Traffic Digital

We went to see the fascinating We Live in Public at the BFI Film Festival. We live in Public won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and is made by Ondi Timoner. It is the story of the internet pioneer Josh Harris, artist, futurist, visionary (and complete lunatic), and his groundbreaking work with online video, broadcast and reality formats, which made him his fortune, but eventually left him bankrupt and living in Vietnam. as the website says:

Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curated and funded the ground breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, becomes more elusive. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance which led to his mental collapse, Harris demonstrated the price we pay for living in public.

Go and see it if you get the chance - Josh Harris saw the future before anyone else and lost it all trying to deliver it 10 years too soon.

This is a great presentation from Dave Gillespie on Slideshare where he talks about the intention / attention economy, how media is inherently social, and what this means for brands and marketing.

This slide shows how rapidly the internet has grown compared to other mass media in the last 100 years.

How long the internet took to reach 50million users

Roughcut Presents is Roughcut TV’s new venture to promote new comedy online.  On the site you’ll see a mixture of Roughcut’s own Showcase short comedy clips and other funny clips drawn from around the web.

The site allows Roughcut staff to embed videos from around the web, encouraging comments from visitors. Users can also submit their own videos to the site. As well as the design and build, we also produced the Roughcut Presents endcard, featuring the axe-wielding ‘Mr Roughcut’, star of http://www.roughcut-tv.com.

Last minute tickets are great. Actually it has only happened once before that I remember - 9 years ago for David Bowie. Having spent some time in vain looking on Ebay for a last minute deal on Thursday, on Friday I received a call and found out I was going.

It was an amazing experience. The audience was a mix of people who were there the first time around and people who weren’t (amazingly, Doolittle, the album being celebrated, is 20 years old).  The band’s popularity is such that they allegedly sold out the tour in 20 minutes.  I had forgotten the lessons of my teenage years and turned up with a thick jumper and a coat. That was comfortable!

The effect of tracks like Debaser was incredible - the entire crowd went totally mental. In addition to the entire album, they opened with the B-sides (great B-sides they were too) and finished with some classics in an encore including Gigantic and Where is my Mind.

Here’s hoping they keep going.  It can’t be too bad going on stage and being adored like that!  You can hear excerpts from the gig here.

After fighting public transport I managed to get to this show last Sunday.

I’m glad I did. The dinosaurs were mostly huge and amazingly lively, the storyline was informative and entertaining.  It was narrated by the “Professor”, who commented and sometimes hid when things became too rough to his liking!

Some tasty dinosaurs

Of course I wondered how the special effects were being achieved. I looked for strings or wires and I noticed the motorised plank on which the dinosaurs were standing, but I quickly forgot about it

Perhaps I’m too sensitive, but seeing the nice herbivore Brachiosaurus, so huge but totally peaceful, ending up having its young eaten by stupid Liliensternus was in my opinion a sad way to start the show!

Then I also was sad for Old Torosaurus (looking quite alike to a Triceratops, but with only 2 horns) when he was beaten by Young Torosaurus and left the stage, moaning and horn broken, if not heart broken…

But whatever it was, the performance was breathtaking, with a really amazing stage being transformed as we were moving forward in time, with plants growing and then then curling up suddenly because of the volcanic heat…

I need to mention the flying Ornithocheirus which had to fly away to avoid being eaten, not to forget the mean Utahraptor that anyone having seen Jurassic Park knows he should fear!

And a last but not least, of course the T-rex was the biggest of all and came last, making me almost afraid as he roared at us!

I tried to take a picture (without flash because yes that was forbidden and even French people respect rules sometimes!), but the shock made me move and I ended up with a nice coloured blurry dot… Never mind, I don’t think I’ll have any problem remembering that scary mouth with enormous teeth!

The show is highly recommended - I am now convinced, as the professor told us, that “dinosaurs still walk the earth”!

I love typography. In fact, I regularly read typographica, to keep on top of emerging typographical trends. It comes as no surprise then that I get a little frustrated by the limited set of fonts available to most web projects. Traditionally, we’ve been limited to that all too familiar set of web safe fonts we all know so boringly well.

Here at Traffic, we’ve explored using many different technologies to get around this problem. We have used FLIR (not the best option), SIFR 2 and SIFR 3 (the latter being a huge improvement on the former and near enough to a good solution) and even just plain old -999em text indent on image headings. None of these solutions are really ideal and until @font-face is adopted by the IE team, we’re probably going to be faced with the necessity of replacing text to meet design requirements.

Luckily there is a neat solution that is gaining a lot of implementation: cufón. If you’ve never heard of cufón check out their site, it’s a lightweight, simple solution that does away with the latency of SIFR 3. It also adds the ability to create gradients and text-shadows and is cross browser compliment. Look out for future examples of work by us that uses this little design-tastic gem.

We’re happy to announce the re-launch of Slightly Foxed at www.foxedquarterly.com. Slightly Foxed is a quarterly journal for book lovers and “people who don’t want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing”.

It’s a great publication that we’re delighted to be associated with.

The Shaftesbury Theatre have asked us to design and build a new website.

The Shaftesbury Theatre is currently home to the award winning musical Hairspray starring Michael Ball.

Watch this space for updates later in March.

Image via Wikipedia

Traffic Digital have won the contract to design and build the new My Family website for DLT Entertainment

My Family is one of the UK’s most popular and long running comedy series. (Series 8 of My Family episode 9 was once again the most watched comedy on television reaching just under 30 million viewers, 52.3% of the UK population).  The series is about the fictional Harper family, and stars Robert Lindsay and Zoë Wanamaker as Ben and Susan Harper, and their three children, Nick, Janey and Michael who are played by Kris Marshall, Daniela Denby-Ashe and Gabriel Thomson respectively.

Arctic Melt Time Lapse - Nature’s Great Events: The Great Melt - BBC One

The website for David Attenborough’s latest natural history documentary, Nature’s Great Events is now live!

This fascinating show charts captures the most dramatic wildlife spectacles on our planet, using state of the art filming technology in HD.

There are also lots of web extras available via YouTube here

The website contains images and clips from the show, as well as a Google shared calendar of Nature’s Great Events so you can keep track of the species featured in the series and find out what else might be happening in the natural world.

You can view the calendar here and subscribe via rss or iCal

HD: Polar Bear on Thin Ice - Nature’s Great Events: The Great Melt - BBC One

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• In pictures: Stunning pictures of nature’s greatest spectacles in new BBC series (guardian.co.uk)
• The One to Watch: Wednesday 11 February (telegraph.co.uk)