If it was up to us, all the best design in the world would be posted within the Parfois Portfolio… But… its not up to us. Stumbling the web we often bump into things worth sharing. The world wide web is so full off great things that will never end up in our portfolio, but which we want the world to see. For this we created our blog. At this moment there 4 of us blogging on a regular basis.Work, studies and social life makes that there are weeks with a lot of posts, and weeks without. But we’ll do our best in bringing you the nicest shit on a acceptable basis.
‘From Art to Z, Parfois blogs it all’
cas
As a small child, I was thrown in the graphical world with a mother that had studied graphical design, and a father that had studied photography. At the age of 6 I was already drawing in Kid Pix on my Mac Plus, and a few years later, I made my diary in QuarkXPress.
After my high school, I decided to study Computer Sciences. I loved the programming and the depth of the studies, but I felt it lacked the creativity. So I stopped Computer Sciences after only one year, and went to the Artevelde College to study graphical en digital media where I found the ideal combination between creativity and computer sciences. Today I'm still studying and I'm trying to find as much work as possible, to get all the experience in the graphical industry that I need. I've always hoped to do what I'm doing now: being creative and using my ideas and creativity for other purposes than only art. Where ever you look, you'll see the importance of creative design, and it's a dream come true to learn about, work with and see the graphic design of today, and try to find the next big thing for tomorrow.
Steelcase teamed up with the critically acclaimed company IDEO to design a new chair called the Node Chair. IDEO is known for it qualitatif redesign of almost anything. They started in Palo Alto (California, US) in 1991. Today they are a global company with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich and Shanghai. They are pure problem solvers, and were one of the first to include collaborative brainstorm sessions, prototypes, research and storytelling into their workflows. All under the watching eye of Tim Brown. Steelcase on the other hand, is known for its well designed office furniture. Always very colorful, efficient and handy. Their cooperation with Steelcase thus didn’t came as a surprise.
The chair is aimed at students. It can rotate 360º, making it adaptable to any class set up, wether it is a circle, lines or small groups. The small desk attached to the chair, works well for both left and right handed people. It is large enough to hold books and notes, or your laptop. The whole bottom area can be used to store your bag, which is probably the most convenient solution of them all.
One of the things I always keep in mind when I decorate my room, is the screensaver and wallpaper of my Mac. I have a big screen + the screen of my Macbook that have a significant place on my desk. You can’t ignore it when you look at my room, let alone my desk. And instead of disgracefully looking at it like it’s a piece of junk, I find it the most interesting piece of furniture I have. Why? Cause I can change it anytime I want in whatever I want. It could give my room a complete new vibe or a new feeling by just changing the screensaver or the wallpaper.
A few weeks ago, I came across this piece of furniture, it’s a wall concept called ‘Change it!’, developed by Amirkhan Abdurakhmanov. The wall is build out of small squares the have can switch into 3 different colors. Look at it as if it were pixels. This piece of furniture does exactly the same as my screensaver and wallpaper, only on a much bigger scale. Imagine all the fun things you can do with this wall: goodmorning-messages, ‘don’t forget’ notifications, even a twitter feed during a party, or just awesome art from eBoy. You name it, possibilities are endless.
Remember the good old days when you could just write your poems, diary or letters without being disturbed by numerous notifications of unread tweets, feeds and mail? Do you remember when you could just take your paper and pencil and go sit outside, inspiring yourself by the sound and view of nature? Well those days have long been gone. We can’t think of writing without a computer anymore. Even worse, the first things that comes to mind when we want to work outside is “Do we have an extension power cord that reaches that far?”. Some people still like the old school way of writing, not disturbed by alerts or notifications, enjoying the beauty of your surroundings. The guys behind Ommwriter took this even further. They tried to take the peace and quietness of that atmosphere and bring it to the digital age by making an intuitive and relaxing editor. OmmWriter let’s you concentrate on your writing. Choose an appropriate background-sound, wallpaper and text-format, and of you go. The application fills your entire screen, so no popups nor alerts will disturb you. And when you’re done, you save your file in the most usable format ever: txt. So wether you’re a blogger, journalist, copywriter, poet or screenwriter, try it out. Perhaps you feel a little less “digital” as you want to.
We all know the New York Times has been one of the first when it comes to interactive news reporting. They always try to bring news to the user in a much more thorough and profounder way using experiences that new technologies today can offer. They were one of the first to bring their newspaper via a digital format to the user. They blew everybody’s mind when they introduced their Times Reader not so long ago. And while building all this awesome products, their newsposts were swarming with infographics, games and interactive user experiences. The NYT found the time to gather all their interactive work in their Innovation Portfolio.
The answer to the question what will happen with us in the coming ten years, is something we’d all like to hear. But not many succeed in bringing the right answer. Unless loads of research and a great and motivated team is behind the project, the future trends won’t be that accurate and acceptable. Making predictions is not a game, as they would say. Yet, Jane McGonigal, reasearcher at IFTF launched Superstruct, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that outlined the world of the future, thanks to the ideas and the collaboration of hundreds of users. If I had known, I would have joined!
Chad Hage is a graphic designer based in¬†Minneapolis. A few days ago, he published his¬†Nonsensical Infographics serie. A set of 8 inforgraphics based on… no data. Still the use of colors and the way of displaying the imagined data is very well done.
Hobnox is innovative community that brings high quality entertainment to the user via new media. They put the designers first, and combines them with experts on several different technologies to create new opportunities for artists, creatives and audiences.
One of there most successful products is the Audio Tool. The application looks a lot like Reason, with the difference that this is free, all in the cloud, and the only thing you need is a Flash. The developers at Hobnox made use of a new feature in Actionscript 3.0, which not only enables developers to manipulate existing sounds, but also create new sounds via code. This what happens in the Audio Tool. And apart from writing an exceptional piece of code, Hobnox also took care of the design. All the different devices you can use in the Audio Tool are all designed with great detail, and look almost real. If you’re a music lover, be sure to check it out and play around with it, cause it’s just fabulous!
Just a few days ago¬†James Grant brought STOC into the world. A real time infograph that visualizes the data from the S&P 500 index on the market. This index indicates the stocks of largely held companies that do not trade on either¬†of the two largest American stock market companies. But enough about the financial side, the cool thing is that this application is real time. It collects the data of 30 minutes ago (they are working on narrowing down the time-delay), and updates the information every 10 minutes. The application is programmed in Processing, a programming language developed for designers that makes coding easy. Make sure you download this application, it’s definitely worth some time where you’ll realize infographs can deliver a whole new vision on data.
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cas
As a small child, I was thrown in the graphical world with a mother that had studied graphical design, and a father that had studied photography. At the age of 6 I was already drawing in Kid Pix on my Mac Plus, and a few years later, I made my diary in QuarkXPress. After my high school, I decided to study Computer Sciences. I loved the programming and the depth of the studies, but I felt it lacked the creativity. So I stopped Computer Sciences after only one year, and went to the Artevelde College to study graphical en digital media where I found the ideal combination between creativity and computer sciences. Today I'm still studying and I'm trying to find as much work as possible, to get all the experience in the graphical industry that I need. I've always hoped to do what I'm doing now: being creative and using my ideas and creativity for other purposes than only art. Where ever you look, you'll see the importance of creative design, and it's a dream come true to learn about, work with and see the graphic design of today, and try to find the next big thing for tomorrow.
