Noisy Decent Graphics

Noticings

Seeing as none of you liked the Newspaper Club logo I'd like to show one you will like.

 

Noticings is a casual Flickr game built by RIG's very own Tom Taylor and BERG's Tom Armitage. It's a game about learning to look at the world around you. You take a picture, upload it to Flickr, tag it with noticings, geotag it and you're in.

 

Noticings' rules are always in flux, but for example you get 10 points for noticing something and 70 for noticing something every day for a week. There are other short lived rules, so one week you may get x2 for noticing something that is lost or something that is red.

There's a score table, but it's weekly, so new players can very easily get to the top of the league.

 

Anyway. Seeing as it's a game on Flickr I thought the logo ought to be pink and blue. And seeing as Flickr is more blue than pink i thought we'd flip that. And then crucially the 'o' in the name gave me the chance to put a little eye in there which becomes the Noticings icon.

 

Seeing as Noticings is a game played on your mobile phone and on the web this is more important than the logo. It's certainly used more. Here's the Twitter stream,

 

the App Store,

  

 

the App icon,

 

the laptop stickers,

 
the favicon (etc, etc)

 

and in possibly the best moment of my career so far the Flickr machine tag.

 
Yes! Something I designed made it into the official Flickr code!

Look how small that Flickr machine tag icon is. Teeny tiny. And yet the symbol still works as a logo and as a cheeky little eye. I'm pretty pleased with that.

You can play noticings here, you can follow them on Twitter here and you can buy the app here. It's worth getting the app just for the ability to upload photos with the correct geo tag from your iPhone.

Smokescreen in the Metro

I wrote a little thing for the Metro about Smokescreen, commissioned by C4 Education and made by Six to Start. Read the article here.

Pentagram

I went to Pentagram this morning. What a lovely office / studio / building they have. And so nice that they take the small stuff seriously, like archiving and lunch for everyone.

And like Matt said a while ago, KPI: Having a street sign.

Although...

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The Second World War

I don't often put my own work on here but this one is a bit special.

It's an ad to promote The Guardian's seven part series on The Second World War. I did it at w+k a few weeks ago with Rob Burleigh as the copywriter.

There's a TV ad and some digital stuff too, but it looks great as a big piece of print.

Newspaper Club

A few weeks ago you may have noticed this gorgeous thing whistling around my Flickr pages.

It's a newspaper we designed and printed for the BBC called 8.

It's a collection of essays which came out of 8 studies commissioned as part of the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. The paper contains articles by Bill Thompson, Katherine Corrick and Pat Kane among others. Brendan from the BBC talks more about the project here.

I'm particularly fond of the cover. Looked great on the press.

Back in January when made TOFHWOTI we said it was a product of the future. The success of that project made us investigate that a bit more. We spoke to 4iP, Channel 4's investment fund, who agreed to fund a separate business called Newspaper Club.

Newspaper Club will have two components. It's main purpose is to allow anyone to curate, create and then collect (by that I mean print, but that doesn't alliterate) newspapers. It might be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a yearly “best of” printed product for obsessive bloggers. You'll be able to organise this stuff online and then print as little as a few to as many as a few thousand.

Like TOFHWOTI but made by you.

Those newspapers will be based on template designs and the user will have limited design choices. Obviously. Which is why I've been thinking about this stuff.

But we realise that some people may want a bespoke option to create something extra special, like 8 for the BBC. A document created from scratch. We're currently working on another one for Penguin which I'll tell you about soon.

Newspaper Club is a major project, lots of people already seem excited by it and there is a lot more I want to tell you. Stuff about how we're working as a team, how we're building the Newspaper Club brand, 4iP, designing templates and so on. But I shall save that for another day.

We launch in September, but in the meantime you can follow our adventures on the blog over here. According to Tech Crunch it's 'hilariously frank'. You can sign up for a beta invite here, you can read our insightful Twitter updates and if you'd like a bespoke newspaper for your corporation you should give me a call or drop me a line - ben@riglondon.com.

More to follow.