Category: Technology

Viral Marketing

Forever 21 Thread Screen

By Delphine Hirasuna |

F21_ThreadScreen
Trendy fashion retailer, Forever 21, recently mounted an Instagram-assisted event and invited millennials to see what they’d look like in thread. A monumental undertaking, hardware maker Breakfast New York spent a year-and-a-half building the 2,000 pound “Thread Screen,” made up of 200,000 components that manipulated 6,400 mechanical spools of multicolored threaded fabric. Each spool held 5 ½ feet of fabric, divided into 36 colors that transitioned every inch and a half.

Forever 21 then invited fans to post their photo on Instagram using the “#21ThreadScreen” hashtag. The machine “read” the submitted photos and instructed the spools to travel along a conveyor-like device until it hit the right hue, displaying the thread-assembled portrait at an 80×80 screen resolution. Forever 21 and Breakfast live streamed the photos turning into thread, and sent each participant an edited version of their own personal thread portrait. It was like totally awesome!
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Marketing

Shocase Shows Off Marketing Talent

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Shocase is a new social network site with some of the intentions of LinkedIn, Pinterest and Facebook, but is targeted specifically to the 100+ million marketing professionals worldwide. It acts somewhat like the old Blackbook directories, but in a friendlier, more interactive and constantly updated way.

Shocase CEO Ron Young explains, “Members can present their work, skills and experience in the best light to the audience they value most; brands can find the right marketing professionals to suit their needs in any discipline. The site is designed to help build working relationships, and ultimately help members grow their business.”

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Technology

Cooper Hewitt Redesigns the Museum Experience

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Last December, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design reopened its doors after being shut down for three years for renovation. Located in the old Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, the new Cooper Hewitt has designed an experience that integrates interactive,immersive technologies into all of its exhibits. Now visitors can view digitized collections on large touch-screen tables, draw their own wallpaper in the Immersion Room, solve real-world design problems in the Process Lab, and use an interactive pen to save objects that they want to view more closely at home. The Cooper Hewitt not only shows how design has evolved over the past century, it is a living example of where it is going.

Viral Marketing

Awareness Is the First Step to Healing

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Digital billboards are making it possible to connect with people in ways we couldn’t imagine a few years ago. To mark International Women’s Day last weekend, UK-based Women’s Aid worked with WCRS London to launch a billboard campaign to raise awareness of domestic violence. The billboard features an obviously battered woman with two black eye, swelling and cuts on her face. From time to time, she blinks sadly.

Using facial recognition technology, the billboard lets passersby heal the woman’s wounds by looking at her. The more people stop and look directly at the image, the faster her face heals and returns to normal. The facial recognition technology can register exactly how many people are looking at the poster and pick out their faces from the crowd and display them through a live-feed of the street.

Motion Graphics

Before Photoshop

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Years ago the CEO of a company I was working for was hospitalized at the time the board of directors’ group photo had to be taken for the annual shareholders report. Another executive who was roughly the same built as the CEO was recruited to stand in his place. Later a photo of the CEO’s head was pasted and airbrushed onto the stand-in’s torso. It looked okay, but anyone who knew the CEO found something about his pose unsettling.

For another annual report cover, we had a shot of a logging truck traveling on a freeway past a forest of gorgeous fall colors. Due to reasons I’ve forgotten, the photograph had to be flopped, so the freeway sign made it look like the truck was driving on the wrong side of the road. If I remember right, a print had to be made of the photograph so the retoucher could fix it, and then it had to be converted back into a transparency.

That was in the days before Photoshop. Because significant manipulation of a photograph was such a big deal back then, it used to be said that “the camera never lies,” Now designers are often overheard saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll photoshop it in (or out) later.” Photography has become an “impressionistic” art form. Seeing isn’t believing. Changes can be made in an instant on a computer by virtually any designer. The airbrushing and retouching professions have all but disappeared. Through Photoshop, a hybrid art form has emerged that is producing some incredible images. More and more, designers have assumed control of the photograph, and taken it out of the hands of the photographer.