Panoramas gone digital

I was slightly ashamed after my usual messing around with constructed panoramas on holiday, when a friend said he’d been doing the same and gave me this link:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=02dbdd97-6cea-4bf9-8594-3a5369e7e585

If you’ve never seen photosynth it’s an awfully clever bit of software owned by Microsoft which calculates where views are in 3D space based on what it sees in the photos.  It’s really impressive when you see it do things like ransack Flickr for loads of pictures of the same place and stitch them all together.

It’s not new, but I thought I’d share my shame at not being “digital” enough to clock that I could have done all my panoramas like this.

Not seen it being used much for product viewing, but having spent the last 5 years working out innovative ways to rotate a football boot in 3D in a way that’s not been done before (for Umbro) then it’s got to be on the cards..

Castle Envy

Bamburgh Castle by Andrew Brown

I’m back to work after my holidays today.  I’ve just got back from a week in the north east, staying in Bamburgh.  As well as having some of the country’s best beaches this part of the world also boasts some fine castles such as the Norman castle at Bamburgh, a very cute castle (in comparison) on Lindesfarne Holy Island and the mighty Alnwick Castle which also boasts the impressive Alnwick Garden. 

Whilst visiting these places I appear to have developed a peculiar condition – ‘castle envy’.  I found myself wishing that I had been born Lord Wassname of Thingummy and spent my time wondering how most philanthropically to invest the squillions of pounds I’d inherited.  Check out the Garden particularly as a very modern project.

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson we’re all here because we’re descended from “Bad M*therf*ckers” who managed to claw and battle their way to survival over billions of years of ‘only the strongest survive’ laws.  Theoretically those whose families have power and money come from the baddest mf’s of them all, the majority of whom having gained their status through ancestral violence.

Maybe that’s why envy is a deadly sin, because greed breeds violence.

StrategiCreativEffective

We just made a double sided poster to show off our design / creative vs. strategy approach here at swamp and how much development and work we put into both those areas.  One side shows the design development and thinking behind developing an iconic campaign for Umbro which went across all things digital.  If you look around you can see the influences and mood boards as well as loads of the final bits of work. 

The other side is made up of graphs, charts, powerpoint slides and spider maps which are all generated as a result of our strategic approach to KPIs, return on investment, usability, ecommerce, ecoupons and SEO which all go into the way we design many sites – a process we call intelligent design.  This is segues with our approach to marketing which is called the customer journey.