SamKnows

SamKnows

I ‘ve been busy rebranding, redesigning and Cookie-ifying all of SamKnows digital products this year. First to get relaunched is the website – www.samknows.com.

If you don’t know anything about SamKnows and it’s highly likely that you don’t, they can measure your internet, they measure lots of peoples internet, they are considered the best measurers of the internet in the world! Governments, regulators and ISPs all over the world use them to conduct national studies on internet performance. They have big plans, plans to help you get better internet, understand your internet performance more, make the complexity and mystery about why your internet is sometimes good, sometimes bad and thing of the past, they want to build a self healing internet so you don’t ever have to worry about bad internet again. We’re not there yet… but you can sign up for a free Whitebox and start monitoring your internet right now, new features will be hot off the production line.

Big up to Callum for building it, all the .svg animations on the homepage required some mad maths skills. Oh there’s a couple of hidden Easter eggs on the homepage, see if you can find them :)

The little boy / girl who lost their name

lostmyname2

Some friends of mine have been busy making a Kids book, The Little Boy / Girl Who Lost Their Name is personalised print on demand storybook based on your child’s name. I gave them a little bit of help on the recent site update, now you can preview your custom book before you buy. Just head over, add a name, select whether it’s for a boy or girl and flick through your book!

Christmas Desktop

It’s been many-a-month since I last posted a desktop, so just in time for Christmas I’ve drawn this reindeer to bring your screen some extra festive feeling :) It’s actually re-purposed from the site I’m currently working on, hopefully should launch in the new year, will be good to get some fresh work up on the internets after my long sabbatical.

Download the dimensions that suits you: 2560×1440, 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800.

For those interested in such things, the Phyllotactic Spiral used in the background was created with a Scriptographer script, their Illustrator plugin is my new favourite thing. And their Paper.js HTML 5 vector graphics scripting examples are blowing my mind.

Olympic mascots become self-ware and go on a killing spree around London!

Wenlock - Olympic mascot

Ha ha, only kidding they do look like they were sent back from the future by Skynet though ;)

So finally the London 2012 Olympic Mascots by have been revealed. As you would expect from the 2012 committee, they are not really what we expected! Far from cute & cuddly they are cold & hard, more like a Henry Moore sculpture than a kids toy.

Designed by London agency iris, I read that they only cost “a few thousand pounds”, I think they probably cost a bit more than that! Probably just trying to play it down after the £400,000 logo fiasco.

Mandeville - Olympic mascot

I feel for it’s designer though, whatever you create you’re going to get people ripping the shit out of it (myself included, sorry..) It’s an impossible brief, design by committee jobs always are.. I actually like it quite a lot, everything from the neck down looks awesome, great proportions, clean lines, sweet as in my book. Problem is though, why oh why that eye Olympic Committee?

You can tell by the descriptions on iris’ design boards, that the eye was supposed to be a camera lens, but at some point they decided to stick a cartoon eye on there which looks totally at odds to the rest of the angular design. Pixar have already shown with characters like WALL•E, or even their original anglepoise lamp short, that with the limitations of something ‘less human’, you can get a lot more unique character out of it. Feels like it was almost good, but they fucked it up at the last hurdle..

I actually took part in the original pitch too!

My olympic mascot pitch

Only fair to put my own work up for comparison/criticism. My idea was unsurprisingly the sock monster route. Rather than selling preformed shiny toys to the kiddies, I wanted to make ‘kits’ which were essentially a pair of long sport socks with instructions of how to make your own mascot from scratch! Thought it would be nice thing to do in school as a crafty lesson, give them chance to be creative and add a bit personal flair to their own mascot. The agency I was working for poo poo’d it because it wasn’t ‘commercially viable’, said the committee would never go for it as they needed to pay for the Olympics through some mass-produced piece of Chinese plastic..

Me 4 You, Threadless submission

Me 4 You, Threadless T-Shirt submission, by Cookie

It’s been a while since I’ve done any bloggin I know.. My excuse? Well I’m in Amsterdam and computerless in the evenings, I need to get a laptop but don’t want to buy one until they bring out the new MacBooks..

Anyhow, I haven’t been completely idle, I’ve also been working on a wedding invite for my brother who is getting married later this year. Which among other things led to this new t-shirt submission for Threadless, if you’d like them to print it, please head over and vote » Sadly it didn’t make the grade, voting has ended early..