Let me start out by disclaiming that I had never designed anything for mobile. Ever. The closest that I had come to mobile was doing web interface design for the mobile start up Zingku a few years ago, back in the SMS days… before any graphical user interface was realistic for mobile devices.

So I had to sell myself to this potential client as honestly as possible. I know user experience design, I know graphical user interface design, and of course, I have used a mobile device plenty. Maybe it was my charm, more likely it was my ‘lower-than-normal-I’m-learning-this-as-we-go’ price quote, but they decided to let me take a crack at it.

Why use a Mobile Platform

One of the biggest issues surrounding mobile web design is that every device renders things very differently. We have all found ourselves pulling out hair trying to get a website to look right in IE6, and there simply is not enough hair on the human body to sustain the process of optimizing across the thousands of mobile devices that are out there.

A mobile platform like NetBiscuits does all of that work for you. You build the application in their development environment, and they push it out optimized for about 5000 devices. Pretty sweet.

There is a bit of a learning curve involved in getting up to speed in their proprietary markup language, BiscuitML, but its pretty much just a mix between XHTML and XML. After a few hours of poking through the documentation and looking at examples, I had a solid idea of what we were dealing with.

Understanding Limitations

While auto-optimizing for 5000+ plus devices is great, it comes at the cost of stooping to the lowest common denominator of what most mobile browsers are capable of. Images need to be used sparingly. All of my CSS knowledge would be thrown out the window in exchange for the very limited set of supported inline styles. Two column layouts were going to be happening with tables. I was entering a world of development that my older web-developing peers had spun tales of.

The limitations, however, turned out to be a mixed blessing. They dictated a lot of good practice for mobile design. Layouts must be simple. Content is king. Navigation systems have to work with a device’s D-Pad. This was not going to be a sexy iPhone or Blackberry application, but it was going work for anyone with a mobile browser, and it was going to be in-brand and as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Designing and Developing

Since Going.com had an existing identity, my design processes consisted mostly of translating the aesthetic of their website into a very simplified one column layout, and only providing the information and features that were absolutely necessary. Two huge design considerations when dealing with mobile devices are your limited screen real estate and limited realistic navigation functionality. This ultimately broke down into only about three page layouts, depending on if we were dealing with the welcome page, a page of content, or a list of items.

NetBiscuits has a pretty defined page structure, and limited page content types, which again enforces pretty solid mobile design practice, but also limits creativity. In the end, with the exception of a few graphical interface elements and a color scheme, all Netbiscuits applications are going to look and behave pretty similarly.

One of the nice aspects of NetBiscuits is that standard page elements are built into the markup, such as headers, footers, some pre-built menu/navigation systems, and a handful of content types such as ‘Article’ (Image with text wrapped around it), and ‘Adbanner.’ These can be helpful in speeding up the development process and guiding what is realistic in the design process.

Pros and Cons of Mobile Frameworks

As more and more people get smart phones, and devices with better browsers, this “lowest common denominator” effect of auto-optimizing for all devices is going to become more of a problem. Users with iPhones and Blackberrys are now used to richer mobile web experiences. While you might get something looking great on a middle-of-the-road Nokia device, users with more advanced phones will want more than NetBiscuits is able to deliver.

As I write this, it looks as though NetBiscuits has added some additional features for the iPhone, however by the time you start tailoring to a specific device, you negate the reasons for using a mobile framework platform in the first place (and open source frameworks such as IUI provide way better solutions for iPhone web development anyways). This means building real applications for the dominant smart phone markets (Blackberry, iPhone, Android) is still a bit of a necessity, but you could let the NetBiscuits version serve as your ‘catch everything else’ solution.

Another drawback of NetBiscuits is that they host your content (although you can connect to your own database when extending existing application). This means your looking at a monthly fee of between $645 and $2,595 depending on the use and scale of your application.

Closing

Ultimately NetBiscuits got the job done, and we were able to very quickly (about three weeks of design and development) push out a mobile version of Going.com that could be effectively used by any user with a mobile browser. The learning curve for BiscuitML was relatively painless with their comprehensive documentation, examples, and sample applications, and while things didn’t look as pretty as they could on the iPhone or Blackberry, everything definitely worked.

