Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
In sharp contrast to our incapacity to perform truly scientific tests in ‘normal’ economic settings, Valve’s digital economies are a marvelous test-bed for meaningful experimentation. Not only do we have a full-information set (making sampling superfluous) but, more importantly, we can change the economy’s underlying values, rules and settings, and then sit back to observe how the community responds, how relative prices change, the new behavioural patterns that evolve. An economist’s paradise indeed…
Academic economist and expert on Greece’s recent collapse, Yanis Varoufakis joins Valve as their economist-in-residence to study and calibrate their digital markets. Valve’s new economics blog should be fascinating in an extremely nerdy kind of way.
Only 30 years ago people did not make things. They would go to art galleries, buy records, read books by famous authors, and watch Hollywood movies all created by professional artists. Fast forward to the last decade—especially the last few years—and everything we know about consuming and creating has unraveled. The makers dramatically changing industries and the world forever.
Today everyone makes things. Not only has the digital age allowed people to become curators of culture, it has removed all the barriers for anyone to create. Everyone is a photographer, writer, designer, musician, film maker. Despite a recession there has never in history been a better time to create and find success as an artist.
The new documentary PressPausePlay explores the concept of hope, fear and digital culture in today’s society.
In the clip above author Seth Godin talks about his experience as an author and his decision to release his book Unleashing the Idea Virus online for free without his publisher. Since the free ebook was released online it has been downloaded over five million times and lead to a hardcover version that topped Amazon’s best seller charts.
I made more money from the book that I gave away than the one I had sold. The lesson is… this changes everything. The industry is dead.
- Seth Godin
Personally I decided to take a leap of faith in early 2009 leaving the ad agency world behind with the goal of being able to find happiness in creative work that I control, provide for my family, and grow a business that gives back to society and employs other talented people. It took several months of ad agency contracts and client work, but finally in late 2010 I was able to transition from clients to truly being independent. For the first time in my career I feel like I have full creative control over what make or pursue.
Best of all getting to this point didn’t require any luck, special favors or a pile of cash. It was accomplished through seeing an opportunity and acting on it with a bit of hard work. I strongly believe that there is no reason why anyone else couldn’t do the same in this amazing time we live in.
With all of this opportunity to create and get paid for it, how are you going to take advantage of the moment?
A few weeks ago at Tumblr’s SXSW party I meet Andrew Zolty and Mattias Gunneras who co-founded BREAKFAST, physical-digital interactive agency. As an agency that hacks and creates physical toys that hook up to the digital world. Everything from a Conan auto-Foursquaring blimp, b-line a batphone for prospecting new clients, an office music democratizer, fresh bread that tweets (while the founders were still at POKE), and now Instaprint.
At the Tumblr party they stuck the device off in a corner and every time someone to an Instagram photo and set the location to The Highball in Austin one of the two Instaprint devices would print out the photo Polaroid-style. The team at BREAKFAST did a brilliant job hacking together the Instagram API, location-based services and a ZINK printer to bring the digital into the real world.
Check out the gallery of all the Instaprint live and past events and dig around BREAKFAST’s website. I’m expecting big things from this relatively new agency.
London based visual artist Quayola transformed traditional Baroque paintings by Velazquez and Tiepolo into digital fabrications using custom software. The process follows the paintings rules of visual composition and colors, and turns the works into shifting geometry. Quayola’s work is currently on display at London’s BFI Gallery.
Found on The Fox Is Black and FastCoDesign
Artist Jenny Odell created a series of digital prints using a collage of cutout imagery from Google Maps. See more of her projects at Jenny’s blog.
Via Kitsune Noir
Take a look under the hood at Firstborn. I’ve been lucky enough to get to know a few of the guys (and girls) at Firstborn over the last few years. They really do have a fantastic team. The quality of work that they’ve been producing lately is beyond amazing.
Make sure you check out all of Firstborn’s work.
I always love seeing how other designers approach their work, and this chance to see how James White, Signalnoise, creates his complex and beautiful artwork is fascinating. I’ll be buying this one later today to dig in.
For those of you who have been around digital for quite some time it might remind you of when Joshua Davis sold his Praystation hard drive. I still have mine sitting around here somewhere.
Reblogged from Cameron Moll
“Online video creators, advertisers and producers have an unhealthy fascination with viral videos, and that obsession is dragging down the entire industry. Why? Because viral videos are, at their core, no better than a fluffernutter white-bread sandwich, delivering little or no value to anyone.”
In a print campaign to show the musical influences behind modern artists Billboard Brazil represented the pixelated likes of Marilyn Manson, Bono, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga made with their influences’ portraits. Agency AlmapBBDO took the campaign beyond print and created video installations that were installed in rock bars in Brazil. Anyone can walk up to the display, select their favorite artists, see a pixelated representation of themselves, and then upload their portrait to Flickr - flickr.com/billboardyourself.
This office is being preserved just as it was found after everyone vanished. We can even see what they were doing when that moment came, filling in time sheets, getting another coffee, playing foosball. They were carrying on as they always had. Ignorant to the great change going on all around them that would soon destroy them all.
And this was it… The consumer to whom agencies had force fed their brand messages for decades stopped being passive. This was the catastrophe.
A short film about what the future of advertising might look like to promote FITC - Design and Technology Events.
No surprises here on digital ad spending, but seeing visually in context with other media types puts things in perspective. My guess is a huge chunk of the money has also shifted away from ad spending all together, and is being replaced by marketing campaigns to connect with real customers (a.k.a. social).
Via Bud Caddell
Fantastic example of how motion, interaction, and editorial content can come together to create digital content. Sure this might take far more time than a standard content layout, but if a publisher can create one to two of these featured mixed in with well designed content this will take off.
Together with co-directors Cory Strassburger and Ming Hsiung, we produced a motion magazine cover and feature spread for Viv Mag - an all digital magazine, which would allow us to create content that will be able to live on the iPad and other tablet devices where digital magazines can live.
Via Josh Spear, Trendhunting (you might want to bookmark this site)
Excellent article by Craig Mod on the future of books in a digital world, content forms, sustainability, and book layout design. Plus, the layout of the article is fantastic!
Take 10-15 minutes to read this article & reblog it. I highly recommend it.
As we’re getting close to closing out the decade of amazing technological advances many of the platforms of the past are reaching their end of their life—especially printed magazines and newspapers. Personally I don’t believe the medium is going anywhere, but the delivery is going to rapidly change over the next few years.
Bonnier R&D imagined a concept of what this new delivery for editorial content will look like. It’s a fascinating conceptual video, and I’m looking forward to the opportunities it will open.
Read more on the Mag+ Prototype and follow the discussion at the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab.
The report highlights five brands that are excelling in an experience driven world:
