Technology is NOT the master!

Interactive design is a medly of electronic displays, kiosks, animations and videos, video games, cell phone/device interfaces and websites. It surrounds our everyday lives and we come into contact with it throughout our day in our world today!

It is essentially the meshing of graphic design/animation/interactivity created on the computer, with appreciation of technical constraints and an understanding of ALL THE POSSIBILITIES of technology .
Technology is always the servant, never the master!

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It's unbranded—add a logo..now it's "branded"

I was recently challenged to defend my reasoning of why a proprietary unbranded interactive program was designed "unbranded". Further questions delved into what it would take to "brand" a interactive program such as this. This led me to a discussion of branding in general...

A brand is the accumulation of perceptions in the mind of a consumer. Sometimes people say brand, when they really mean : logo, graphic design, packaging or ad campaigns....these are just the things that factor into the "accumulation of perceptions" that becomes the brand.

The brand is built through the total experience it offers, and in this case there is a hard line between a branded and unbranded project. Since effective branding is about the experience and memorable value derived from that particular brand—not just instant information, and the nature of this particular program was "information" , and the educational derivitive of that information, supported by peer perception, key opinion leaders and clinical evidence.

Simply injecting an "accumulation of perceptions" into an interactive program that is based on evidence, would seemingly conflict with, or possibly negate—such a source of trusted information—hence possibly working against that brand. On the other hand if the expectation of such a program is that the information is being derived from the brand, encompassing all the perceptions that that particular brand stands for...whell, then creating it in a "branded" fashion would undoubtebly aid the objective of the program, and it's approach in design and development should be optimized to support a "branded" strategy.

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Untraditional Media Vehicles—become Traditional

Source : New York Magazine (JULY 2007)

Is there a threat to the traditional agency model, with a stable of "creatives" trained to provide print, radio, television ads to a passive audience?
If you're a big marketer, why would you hire an enormous staff at great expense when you could have somebody like those guys who made the funny JibJab video about Kerry and Bush, the one that everyone saw and loved, for relative pennies?

Here's a story of a really effective, very untraditional campaign by Amalgamated and Deep Focus, another small agency, on their highest-profile campaign to date for Court TV's Parco, PI.

It started last summer with a billboard on Houston Street, one that read in block letters:

Hi Steven,
Do I have your attention now?
I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful, poorly-endowed slimeball.
Every thing's caught on tape.

Your (soon-to-be-ex) Wife, Emily.

P.S. : I paid for this billboard from OUR joint bank account.

Many New Yorkers and whoever else cared to check soon stumbled on a blog by "That Girl Emily," which gathered a million hits in a few days. At Deep Focus, a copywriter spent weeks playing Emily, logging entries and answering emails. She crafted a love story that started months before the billboard went up and ended with "14 Days of Wrath", an elaborately staged retribution that included a BMW spray-painted "I Hope It Was Worth It" getting towed around New York City, and an actress tossing Steven's belongings out of an SUV near Bryant Park. The events were filmed and slipped into YouTube and posted under titles like "Angry Wife Rampage!" That one gathered 284,275 views.

Source : New York Magazine (JULY 2007)

1080i, 720p...what is this ?

The older TV sets, that we grew up watching were called stadard definition—480 lines of picture stacked on top of one another to make up the picture. Pretty sore quality campared with today's standards. The TV refreshed itself 30 times per second (30 FPS, frames per second), it lacked the horsepower to process the full image on each scan. So it just drew every other line, and updated the remaining lines on the next refresh. The images flitted so fast that your brain stihed the two sets of lines together. It is called interlacing, and the screens display properties would be called 480i, i for interlaced.

HD boosts 720 lines or more that can update every line in every refresh pass, progressive scan. The latest TVs can display 1080p. 1080p sources right now are limited to blue-ray and HD DVD players, as well as a few video games..and cable services top out at either 720p or 1080i.

When the action speeds up, things get a bit trickier, TVs use complex algorithims to account for faster moving objects that change positions between frames, guessing which part of the image has changed. A wrong guess leads to visual artifacts and ghosting.

Those are the basics, of HD for consumers out there right now.