I can say that I recommend NetBiscuits as a solid solution for quickly pushing out simple mobile versions of web applications for small to medium-sized businesses.  While these applications can be used on any device, they will not provide a viable solution for the growing demands and expectations of smart phone users.

So the Going.com gig ran through without any major injuries or fatalities. They got their foot in the mobile world, and I learned a few things. With a medium like mobile design and development being so young, and evolving so quickly, our only real option as interaction designers is to dive right in, adapt, see what’s working right now, and try and foresee how things need to change and improve.

Context

One question I continued to dwell on after extensively contemplating the validity of art in digital contexts concerns the idea of how we perceive digital reality relative to how we perceive physical reality. While projects such as Boundary Functions, by Scott Snibbe, provide participants with the ability to reflect upon their perception of physical reality through digital means in a gallery setting, other projects such as Drawn, by Zach Lieberman, only allow participants to reflect upon their perception of a digital realty that has been constructed by the artist. This inspired a project idea that for now will be called Digital Translation. Digital Translation would be a critical design installation that aims to reflect upon these notions of “real/physical” versus “real/digital” and question within which our perception of reality lives.

Description

Digital Translation would consist of a video camera that captures a video feed of a viewer, and through custom software, deconstructs the video feed into it’s binary state, or all of the ones and zeros that would describe each frame of the video feed in real time. This binary data of each frame is then projected onto the wall of the gallery in front of the viewer who’s image is being captured.

The viewer is then prompted to put on a custom made helmet, and view the binary data of the video feed of their own image project onto the wall. The helmet has a small video camera attached to the front, which again passes the video feed through custom software, now attempting to reconstruct the binary data that is projected on the wall into the image that is being described by that binary data, and displaying this reconstructed feed on a small screen positioned in front of the viewers eyes inside the helmet.  Looking at anything else in the room while wearing the helmet would provide an “un-altered” video feed of “reality,” while looking at the wall which the binary video feed has been projected onto would reveal the video feed of the user’s self image, as accurately as possible in light of the four stages of translation between the physical and the digital from the viewer, to their personal representation of themselves.

Due to a lack of time and resources at the moment, I am releasing this idea as “open source” if anyone has any interest in attempting to develop it. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Digital Art seems to be at greater risk of becoming a pure demonstration of it’s own medium, as tools and processes become available faster than messages beyond ‘look at these new possibilities’ can be conceived by those with the means to execute them.

Exploring Perception

In the 1970’s, artists such as Robert Irwin began to look at art as a forum for truthfully engaging with our own sense of perception of the world that surrounds us rather than attempting to represent it. Irwin describes this in his book Being and Circumstance as ‘nonobjective art.’ The first key point of Irwin’s theories on nonobjective art is the core idea of change, the most basic rule of our universe, which is responsible for any sort of perception at all. Irwin proposes the irony of calling works of modern, postmodern, or conceptual artists ‘abstract’ when more classical representational art is an abstraction at its very core (the rendering of a human form through any medium is not ‘truth’ despite how accurately it has been rendered, it is still an abstracted representation of reality), while a nonobjective process aims to explore our actual perception of existence. As Irwin explains “The principle contribution of nonobjective art comes in replacing the abstracted figure with the presence of the specific individual observer acting directly in determining all matters of quality in art (and in life?).”

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, spoke extensively of art having the potential to be a lens through which one’s perception of the world could be explored, simply because it forces one to actively reflect on his or her senses (which are strategically hiding their presence from us, according to Merleau-Ponty), and how those senses are constructing the world which is being perceived. Merleau-Ponty describes this quite eloquently in The World of Perception:

“Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.”

Some strong examples of Irwin’s concept of nonobjective art in conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of art as a means for perceiving the world can be seen in the works of Carlos Cruz-Diez, and other artists from the Kinetic Art and Op-Art movements, as well as in the work of Space and Light artists such as James Turrell. Cruz-Diez’s compositions engage the viewer in his or her perception of color and value as forms and hues stay in a state of flux in response to the viewer’s orientation relative to the work, allowing the piece to actually exist between the composition itself, and the viewer who is experiencing it.

Cruz Diez - Physichromie No 21, 1960

Turrell’s Skyspaces provide viewers with the opportunity to explore a shift in perception between the tactile and void, the thing and the nonthing, the positive and the negative as a window through which to view the sky reveals day shifting into night within the context of a precisely lit room.

James Turrell - Skyspace

Exploring this idea of perception is crucial when attempting to evaluate art that has been created through any sort of digital medium, especially when adopting Merleau-Ponty’s perspective of art as a process for understanding and reacting to the world around us.

Arguing that all forms of art need to accomplish this process of allowing one to detach oneself from their senses in order for them to be able to actively explore their perception of existence and reality, would be misguided. However, when looking at the practice of art in the sense of its own evolution, one must acknowledge the significance of art gaining new potential throughout its various eras and isms, regardless of the changes in medium. While representational work is by no means obsolete, the potential for digital works to exploit the (subjectively) profound potential of nonobjective art, or function to the full capacity outlined by Merleau-Ponty is valuable opportunity.

Exploring Perception In The Context Of Digital Art

The work of digital artist Zach Lieberman begins to embody some of the aspects of nonobjective art, as described by Irwin, and fits into the ideas of perceptual awareness and understanding, or acknowledging, cross sensory relationships as a means for comprehending the world around us.  One of Lieberman’s pieces, Drawn, fits into the construct of Irwin’s nonobjective manifesto almost perfectly, until one questions the notion of context.

Drawn consists of a pad of paper stationed beneath a video camera, passing a video feed through custom software and projecting it onto a screen. After a user draws on the pad of paper with an ink brush, he or she can then manipulate the illustration with hand motions as the illustration takes life in real time on a projection above. The movements of the illustrations are accompanied by generative sounds that algorithmically respond to the (metaphorically) implied physical attributes that would accompany that illustration’s appearance and movements if it were to take life in a truly physical form.

Zach Lieberman - Drawn

Like Irwin’s definition of nonobjective art, the core mechanic of Drawn is non-representational, when looking at the piece as the entire process of bringing one’s illustrations to life through motion and sound in real time. Regardless of what a user chooses to draw, the experience that is unique to this interaction is purely perceptual. Also in line with Irwin’s ideas are the concepts of ‘change’ as these strokes of an ink brush evolve from representational, to seemingly tactile, to auditory; and the user dictates the entire process, with no two experiences ever being the same. What becomes difficult is when we ask if this process is really enabling the exploration of one’s perception of actual existence or ‘reality.’ This question could be applied to many manifestations of “digital art.”

While Drawn does allow one to explore a spontaneous and original relationship between the visual, the tactile, and the auditory in a temporal manner, are we really exploring those relationships in the context of actual existence? Here is where the fact that the project exists within a digital medium makes things difficult. One could argue that we are only exploring these relationships within the context of a constructed artificial reality.

Users of Drawn are able to experience a perceptual shift within the context of the world Zach Lieberman has created, a world of ones and zeros, where small illustrations can instantly animate to life and make noises. While there could potentially be a profound moment where a user gets “lost” in the experience of seeing their illustrations come to life, this perceptual shift can only happen while one is accepting (if only temporarily) the process that is taking place on the screen as reality. Regardless, the user knows (even if they don’t know how) that the illustrations are being manipulated on the screen by a computer program, and not actually assuming any sort of physical manifestation, but rather only providing the illusion of such.

In contrast, the previously mentioned works of Turrell and Cruz-Diez allow a viewer to explore these shifts in perception through multi-sensory awareness in the context of the physical world, rather than in a world that has been constructed by the artist (such as the perception of existence that Lieberman has created for his viewers). The shift of perceiving space between the tactile and void, the natural and the artificial, which is the essence of Turrell’s Skyspaces all happens in the physical world. The shift between positive and negative values, and the shift in ones perception of color relative to ones physical relationship to the composition, which is present in Cruz-Diez’s paintings and installations, again all happen in the physical world.

In this sense, the experience of Drawn in relation to our understanding of our perception is grounded within the digital, which of course is it’s own medium. So is this any different than a representational painting? A painting of a chair provides an abstracted representation of the physical attributes of a chair. Drawn provides an abstracted representation of the physical laws of the world that Zach Lieberman has created. The only difference is that we have seen a chair before, so it is not exciting. What justifies this complex new concept that requires months of innovation and thousands of lines of C++? Is it the novelty of it, in that it is something that we have not seen before? It would be difficult to argue something as ‘art’ simply because it is demonstrating the potential of new technologies. Going back to our earlier qualm with Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message,” one could argue that in order for something to be considered art, in both a nonobjective sense, and from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty, it’s message, or goal, needs to transcend it’s medium.

