“Atmospherik 01 Color Canvas” by artist, designer, Flash ninja Erik Natzke. Don’t miss his still images on Flickr – amazing – beautiful – work.

From Ad Age (March 20): “Unwitting E-mail Reveals What Agencies Shell Out for Awards.”

Yesterday an employee of the One Show inadvertently e-mailed a spreadsheet to several ad execs that contained a list of the agencies that have entered the One Show’s 2009 ad awards… In all, there were 9,795 entries for the [One Show] awards, at a total cost to the agencies of $3,507,860… BBDO offices account for more than 750 of the entries, and the network spent a total of more than $250,000, according to the spreadsheet.

Such a racket.

Interesting Adweek article comparing flashy marketing microsites – eg: Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory – with more-modular, theoretically lower-cost, bloggier sites – eg: Barbarian Group’s GE Adventure. (Those sites don’t work as a head-to-head comparison, but they are pretty good examples of the two categories.)

Ultimately, they’re just different techniques with different strengths and weaknesses. Entertainment vs content, exchange and sustainability. Or something. And they’re not mutually exclusive, obviously. Those soft drink and candy microsites do generally bum me out. Seems they could find something more constructive to do with the money. Even them.

Genius map projection idea from London design studio Schulze & Webb. I want this for the heads-up display in the fancy car I’ll never own.

Update 16 June: And there you go…

I think this one fits the bill.

(Post updated, 4 March) Joe sends in this prize winner while on the road at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Biloxi. Top shelf.

Garret Lisi shows you one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. Unless he’s wrong. Here’s an alternate video illustrating the same concepts. (I wonder if David Byrne had this in mind.)

A quick shout out to the D/C fan (or fans) in Mongolia that visited the site last week. We see you.

Robert Hodgin (aka flight404) interprets Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes: Arpeggi” via Processing. Trip out. (Thanks to DJ Stef for the tip.)

Unless you’re an old man you’ve already seen this.

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards,” no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Also:
Making-of video

Xobni almost makes me wish I was a PC/Outlook user. (It wouldn’t last.) If you are, you prolly want to check it out. It’s free. Mac users: stand by.

Xobni was created by Adam Smith, one of Technology Reviews‘ 35 “Young Innovators” for 2008.

I assume this is Photosynth, but there’s a lot more detail shown here than in the TED demo from a year or so ago. The video is 7 minutes long but definitely worth watching all the way through… if you’re into that sort of thing.

More info on “Photo Tourism” is available on the University of Washington’s website.

Internet, I love you.

I always wanted to do this. Axel Peemoeller did it.

New video (two years later?) for Cut Chemist’s “(My First) Big Break.” Brought to you by Eyestorm Productions.

Cool visualization of box office data by Zach Beane.

Use Silverlight with Deep Zoom to explore 20 or so gigapixel images of Yosemite. (You’ll need the Silverlight plug-in.) Zoom in to the tops of any of the peaks and they’re crawling with people. It ain’t rock ’n’ roll memorabilia, but that’s pretty cool.

More info on the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project here.

Via Milo. “If you don’t want your face to melt off, don’t watch this.” Animation and editing by Blu. Incredible. Don’t miss the Blu blog.

The Brazilian government flew over and photographed a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest that is speculated to have never had contact with modern civilization. Amazing photos, but even more amazing to imagine the encounter from their point of view.

Brand Tags is a genius site by Noah Brier that uses tag clouds and crowdsourcing to reveal emergent brand attributes. It can be pretty raw. Hey, sometimes the truth hurts.

It’d be cool to take snapshots of each brand over time and add a time slider.

Was there comedy before the internet?

Related to the previous post: Everyone agrees that the London 2012 Olympics logo is horrible. The worst. Not exactly because of that, but also because of that, I’m actually a fan. Bigger all the time, I’m finding. (Check out the Adidas animation. You know you love it.)

All of that said, this thing (also by Wolff Olins) is terrifying.

Roger Ebert mentioned Joe Versus the Volcano. So he had my attention. He described it as “a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it.” Exactly. Joe Versus the Volcano is one of those rare movies that everyone agrees is horrible except that it’s also brilliant.

Ebert:

What I appreciate about them is that they don’t do what we expect them do do. They break the rules. By this I don’t mean they “surprise” us, but they show us what by all rights should not be showable. They are, in other words, alive.

Now: “I’m not arguing that with you…”

“Steve is not happy with the process so far.”

Good evening. What you are about to witness is an unrehearsed and uncensored interview. My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Philip Morris.

For the sake of all that is decent and holy, take the time and watch this 1957 interview of “America’s foremost social rebel.” Yeah, it’s long. (An hour or so?) Crazy long for this kind of format, I know. But it’s amazing. Completely inspiring and pretty funny in spots. Funny watching young, ambitious Mike Wallace go toe-to-toe with 88-year old, unapologetic Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America’s youth, sex, morality, politics, nature and death.

There are a ton of other interviews here — all from the same 1950s program, “The Mike Wallace Interview”. Steve Allen, Salvador Dali, Aldous Huxley, Henry Kissinger, Tony Perkins, and on and on. Bummer you can’t download.

Not really newsworthy at this point, I know, but the website for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, like the show itself, is relentlessly funny. If you haven’t seen it, you should really check out the sleek, low-bandwidth version of the site. Oh, and the trailer. Actually, everything. Just go ahead an look at everything on this site.

Check out this typeface designed by Kris Sowersby for Constellation Wines Australia. Exclusive to Constellation until 2011.

I covet his typeface “National.” Info. Samples.

Nice site, huh? I have no idea what it’s built on, but it’s interesting to consider that this could easily be a customized theme for WordPress (or TypePad, Moe). Our site is built on WordPress and is more obviously a blog format than the KLIM site. But using those blog platforms for building all kinds of simple sites is a great way to make attractive and functional sites that are easily managed with very little technical expertise. Everybody’s happy.

Almost forgot. Check out Mr. Sowersby’s sketchbooks.

Time-lapse video (set to music) of a guy that was trapped in a stalled NYC elevator for 41 hours. (Video, as far as I can tell, courtesy of the New Yorker and this recent article: “Up and Then Down”.)

Music by Paul Holcomb. Lyrics by Ted Stevens, former US Senator.