About a month or so ago, before the chaos of December arrived I was queueing this post up - a selection of 5 sensational experiences I had in the festive build up which I hope will still satisfy all your senses, even if they are well past their posting date!

1.Eastern Promises at the Rich Mix
If you haven’t seen it yet, do, it was one of the best films I saw last year for sure. A combination of tough Russian gangsters, young Eastern European girls tragically failing to make a better life for themselves in London, a midwife, a baby and the best fight scene of 2007 make this gruesome thriller led by Viggo Mortensen a stunning watch from start to finish. Be warned though, after viewing you may have violent dreams.

2. Eating great food and getting crack
At some point I paid my second visit to the mighty Great Queen St gastro pub in Covent Garden. Between the four of us we had excellent vension, burger on dripping bread and a barley, squash and mushroom risotto, all very tasty indeed! To complete our inner glow we took a stroll down the embankment towards the Tate Modern where we saw the crack before going up to level 7, where we shared four amazing desserts whilst London’s skyline became illuminated in front of our eyes.

3.James Murphy + Tom Mahoney = Fabric live 36
After a hectic electronic start to the mix (which isn’t too studio friendly late morning I’ve found) things calm down and slip into a funkadelic, disco experience that makes you want to dance sexy.

4.International Lefthanders Day
At the time I wanted this poster a lot, it’s been made with Scandinavian skill.

5.Apple iPhone
It’s not about what this first generation product can’t do, it’s all about the amazing things it can do. The touch screen interface is absolutely superb, you consume lots of stuff, you stroke it alot, it’s incredible. I have had iPhone-itous for two months and it feels great.

Last week I went to the D&AD Presidents lecture where straight talking, non computer using, rubbish collecting graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff took centre stage and shared stories from his 50 year (and still going strong) career in design. He showcased projects he was invloved in on behalf of his company Chermayeff & Gesimar, including brand identities, exhibition design, motion graphics and art in architecture. As you may expect it made for a very impressive and highly motivating evening.

Towards the end of the lecture he presented a selection of motion graphic projects his studio has produced, one of which was a project called ‘Logomotion’ where a selection of their identities are morphed in and out of each other, excerpts of which can be viewed here. This organic sequence of events reminded me of a little typographic place called Bembo’s Zoo. Enjoy.

I went to the third day of the Gamecity festival in Nottingham, mainly to see Alexander Kohlhofer of
soda/plasticpilots fame speak about weewar which I fell in love with at first sight a couple of months ago. it was great to enjoy a long chat with his afterwards as well! (Thanks Alexander)

In case you havent seen weewar or played it, weewar is a very addicitive multiplayer turn based strategy game which currently has over 20,000 players. see Techcrunch, Kotaku coverage. Its a really nice recent success story and Alexander’s talk was really enjoyable all the more so because he was outlining/sharing/dissecting how they got it right with nearly every slide. He had some very valuable wisdom to impart which he presented in a very humble, well executed way.

In fact it was one of the most polished talks I’d been to in a while and one of the most inspiring things I’d been to all year sitting right next to Brendan Dawes‘ talk for our final year students.

Alexander covered many areas in his talk and referred to the key points in the weewar strategy, as well as mentioning how it came to be.

he said he was (like many of us):

• too busy to play
• stuck in an office
• had nobody to play with

..and he was interested in creating something which would make many people happy instead of just a limited number of clients.

Some of his talk was also about how they’ve dealt with the community building aspect of weewar (tangler), to the challenges of stable infrastructure and growing needs (API access, google apps use, invites mechanism to cope with server capacity), as well as principles of design and ways of listening to users and legitimising their interest and enthusiasm which had resulted in the wiki etc.

I was in awe when i realised that weewar was a two man designed and implemented game, just Alexander and Bert!

Things I picked up specifically in relation to design and etched firmly in my mind:

• you cant get it right but you can improve it all the time
• getting it wrong is okay
• keeping users in the loop
• not to try and shoehorn a game into a browser
• being agile and iterative
• release often and listen

also

• giving users self regulating responsibility (allowing them to make the rules)
• be part of the community and mean it
• dont use players with overly complex systems
• dont have a closed system

I think Weewar was essentially at one point described as a web 2.0 app and thats possibly very apt, that train of thought reminded me of Amy Jo Kim’s Etech Presentation from 2006 which is essentially about
how similar Web 2.0 apps and their features/functionality are to the mechanics and components of games.

Anyhow, needless to say weewar is very enjoyable game with lots of attention to functional detail, go sign up for an invite or drop me an email to send you a game request.

The rest of the day, well the morning I attended a panel discussion about indie games with the indiecade folk, IGF and Gamasutra as well as Channel 4 represented on the panel.

I was briefly starstruck to see Cory Doctorow behind me with his iconic specs, I tried googling him on my phone to see a recent pic to make sure. but then one of the panel members made a comment about indie games / the concept of giving away games for free and mentioned Cory and his books and my suspicions were confirmed.

I went to an ARG talk as well in the afternoon by Guy Lewis Parsons who gave a very energetic talk in place of Dan Hon.
Mr Katamari Damacy (was there with his new game nobi nobi boy) his keynote talk was covered in depth on Wonderland. It was nice to see almost full HD from the the PS3 on such a large cinema screen.

It’s just starting to go moldy like a good bit of cheese incase you wondered, I guess we are all just super busy at the moment. This post is simple though, it’s about a great poster which you can buy from the internet. I have put my face back amongst the big www crowd recently so to speak with a selection of my work from the last 5 years. Enjoy!

Design studio Dixon and Baxi have uploaded some new work to their portfolio with a familiar bearded face for Nic, Rob, Si and I featured amongst the case studies. Go Model J!

Forget the frisbee, now we can now create our mini golf courses at the park. Link via design blog Dezeen, which is brimming full of great content.

Check out Ryan’s nice work

Michael Bojkowski has a great portfolio and blog.

There are many shades of Ken Meier and his great little website.

Jasmine Raznahan is switched on.