We need to acknowledge that Drawn was not necessarily intended to be nonobjective, or even purely perceptual, so we cannot hold that against the project, whether the intention was entertainment, or education, or anything else. For this analysis, Drawn simply serves as a comprehensive example for asking the question ‘what is digital art?’

We also need to re-examine this idea of “real.” If the argument is that potentially lots of digital works are only providing viewers with a perceptual shift within the context of the digital world in which the pieces exist, we must ask, can the digital world be seen as a less significant realm within which one might hope to shift their perceptual understanding? When looking at ideas such as Singularity, the complexity of this question is compounded. For the sake of this argument, we should look at the difference between a perceptual shift in the ‘real’ world verses a perceptual shift in the digital world.

An argument against applying equal significance to both is that the laws, sensory ability, and our general sense of perception within the digital world is in a constant state of development and flux, often as defined by these projects that are exploring the possibilities of innovative digital technologies. This can clearly be seen in a project such as Drawn, where Lieberman mimics through code what a profound, if not magical shift in perception of the real world might look like (ink illustrations animating to life). In contrast, creating work with the potential of changing one’s perception of the physical world extends beyond just conceiving “what if…” because a new set of physical rules cannot be constructed by the artist, if any rules even exist in the first place. Irwin points out in his writings that ‘we used to think that Euclidian geometry could describe our physical world, but we now know that Euclidian geometry can only describe the world of Euclidian geometry.’ Since the rules and paradigms of the digital world are constantly changing and being redefined by the humans that are creating and using them, our perception of that world is not really changing, but rather just constantly being created.

We are left with the challenge of finding digital works that actually do provide the potential to effect our perception of the real world.  The art installation Boundary Functions by interactive media artist Scott Snibbe arguably fulfills our criteria for a nonobjective piece created within a digital context. Boundary Functions consists of a dynamic set of lines that are projected onto the floor of a gallery space. As multiple spectators begin to occupy the room, a set of lines form at equidistance between all of the spectators within the gallery space, amplifying the participants’ concepts of personal space in relation to the people around them.

Scott Snibbe - Boundry Functions

Here we can see the perception of space being potentially changed for each participant as they engage with the piece.  In returning to Irwin’s definition of nonobjective art, Boundary Functions represents an experiential process based around the universal constant of change that is non representational, allows each user to engage with it directly, and constructs a paradigm through which one could develop their perception of the physical world, which in this case is the understanding that the concept of personal space only exists in relation to other people. Unlike Drawn, Boundary Functions provides an additional level of translation, bringing the capacity for a changed sense of perception back into the physical world.

As art and technology continue to evolve together, it will be interesting to see how artists of the twenty first century begin to mature and respond to rapidly expanding technological possibilities. Hopefully novelty and demonstration will cease to be fully encompassing criteria for fine art created with digital tools, and we can look forward to nonobjective and conceptual works that really start to exploit the potential and justify the use of the ever-growing set of new tools at our disposal.

If anyone actually reads this, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Here are some inspiring screen printed posters done by a couple of contemporary print studios.

Spike Press

Spike Press is the brain child of designer, illustrator and  screen printer John Solimine. This musician-gone-gig-poster-artist has a playful illustration style, exciting and powerful color pallets, and always a fantastic concept behind his prints.

Aesthetic Apparatus

Based out of Minneapolis, Aesthetic Apparatus is made up of design and print team Dan Ibarra and Michael Byzewski. What started as joint love of both music and printing blossemed into a full fledge studio, printing up limited edition runs of brilliantly designed prints, ranging from fine art to gig posters.

The Brief

The band I was going to be designing a concert poster for was the Bristol England based trip-hop group Portishead. The final poster was to be 18” by 24” and include extensive information about the show’s venue, barbes, in Brooklyn NY. The “client” (actually my professor and the rest of my class in this situation) wanted to explore a couple different concept directions that we could then pair down to a final design that felt the strongest, refine that a bit, and get it ready for print.

Listening to the Music

Since I was dealing with a music group in this situation, giving Portishead a fully engaged listen was the logical first step. I put the album on, closed my eyes, and let the music paint as clear of an image in my head as it could. If you are unfamiliar with Portishead’s music, you can check out the video bellow to get a sense.

