How Google Redoes Design

A look into how Google underwent a design revolution:

Noteworthy Branding from 2012

Fast Co. revisits some clever branding campaigns from 2012.

Pin-able Banner Ads

Gucci recently went live with a series of banner ads with “Pin It” calls to action. You can save the branded glamour shots to one of your boards on Pinterest (and from there link to Gucci’s e-commerce site).

With the engagement challenge that banners pose, who knows, this could be a clever approach.

via Mashable

GIF-ITI

Here’s some awesome animated street art from UK artist INSA.

These start out as street art paintings, then the artist photographs them at various stages and compiles them into a GIF so that when viewed online they become a moving image! For the full experience, check them out here.

via Laughing Squid

what will you look like in 30 years…

… And will that image motivate you to open a 401k?

Wired magazine posted an article yesterday about a cool new digital campaign from Merrill Edge that shows you what you’ll look like in 30 years with the goal of incentivizing you to sock away money.

Contributed by Michael Phillips

F1, in real time

This is quite a neat approach to real time tracking. It could make for some very cool infographics as well.

Contributed by Jeremy Adirim.

This Exquisite Forest

This Exquisite Forest is a collaborative storytelling tool. Inspired by the Surrealist drawing game of “exquisite corpse,” the site allows anyone to start an animation tree by drawing a series of short frames — a “seed” — or add on to an existing tree. The project, from Google’s Data Arts team, is also temporarily installed in the Tate Modern in London.

Check out some popular trees here and here and here.

The way the wind blows

A beautiful visualization of surface wind patterns over the U.S.: http://hint.fm/wind/

Frisbee Rush – Mobile to Desktop/TV Game

Unit9 premiered a new gesture-based, multiplayer, mobile-to-desktop synced game called Frisbee Rush at a few weeks back and are now finishing the app to be released in the coming weeks. More details on vimeo.

If this then that

If this then that puts the internet to work for you. The free service allows users to set up a number of ‘recipes’ that fit the structure: if this happens, then do that. For instance, if rain is in the forecast, then send a text notification or if there’s a new post on Craigslist for a certain item, then send an email. Simple utility.