NEWS+BLOG

Some designers with possibly a little too much downtime between clients have identified what they think are the key design trends for logos this year. We took a quick look at some of the top ones.

Psychedelic Pop Backgrounds We’ve seen lots of advertising with a myriad of colours and shapes (ever since those iPod print ads with all the album covers) and now it seems that’s boiling down into logos with colours and shapes bursting out of them. Will the 60’s never end?

Origami You don’t have a real logo unless it can be cleverly made out of a piece of paper... Or at least look like folded paper with geometric shapes.

Tactile/3 D It could look like striped toothpaste squeezed out of a tube or 3-D Letters built for real and photographed, but if your logo looks like a real object and casts a shadow, it’s totally hot right now.

It wasn’t long ago that 3.2 megapixles on a camera seemed impressive. Now it’s a minimum for even a phone. But will the seemingly relentless quest for more megapixels ever end? It seems as if Olympus are calling it at 12 megapixels. Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, said in an interview at the Photo Marketing Association that 12 megapixles was enough to meet most applications and needs of customers. Cameras for commercial photographers will go up to around 20 megapixels, but mainstream cameras wont go beyond 12. The quest for more megapixels does come at a price. Smaller pixels can mean more noisy speckles at the pixel level and also reduce the dynamic range: brighter areas wash out and darker areas can become pure black.

The refinement process in photo editing can just go on and on. Photoshop offers endless options and infinite possibilities, my problem is deciding when to stop. Below is a before and after example of a photo taken last weekend of my daughter. The after example has been developed by using 9 adjustment layers, during this process I was tempted to apply an additional 4-5 other layers to further enhance or perhaps spoil the end result.  Half of the existing layers applied make subtle changes to certain areas of the image. How many more subtle changes can I make or do I want to make?

The solution is to walk away for a day or two and come back to the canvas with a fresh set of eyes and then make the final call, will I need to create more layers or remove some? - Will I be happy with the end result? Maybe or maybe not. Art can be a painful process.

As young children we all had our building blocks and enjoyed the tactile interaction with the objects. Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab have created a set of smart blocks they call Siftables. "I wanted to build a new human-computer interface that would take advantage of our abilities to grasp objects, move them around and understand the spatial relationships between them," David Merrill, one of the inventors, said. Each Siftable is 5 cm square and has an LCD screen, battery, memory, a motion detector, Bluetooth, and infrared to detect the presence and orientation of neighbouring siftables. They can be programmed to solve problems independently or linked to a PC. Initially it’s thought they will be used for games but developers are interested in more work and learning applications.

biginterative.com.au a division of CDW intends to develop interactive learning aids for children.

You can now follow the mutterings of Cyberdesign / Big Creative on Twitter.

Visit us at http://www.twitter.com/bigcreative

Hackers attending PWN2OWN at the CanSecWest security conference have blasted all major web browsers from Microsift, Mozilla & Apple with Apples Safari the first browser to be hacked.

The exploit was exposed within seconds of the competition with a top prize of $10,000 opening.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, touted by Steve Ballmer as having "protection that no other browser can match", also fell on day one. HA!

Mozilla's Firefox was also broken with a zero-day flaw.

The only browser to come out of day one completely unscathed was Google Chrome. Go Google!

PWN2Own Rules

Getting a product name right can make a huge difference and, for something like Ipods change the way the world speaks. Some names have great historical context, some are cobbled together and some simply happen. For example TiVo came about by a merger of TV and the engineering acronym I/O which stands for ‘input/output’.

The reason Bluetooth sounds nothing like what it does is centuries old. In the 10th century a Danish king united the various fiefdoms in Scandinavia under one flag. His name was Harald Blatand which translates into English as Bluetooth. The developers wanted to communicate how their product united many different forms of technology and a 10th century Danish king was, apparently, the obvious answer.

The Blackberry was originally called Strawberry in during development because the keys looked liked pips on strawberry. Someone thought straw sounded a bit old and slow so they picked another fruit as a temporary name - which ended up becoming permanent. It was just pure chance that their biggest competitor ended up being another fruit.

We’re great believers in pushing the boundaries of marketing. This promotion in a Japanese ski resort does absolutely that. Marketers have recreated the top of steep ski jump with some serious wraparound graphics. As you sit there you can experience a professional jump skiers view. Whether it encourages or puts off the users on-seat performance has not been established.

The big question is, of course, what is it actually promoting? The answer is to be found on the toilet paper holder: “Seriously kick-ass intensely sweet for the real coffee super zinging unstoppable Max! Taste-explosion!”

Cyberdesign works have created numerous wall murals for Exhibitions and Trade shows, Call one of Graphic Designers now for an obligation free quote.

In 1946 the Type Directors Club was created to promote excellence in typography and has featured some of the greatest names in type design. Each year they hold a type competition. The 2009 competition was judged in New York during January. Of the 160 entries, 18 winners have now been announced. Here’s a glimpse of some of the winners. For a full list and more extensives examples of type visit  www.tdc.org/ - And the winner is...

A group of anti-filtering activists are trying to test the Australian Communications and Media Authority's (ACMA) ability to censor the Internet.

Recently the ACMA added an anti-abortion site to its blacklist (in existence since 2000) that contained images of aborted foetuses. Under the authority's guidelines, a page that links to prohibited content is also considered prohibited.

To test boundaries of this legal minefield the activists posted a link to the "prohibited" content on the broadband user group website Whirlpool.net.au.

Whirpool's host Bulletproof Networks was then served with a "Link Deletion Notice" and threatened with an $11,000 fine if the link was not removed within 24 hours.

In a further test of the ACMA's resolve and potential hypocrisy, the Activists have placed the offending on the ACMA's own Wikipedia entry under the title of Internet Censorship and Criticism.

"It can't issue a removal order to Whirlpool for linking to an anti-abortion site, but not take equivalent action against Wikipedia," the activist told iTnews.

"If ACMA blacklists their own Wikipedia page, well that says it all doesn't it? If they don't, that is a very, very strong reason to call them hypocrites for making vastly different responses to two sites linking to the very same material."