The first thing I felt while listening was an extremely strong sense of atmosphere with the minimal and slightly filtered drums and bass, layered with unobtrusive but textured guitar and organ lines, a DJ periodically noodling on the turntables, and plenty of space left in the mix for vocalist Beth Gibbons’ sexy, sultry and angst-filled soaring vocals.

The periodic half-step progressions and predominantly minor key compositions layered with single note guitar and organ lines that explored the sonic space like wisps of smoke painted very dark and mysterious scenes in my mind, as if I had stumbled into a film noir crime drama from the late 1940s.

Research

Like all design projects, the first step after internalizing what I will be working on is doing some research. The two visuals that initially stood out in my mind from listening to the music was the wispy free form quality of smoke, and the film noir aesthetic that describes lots of Hollywood crime dramas from the 1940s and 50s.

I found a few images of smoke that resonated with me, and identified what specifically was appealing… namely the organic paths that were created (no right angles or grids) which subscribed to some sort of a loose system, but take on a life of their own… and always a convoluted sense of flow from point A to point B… again like a mysterious crime drama.

This lead me into further exploring this film noir aesthetic that I had loose images of in my head. I found several frames from these films from the late 1940s, so I could better identify the attributes that defined this aesthetic.

I absolutely love the reoccurring motifs of this style, and finding these images reaffirmed my association between this aesthetic and Portishead’s music. Every frame was comprised of very simple but well thought out compositions with very high contrast, often filled with smoke, silhouettes, shadows, and some sort of sexual tension.

Forming a Concept

By now a concept was starting to form. This poster needed to embody some sort of suggested narrative, as if the viewer has just stumbled into some mysterious scene that they don’t fully understand, but they are intrigued, and want to discover more.

Pulling from the film noir aesthetic, I knew I would be working with simple high contrast graphical forms. The poster had to suggest some sort of narrative, be a little dark, mysterious, sexy, sultry, and the composition needed to graphically twist the users head into a state of tension, just waiting to be released… much like Portishead’s music.

While most of my research had been dealing with purely black and white imagery, which was beautifully stark and to the point, this is 2008, and the poster would undoubtedly be competing for viewers’ attention against the cacophony of other ads that consume every available surface of New York City. My solution was to follow in the footsteps of Graphic Novel artist Frank Miller (and Saul Bass before him), who often introduces one bright color into otherwise graphic black and white compositions, keeping things stark, yet eye catching.

I started realizing my ideas by roughly sketching out a few compositions with pencil and paper, being careful that each design embodied the criteria that I had established through my research. I came up with four concepts that I would discuss with the client before moving forward.

The client was most intrigued by the silhouette concept, the hand holding the cigarette, and the open door, and I agreed that the lamppost concept lacked this sexy/sultry quality that we were looking for, and was not as intrinsically mysterious as the other concepts. So I began to refine the three chosen directions, again remembering to keep things graphical, stark, high contrast, and limit my pallet to graysacle plus one other color. I brought the three concepts back to client in a more evolved state.

Concept 1: I went for a bit of a lo-fi quality on this one as a node to the subtle tape noises and slight distortion filters that Portishead often uses in their music. The band’s name was moved out from silhouette so that it could quickly and easily be identified. The one spot of red was added to the lower left to make the composition pop, and balance out the band’s name. The entire form of the woman was shifted slightly left of the center of the composition and all of the type was set at slightly canted angles, both in an attempt to add more tension to the whole design, and follow the rule-breaking and organic characteristics of smoke that first inspired me. I opted for a slightly swooshy handwritten typeface as both a response to some of the characteristics of smoke that I reflected on earlier, as well as providing a “hand written note” quality that hopefully added more mystery to the design

Concept 2: For this one, I took a more simple Saul Bass style approach. I again played with a slightly offset placement of elements to add tension to the design. If this design was to be pushed forward, I would have explored sans-serif typefaces from 1940s and cut them by hand as a nod to the era of film that was inspiring the aesthetic, and playing with the idea of blending the old with new, which is very present in Portishead’s music as they put a modern twist on classic jazz and blues progressions.

