Angry Birds. It’s been quickly taking over iPhones, the iPod Touch and the iPad that last few months. (I just had to pry myself away from playing it on my iPad to write this blog post. Seriously.) It’s addictive, no doubt about it. (more…)
Why Are Those Birds So Angry Anyway?
February 4th, 2011 by Chris StrongPosted in News | 36 Comments »
Have Tivo and the DVR Finally Met Their Match?
January 27th, 2011 by Chris Strong
No way I say!
Apparently, someone out there has come up with “a way” to trick people into hitting the play button early when they are fast forwarding through the commercials recorded content on their Tivo or cable company’s DVR. I guess not everyone out there fully believes that people don’t like to be force-fed commercials for stuff they don’t want or like, when they are watching TV…
Posted in News | 231 Comments »
Meet: Birdbot
October 12th, 2010 by Julie Hill
Behold! HQ’s newest friend, Birdbot, the paper robo-presentative for HQ’s newest edition to our poster series. Visit PosterQuake.com to design and create your own papercraft Birdbot…no tape required! All the cool kids are doing it.
Our sweet Birdbot team made it all possible: shout out time!
Chris Albert on concept and poster design! Julie Hill on illustration, web design and copy! Adam Daniel, Charlie Key and Bao Nguyen on dev! Jared “Mitch” Rabinowitz on video and digital production! Zack “Zackfork” Mueller on print! Rachel Forgus and Sam Weiner wrangled all of us into productivity! And of course, Chris Strong on guidance and general enthusiasm. Good job, guys!
(P.S., This is our 300th blog post, dang!)
Posted in Design, News | 263 Comments »
HyperQuake Creates Our Own Environment In The UK
October 6th, 2010 by Chris StrongSo, we’ve been traveling internationally lately (well, at least our ‘Create Your Own Environment’ poster has).
No way you say? Yes, way. It’s like we’re playing our own game of the hit 1990′s PBS game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego.
From September 13th through the 24th at the Bower Ashton Campus of The University of the West of England in Bristol, HyperQuake’s own ‘Create Your Own Environment’ poster was on display in a laser cutting exhibition called ‘Drawing with Fire.’
Featured alongside a variety of other excellent artwork curated by Tom Sowden, the exhibition aimed to showcase the variety of interesting and truly innovative ways in which artists and designers of all sorts are using laser cutting to work with paper.
Tom was kind enough to share some images (courtesy of Natalie McGrorty) that were taken of the exhibition, which have been featured throughout this post. You can also check out more of Natalie’s work at her Flickr gallery too, though I’m not sure if she’ll be posting any images from the exhibition there or not.
For a complete look at and write up of the exhibition go on over the where the University has archived everything online on their bookarts website here.
We’re of course very proud and honored to have been asked to have our work showcased in this exhibition so far away from home. It’s pretty humbling and very awesome. We here that the exhibition might be traveling to the Enschede, Netherlands as well to visit the ArtEZ Institute of Arts sometime in January. So for all our friends and followers over in the Netherlands, make sure to go check out the exhibition when it makes it way to town.
Thanks again to Tom and Natalie for sharing some of the photos with us!
Posted in Design, News | 161 Comments »
Webp
October 4th, 2010 by Julie HillWeb designers: Get ready to kiss your jpgs goodbye, because Google has decried a new image format, WebP, and we all know that whatever Google wants, Google gets.
Images on the web in this format…will have smaller file sizes, load faster and relieve a lot of overclocked networks. They won’t necessarily look better — WebP images are as “lossy” as JPEGs — but the files might be around 40% smaller than JPEG files. – Mashable
Posted in News | 167 Comments »
Nothing Lasts Forever
September 20th, 2010 by Julie Hill
17,000 years ago, someone filled a cave in Lascaux, France with paintings, discovered in 1940 by a few teenagers and their dog. If you’ve ever taken an art history course, you’re likely familiar with these ethereal images.
But now it seems that nature is attempting to take the cave back, sending typically cave-dwelling fungi, molds and lichen to reclaim the galleries. Air conditioning systems, sprays and quicklime have all been employed to preserve the cave’s interior.
Part of me laments the potential loss of such an interesting piece of art history, and part of me feels content that this is simply the way of things, and would like to point out that it is our meddling that’s created a problem that wasn’t a problem for thousands of years. We’ve already learned so much about the people who created the cave galleries, and many more people will experience the caves through images than real life anyway. Adieu, Lascaux, and thanks.
Posted in Design, News | 249 Comments »
Show Dominos Your Pizza
September 2nd, 2010 by Chris Strong
Domino’s definitely seems to be getting more and more confident about its improvements to its pizzas. This includes both the changes to the crust, sauce and cheese blend we posted about a couple of months back, as well as the actual visual appeal of the pizzas coming out of the restaurants across the nation.
So what does a brand like Domino’s decide to do at that point? Well, launch another ad campaign centered around showcasing the “realness” of the brand, essentially reinforcing to consumers how much of an open book the brand is and how proud of their recent changes they are.
The contest, referred to as ‘Show Us Your Pizza’ also integrates a contest with the campaign, allowing users to submit photos of their pizzas for a chance to win $500 if their pizza photo is used in an ad.
The program is tied in with Facebook and is currently awaiting the 3rd assignment to be pushed out to Facebook fans who have “Liked” the brand. Appears that they have over 5,000 of those right now, which of course is good for the brand as they can now continue to market directly to those fans through Facebook in the meantime.
