initiative. Three hours of diligence produces a product, a history behind the product, and a website dedicated to solving an issue that riddles offices across the plant. It’s with our pleasure that we introduce PC Loadletter’s Paper Jam: the real full-page spread.
Posted by stevestpierre on January 13th, 2010 2 Comments
Often times, I’m convinced I was born in the wrong time. Maybe it’s because I watched a few too many episodes of Mad Men over the last couple years (yep, I’m an industry cliché), or because my stereo really only rotates Sam Cooke records (ok, and Counting Crows). But it’s safe to say I have a passion for the past, and believe it or not – that bodes well for design. Knowing where you came from, both personally and professionally, is a surefire way of keeping you grounded, and something that’s often lost on these young whippersnappers using every Photoshop filter in the book and calling it ‘good design’.
(Don’t get me wrong, I love bevel and emboss as much as the next, guy – stick with me here.)
Take a look at ‘
Final Marks‘ , an incredible documentary from 1978 on lettercutting. There’s no filter for that! That’s dilligence! That’s focus! That’s passion! There’s no rushing when you’re carving someone’s name into a gravestone. There’s careful planning involved and then the task itself, getting in there with the right tools, getting dust in your eyes, knicks on your hands, all sorts of good stuff – it’s all part of the process.
And that has put me into a decent mindset for the year. I’ve already read a Chapters (or Borders) worth of design books, trying to get whatever edge, but there’s more research to be done into how I (and all designers, for that matter) can become better at what we do. Yes, the focus is always on the finished work, but I think it’s about time we take a step back and focus on the process.
Craftsmanship. Attention to detail. Design is more than choosing colours and typefaces. It’s how all the shapes fit together. Every little pixel communicates something. We’re no different than these guys cutting into stone – except for, you know, the cushy chairs, widescreen monitors, and tablets the size of a kitchen table. Appreciate the process more. I’m not saying that consumers need to think about the poor letterspacing on their taco menu – but that designers and account people alike should understand ‘good design’ rarely comes from a snap of the fingers and the “create logo” filter in Photoshop.
These days, we can’t live by the adage of ‘slow and steady’ – but I think we can make ‘brisk and steady’ work.
Posted by Ben Watts on January 12th, 2010 Comments Off
Happy Tuesday night, here’s a wallpaper!
Oh snap! See what I did there?
1920×1200 download
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on January 8th, 2010 2 Comments
A good friend of ours and past comrade, Matt Wallace of paradisal.ca fame, a stock-photography agency, is launching his annual Paradisal* poster design contest.
There is no cost to enter. The winners get 25% of each sale once they’re printed, a $300 gift certificate for use at www.paradisal.ca and 5 printed copies of their design and 1 of the other winning design. Last year there were 64 submissions with entries coming in from all over the world.
Maybe 76design will simply enter the results of our Aural Design Challenge.
Last year’s winner
Posted by ryan on December 18th, 2009 2 Comments
For the second year in a row some coworkers and I have decided to be thrifty with our holiday gift exchange by designing and creating personalized CDs filled with music that we think the other person will like.
It started off with a hat, tiny pieces of paper, and the Christmas Party. It was then that we drew the name of our sucker, err, recipient. The hardest part, in my opinion, is trying to figure out what the giftee will like on their CD. There are several people in the office who are extremely transparent with their choice of music, but then there are others who never leave their iPod alone long enough to take a peek.
We’re lucky enough to be a tight knit crew, so the CDs always seem to have a personal touch that ends up being a big success. Our collection of disc cover designs this year included favourite fonts, colours, even condiments (images, and believe it or not, actual fresh pepper).
For the past few hours it’s been pretty quiet in the office except for the headphones of everyone listening to their CDs. Well, that and the munching of Brett‘s mom’s delicious cookies.
Posted by Steve Lounsbury on December 14th, 2009 Comments Off
Ben Watts and I were grouped together for this round of Skunkworks. Our idea was to figure out a way to port the board game Battleship onto twitter. The primary way of playing the game had to include twitter, a web interface could be used to augment the experience, but a player should be able to play entirely through twitter.
Enter BattleTwip!
We refined the objective of the game to fit better with the social media aspects of Twitter. Typically, a battleship game is played between two players in close proximity. Twitter includes millions of users all around the world. To limit the game to the traditional two players would be missing the opportunity to take advantage of the potential players on Twitter.
In order to make games playable by more users, our solution was to pit all of twitter against the “twitter bot” running the game. Once a new game was created, twitterers could take shots at the board and the bot would inform them if the shot was a hit or a miss.
At this point, we designed a high level flow diagram for the game in order to better understand the work flow involved. Click here to check out the flow chart.
The twitter bot would monitor tweets from players and scan them for moves. Once adding those moves to the game, it would update the players of the progress by tweeting about it. This solved the challenge of being able to play entirely over twitter.
Playing over twitter is great, but can you really be expected to keep track of all your moves from a list of tweets? In order to make the game easier to track and more fun to play, we created a web interface to display the general progress of the game. This displays all the recorded hits so far, a player leader board, and the latest tweets from the bot.
The Twitter Bot
Here’s the basic logic the twitter bot follows on each run:
- Load the current active game from the database.
- Use the Twitter API to look for battleship “shots” in @replies and direct messages from twitter users. Shots are considered any string that specifies a point on the battleship board. Examples of shots are “A3″ and “J10″.
- If any messages come from Twitter users that the bot is not currently following, requests will be sent to the API to follow these users. This will allow them to direct message the bot in the future.
- The collection of moves gathered from twitter is added to the current game. These moves are classified into one of three categories: miss, hit and sink.
- After moves are classified, the bot will tweet about each one and indicate if it was a hit or sink. Misses are simply claimed to have missed and the board position is not indicated.
Web Interface
So, playing battleship solely over twitter is great, but it doesn’t really lend itself to seeing the progress of the game. For this, we created a nice web frontend that displays the game progress on a battleship game board.
The web interface is built on top of the Zend Framework and uses AMF to provide the communication between flash and the backend.
Avoiding Twitter Spam
A common complaint about twitter based games is the level of spam they introduce into your twitter stream. Games like @playspymaster came under a lot of scrutiny for this when first released. They have since cleaned things up.
In order to avoid spamming people from the beginning, the following policies were adopted:
- Users can play the game by replying to the bot, or by direct messaging it. This means your followers won’t hate you for playing the game.
- The bot doesn’t do any questionable stuff like tweet on your behalf or give you points for tweeting about it.
How about a demo?
Sure! It’s up and running at http://76design.ca/battletwip. Have fun, but remember this is definitely not ready for prime-time at this point :)
Where to go from here?
Battletwip was a great experience. It was fun using the twitter API to create a game. I think it has potential to be used, so we’re going to let people play with it a bit and see what feedback we get. We don’t have any grand plans at this point, but we’ll see what happens!