Concept 3: This concept ended up taking a slight departure from the initial sketch because working the copy into the smoke was resulting in legibility issues with too many forms competing with each other. I added some lips trying to keep things sexy, however at this stage in this concepts development, the mystery was there, but it felt more sleazy than sexy or sultry. Also with so much going, we were starting to move away form the stark simplicity that made the film noir aesthetic so successful.

Final Refinements

The client ultimately choose the silhouette concept as the favored direction, and I also felt that it embodied pretty much everything hat we had set out to achieve. It suggested some sort of a narrative, it was stark, mysterious, eye catching, and legible. My issue with the design was the lack of the sexy and sultry quality that is very present in Portishead’s music. The silhouette felt too matronly… more like a 1940s housewife than a sexy woman walking through the shadows of a smoky lounge.

As a final step, I re-illustrated the silhouette in response to my hope for a sexier form. Rather than staying with the red dot, which worked graphically but felt a little arbitrary, I opted for the lips from one of the earlier concepts. The new profile required moving the red lips to the right side of the composition to balance everything out correctly, but breaking the edge of the composition held that level of tension that I was after.

For the final details, I went through altered repeated letters in the handwriting font to make it feel more like handwriting, and less like a font. Check out the final design:

Andrew Mahon

Interaction designer Andrew Mahon recently did an algorithmic music visualization for a song by the Apex Twin. He built this with the C++ library Open Frameworks and Open GL, mostly as an exploration in algorithmic animation, but the results are very engaging. This piece is the culmination of a whole series of algorithmic animations that he has been experimenting with, which can all be seen on his Vimeo page. You can also follow Andrew on his Tumblr blog for a constant stream of musings, ideas, and inspiring imagery and videos.

Lucas Sharp

The multi-disciplined Lucas Sharp has been working up a storm with a couple of new Typefaces designs over the past few months. His first official typeface debut is the jaw-droppingly intricate blackletter display set titled Black Slash. Throwing many blackletter conventions out the window, Black Slash feels fresh and unique, elegant yet brutal… finally a new blackletter that actually feels new. Body text set with some high leading is easily legible, while the lavishly serifed caps let titles jump off the page and punch the viewer in the throat in display situations.

Sharp is still refining all of the ligatures and numbers, so we can expect a limited sample release in a few months, and then a full OpenType release available for licensing sometime after that. Something to nibble on in the meantime is an alternate caps set that he has already started working on to even further spread the possibilities for this already diverse typeface.

Sharp also recently pumped out another display face aptly titled “Your Designer Handbag Sucks.” YDHS was inspired by cookies taking (or loosing?) form as they bake, and works fantastically in knocked out situations, where lighter colors can add to it’s billowy feel. YDHS is fun, friendly and unique. We can hopefully expect a sample set out soon, and a full OpenType version available some time after that.

More of Lucas Sharp’s graphic design, textile design, typface design and animation work can be seen on his website

Keep checking back for periodic updates on some of the cool stuff happening in the Communication Design and Technology department at Parsons School of Design

As Google Friend Connect goes out of private beta, I thought I would provide some comments on Google’s new attempt to change how people interact on the web. I had a chance to integrate Goggle Friend Connect into my latest project, Billboard For The People, and gain some insight into where this service holds value, and how I think it should evolve in the future.

For those who don’t know already, Google Friend Connect (GFC, for brevity’s sake) is a plug-n-play social networking utility that can easily be integrated into websites, and allow visitors to sign in, “join” your site, spread it amongst friends, provide comments, etc. More can be read about GFC on their website.

Let me start with what is great about GFC. This service could not be more simple to integrate into an existing website, which can be a crucial feature in many contexts. In the case of Billboard For The People, which is a grassroots effort I developed with Hyperakt Design Group to raise money for a congratulatory billboard for president elect Barack Obama, two main constraints for the project were, of course, time and budget.  We were able to get GFC fully integrated into our site (and assume the sites aesthetic, more or less) within a few hours, and you can’t beat the price of ‘free.’

In the case of Billboard for the People, we instantly had a space where like-minded users could sign-in, provide comments, and potentially invite their Google contacts to join the site as well, and spread the site across various other social networks, such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. While we already had similar ‘spread’ features built into the site more prominently, an influx of over 3,000 visitors joining the site via GFC within two weeks is definitely significant, regardless of some percent of users just joining to check out Google’s new tool.