Another facet of the campaign is that according to the article linked to above on AdWeek, the campaign is also a response to “Web sites like “This Is Why You’re Fat” that show unflinching photos of real food orders that contrast with the more idyllic images found in advertising.”
I’m not going to lie, as a bunch of foodies here at HQ, a number of us find our way to that site quite often and I’m sure a lot of other people do too. Some of the stuff you see on there
DEFINITELY
looks nothing like what it does in ads, no matter how crazy a dish might be.
Given that the brand is apparently paying attention to what’s going on over at This is Why You’re Fat, I’d say the next evolution in this campaign is seeing what the craziest pizza someone could actually come up with is. I can think of a few Quakers who might see what they could come up with.
Either that, or Domino’s brings back the Noid!
Anyone want to start petitioning for that with me?
Posted in News | 211 Comments »
Forbes.com Names The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns
August 31st, 2010 by Chris Strong
So, the crew over at Forbes.com just unleashed a list of what they consider to be the best-ever social media campaigns.
The list, including everyone from Blendtec Blenders (featured above whose sales rose 700% since the campaign in 2006) to Smirnoff, to Old Spice to Ikea, Vitamin Water to Careerbuilder, BMW to The Blair Witch Project, Burger King to, well, Burger King (both the Subservient Chicken and their Whopper Sacrifice campaigns), is pretty comprehensive.
Now, some of the campaigns I don’t necessarily agree with as being the ‘best’ but that’s probably a whole other blog post….
Honestly though, if you haven’t been paying attention to what brands have been doing in the social media space the last few years, I definitely recommend you take a look through the image slide-show and write-ups on each. It’ll paint a broad picture for you of how social media continues to push various limits when it comes to driving consumer engagement and building effective marketing strategies.
On a side note, I did notice however that the Smirnoff campaign for ‘Bros Icing Bros’ that we talked about here didn’t make the list. Oh yeah, that wasn’t a social media campaign from the brand, or was it…? (I know a whole bunch of people that still dispute that.) Either way, even if the brand wasn’t involved with it as they claimed (which I can understand why), it sure was one heck of a organic, social-media driven campaign that apparently sold the product to a whole new consumer segment, bros.
All in all though, a fun read, so check it out.
Posted in News | 117 Comments »
Once Again, New Evidence That Cincinnati Is Awesome
August 25th, 2010 by Chris Strong
What might that evidence be you ask?
Well, apparently the next Superman comic is going to be set in none other than The Queen City according to the crew over at Cincinnati.com.
In addition to deciding once and for all, who is the chili king, Skyline or Goldstar, Superman will also be partaking in all that is Cincinnati from a run in the 2011 Flying Pig, to enjoying a burger at the legendary Zip’s.
It’s unknown at present whether he’ll be taking up residency on the West or East side, but whatever his choice is, it’s certain that there will be quite a stir caused.
So again, if you haven’t realized it yet, Cincinnati truly is pretty much the coolest place on earth. First ever professional baseball team; check, we got that covered. Flying pigs. Yep, we’re good there. Ties to the entertainment industry? Um, what other city can claim that one of the best movies ever was set in it (yes, I’m talking Airborne)? I still say it’s a travesty that it didn’t get an Oscar!
So again, I’m telling you Cincinnati rules. We didn’t need Superman coming here to prove it, but hey, it doesn’t hurt.
Posted in News | 203 Comments »
Coming Soon… The Apple Liquid Metal iBike?
August 19th, 2010 by Chris Strong
Yep, you read the title of this post correctly. It’s apparently true that Apple has filed a patent for a bicycle.
As an avid cyclist and an Apple fan (not Fan Boy), I’m more than intrigued and excited by this. When you combine the technological know how that Apple has with something like cycling, that has a number of variables that Apple could somehow integrate with, the future for a product like this seems endless.
It’s important to note that from essentially, innovation in the world of cycling has always been confined to:
1.) Making frames and components out of new materials, so they weigh less, enabling riders to move faster.
2.) Building frames with new and improved geometry to maximize the physical output of the riders body.
Aside from carbon fiber dominating the bike frame landscape over the last 5 years and replacing things like aluminum, there really hasn’t been much more evolution.
But this patent, this could begin writing a whole new chapter in cycling….
So, If you think of the Nike + iPod products out there, you’ll get an idea for what this iBike could potentially be about. The iPod + Nike product essentially measures a few key metrics output while an individual is running. With cycling though, the ability to get more rich and robust data, from heart rate, cadence, wind speed, distance, mph, etc. is more than possible. I can only imagine how awesome and more importantly informative in my training, an integrated LCD screen on my bike measuring all this data would be. I literally could talk the most informative levels of trash to my cycling buddies after we finish fighting it out against one another as we climb (i.e. race) up some of the hills in Indian Hill.
As far as the whole liquid metal thing goes, I’m not to sure what to make of that. Apparently Apple has signed a contract with a company called Liquidmetal Technologies so it’s probably a pretty safe bet this will happen. Apparently the material looks like glass, but is infinitely stronger and requires little machining and polishing.
Could this material be the next carbon fiber? If Apple is committed to making it work, I’m willing to put bets down that it will.
My only fear is that this bike, with all the technology that it could have, will be priced so astronomically high that very few cyclists may be able to afford right away.
I’m already salivating over this so I’ll just have to start saving my pennies.
Oh, the only other thing to add here is that apparently this kangaroo will be helping out with the testing of the bike. Maybe not, but it’s still an awesome image.
Posted in Design, News, Technology | 138 Comments »