The Real Rocketeer

This blew me away. No pun intended. Hat tip: Vinny



http://vinnykumar.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/the-future-is-here-a-real-jetpack/

Puma Interior.

This is a really cool design for a wall mural. On a side note, I'm working on the office interior redesign (so far we're totally under budget!) Hat Tip: Robin

Visualizations for Facebook vs Others

Based off AddThis's data, Facebook makes up roughly 30% of all the sharing on the web. While that is enormous for one service, we sometimes loose sight of the other 70% of services used to share. These are some visualizations I sketched out to illustrate this concept.

Let me know what you think!

Thursday Music, "Tigerlily" by La Roux

This i song is bangin. When I get back into writing, my goal is to find some lovely 8bit sounds. Listen to the song here. The breakdown reminds me of "Thriller", by MJ. Hat Tip: Dave

Discovery, "Life" trailer.

Love the narrator's script... it's so corny, but the video totally makes up for it. Watch it here. Hat tip: Annie

Morning yoga in the morning @clearspring.

One of my coworkers from the west coast hosted a morning yoga session. She just got certified to be an instructor, and she organized a quick warm up this morning. It was actually really refreshing. I'd love to do something like that once a week. Any other companies do yoga or something special from time to time?

Q1 Clearspring After Party.

Clearspring threw a nice after party at On The Border last night. It was fun seeing the entire company from around the US (west coast, NYC, etc) come together. Thanks for a great time! Here are some photos. See all the photos here.

Apollo 11 Saturn Launch, in slow motion.

This is fascinating. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time. Narration is provided by Mark Gray (me), Executive Producer for Spacecraft Films.

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

Redesigned Gowalla Homepage.

I like the new Gowalla homepage... it seems to be more benefit oriented, and focused on explaining the product. Nice illustration! It's much cleaner. Nice job.

Old Gowalla.com


New Gowalla.com

Apple product video parody.

Not bad! Definitely cheesy.

The human Gambit. Card throwing tricks.

This guy definitely has some card throwing skills, but I feel that the video was way too edited. I'd like to see a reel with him doing these kinds of tricks without any cuts. Hat tip: Vinny




Most of you guys may not know Ricky Jay, but he's got some serious card skills... not just throwing, but sleight of hand kinda stuff. Check it out.

Evolution of Twitter's homepage.

Anyone else think Twitter's new homepage is looking a little cluttered? Looks like they're trying to squeeze to much stuff "above the fold".

New Clearspring Business Card

Here's the new Clearspring business card design. It's much more simple, and clean. Thoughts?

AddThis Business Card Concept

I mocked this up this business card concept for AddThis recently. You'll notice it has no contact information... it's just a simple card that shows an abstraction of the AddThis logo on one side, and tons of services you can share to on the other.

The ideas is to hand them out along with our Clearspring business card, if they need our contact information. As Clearspring launches new products, we can print up "promotional" cards that help explain the product. This could be a good way to promote new analytics, new features, etc as they arise. Let me know what you think of the design.

Thursday music. "Final Symphony", by Hybrid

You've probably never heard of them, but have heard their music from a show, movie, or commercial. If you're having a slow thursday, turn up your speakers and play this song. Ignore the video... just listen to the music, and have it run in the background. If you don't see the video, click here.

This song is called "Final Symphony" by Hybrid. It was used in Top Gear, when Jeremy Clarkson raced a Bugatti Veyron across Europe against James May and Richard Hammond in a light aircraft.

Just purchased an iPad 16gb.

I just ordered my iPad yesterday evening. After playing with it, I think I'd enjoy using it.

I asked a bunch of iPad owners I know for their opinion:

Justin said, "Key use cases would be: read books, couch/toilet web surfing, comic books, video, video/web surfing on the go, draw".

On the other hand, Jim said "The iPhone changed my life, but I haven't found a place for the iPad in my life yet".

Lastly, Dave said "It feels sooooooo much better to touch. Touching changes EVERYTHING."


For me, I think the iPad will fit in my life. I'd like to use it for reading all my favorite RSS feeds, surfing the web, checking email, playing games, and watching youtube. I'm also a designer, so I'd like to understand the touch interface better... and perhaps develop an app for it with Dave in the near future.

Am I an apple fanboy for owning an iPhone, iPad and Macbook Pro? I'd say no. I used PCs for 3d modeling, I owned a sidekick phone and another smartphone that ran windows mobile, and I've always used 3rd party monitors. My background is industrial design, so I have an appreciation for good product design!

My iPad should be here sometime next week.

New 15" MacBook Pro, fully loaded.

I'd love to get an update to my MacBook Pro, but it works for now. The new MacBook has some nice hardware updates like more battery life, adaptive processing speeds, higher resolution monitor, larger harddrive, faster processor and graphics card, and more.

So what does a fully loaded 15" Macbook Pro look like?
• 2.66GHz Intel i7
• 8GB of ram
• 512GB solid state drive
• 15" hi-res glossy widescreen display (1680x1050)

Clearspring interior design refresh concept.

I've been asked to help help Clearspring clean up their interior... but I get the feeling we're not going to have a big budget to revamp the whole place. As much as I'd like new desks, flooring, lighting, etc, I think we're going to be limited to paint.

I quickly rendered a concept illustrating what a couple paint and decals could do. The idea is to bring in some glass doors, themed meeting rooms, and remove some of excess furniture.

Before


After

Anderson Silva fighter impressions.

These were really good. LOL. Check it out here.

AddThis gallery showcases new sexy sharing tools.

We just released a new gallery with all kinds of sharing buttons, like big sexy icons, css3 buttons, and more. If you're a designer or web developer, you should try using these instead. Currently, I'm using the Komodo Media Toolbox. Try it for yourself, and make sharing sexy. Stay tuned for more—we're working on some slick menu designs using jquery.

Cool business cards.

Portrait of Dave's Mohawk.

Here are some photos I shot of Dave last night. I was playing around with the NEF files, and doing some post color correction.

Ip Man 2 Trailer

Ah, I can't wait to watch this. I just finished watching Ip Man 1, and the fight scenes were bad ass. Watch the Ip Man 2 Trailer here if you don't see it below.

Ping Pong

Thanks to Annie, I have a clip clip of some ping pong between oren and me last night. We had a pretty good rally around 1:40.

Scroll to the bottom of a nytimes.com article.

This was a nice effect I came across for promoting more content on NYtimes. I might have to do something like this on more of my sites. Heh heh.

Beaverlab.com

I like how beaverlab use some basic jquery to bring a nice touch to their site. I might have to put something like this together soon. Heh. Check out this video of it.

YouTube design is evolving and iterating quickly.

Has anyone else noticed that YouTube has been doing a lot of testing, and rolling out incremental design updates? I've seen small changes here and there, but last night I saw their latest design. It's much cleaner, and puts the content first, versus all their other social features (like sharing, embedding, favoriting, and comments). Has anyone documented how YouTube has iterated with their design?



Dashboard
Ah yes, they changed their main navigation and put the search input next to the logo. They've done a substantial amount of subtraction to features as well. For example, notice how they removed the star ratings, and removed the header backgrounds. Lastly, they've been incorporating more social features and added an "inbox" on the right. I just wonder exactly what they have in mind for the future...



Content Page
The first thing I noticed is that they moved their embed feature below the content. This moves the recommended content up, which is smart. Get someone watching a video, and then get them to watch more immediately. They've even added an "autoplay" which keeps videos streaming. Smart move.