The difficulty with GFC is that it seems to be living in an odd state between common use cases… Full on designers and developers will most likely be frustrated by the limited ability for customization, or fully and seamlessly integrating the social features that GFC provides into an existing infrastructure. Hopefully we can look forward to some sort of full API that would allow GFC’s robust social networking framework to be exploited to it’s full potential in new and creative ways beyond just message boards.

This leaves GFC as an ideal tool for the amateur web developer/administrator/content manager. Unfortunately, this is where we encounter GFC’s second limitation, which is a disappointing lack of features. As of GFC’s launch into public beta, the only tools available are a message board and a review/rating system. So this is where the question of ‘who is this for?’ comes back up. Any amateur developer who might want to integrate GFC into their existing site potentially already has access to these types of features (comments/reviews) with platforms such as Wordpress, or any other free blogging, forum, or content management system. Until a range of features are available that would allow site visitors to really interact with each other, and promote increased visit durations and visitor loyalty, I can see a lot of room for development in GFC’s value potential.

Regardless, GFC was unquestionably an asset to the Billboard for the People project, so there are definitely situations where the lack of a full API and more features is out-shined by how easy GFC is to implement, and quickly add some basic social features to smaller scale websites.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the launch of my latest project, Billboard for the People: A Public Celebration of Progress. Deroy Peraza, over at Hyperakt Design Group had the brilliant idea of channeling all of this positive energy surrounding the election of Barack Obama into a grassroots effort to congratulate our president elect with a massive billboard in New York City.

The idea is pretty simple…

Step 1: We all donate some money over at BillboardForThePeople.com. If you are feeling inspired and generous, and can toss in some serious coin, fantastic! However, even if it’s just a few dollars, every little bit counts.

Step 2: We tell all of our friends about this initiative, and hopefully raise $25,000 by December 15th… Be sure to Digg it, join on FriendConnect and Facebook, etc, to help spread the word.

Step 3: We install a beautiful congratulatory billboard in Manhattan designed by Deroy Peraza, and the good folks over at Hyperakt, just in time for Obama’s inauguration, and welcome him into the White House with style.

After spending election night cavorting through Harlem with thousands of elated voters all smiling and hugging each other, and for once, all feeling like we are on the same page, I was instantly on board for developing the Billboard for the People website when Hyperakt came to me with the project idea.

Obama ran a campaign completely funded by the people, showing us that we do have the power to act collectively and inspire change in American politics. Let’s continue the tradition with this grassroots effort to congratulate Obama for his historic victory. If we all pitch in, we can totally make this happen, and continue to spread Obama’s message of hope and change.

Visit BillboardForThePeople.com, donate whatever you can, and be sure to tell of your friends about this. If we raise more than enough money to put a billboard up in Manhattan, then we can put more billboards up in other cities as well.

After doing so much design work for Web 2.0 start ups, I made this satirical start up investment pitch video about a year ago, but never really pushed it out. Now with the market in the hole, it seemed appropriate that I offer the tech industry a few ideas… Venture Capitalists, feel free to get in touch.

Saturday was the opening of The New Hope exhibit in Geneva, Switzerland, which I had the honor of doing a piece for with Hyperakt Design Group. After gaining international attention for an Obama poster designed by Deroy Peraza at Hyperakt, the studio was asked to do a full series inspired by Obama’s message of hope, to be exhibited at the Flux Laboratory in Geneva. I contributed a Flash-based interactive piece called Kids Vote 2008 which explores kids’ perspectives on the election through an interactive cloud of comments on the two presidential candidates. While the piece is currently being projected at the Flux Laboratory, it can also be experience online at:

http://www.kidsvote2008.us/

I was responsible for the interaction design and front end development of this piece, and with a two week deadline, was left with little time for sleep over the past two weeks. However, with the site live now, and on display in Geneva, all the hard work feels pretty good.

While it is a little too early to hear any direct feedback from the show in Geneva, Kids Vote 2008 has already started to get some attention around the web, with a “Fresh Picks” feature on the website Moluv, a mention on the Communication Arts website, and a blurb on E-Creative.net.

Check out the project, and let me know what you think.

UPDATE
Kids Vote 2008 was featured (briefly) on Swiss television last week

Also, Hyperakt has put up a flickr set of photos from the show in Geneva. Seems like people at the show responded well.