For the past few years I have been writing posts about Norad's Santa Tracker (once a partner of Google's) and how it works as a nice online activity to enjoy with your children and friends. Now that Microsoft's Bing has partnered with Norad, Google has gone all out and created their own Google Maps' Santa Tracker and until it launches on Christmas Eve, you can explore a fun interactive animated site with plenty of games and goodies or download a Google Chrome app for added entertainment.
above: screen grabs of the Village briefing and windtunnel
Santa’s many developer elves, who are hard at work in the North Pole helping Santa prepare for his big day, have combined their elf magic with the latest and greatest in Google Maps technology and sleigh engineering to allow you to follow his progress around the world, and also learn a little about some of his stops along the way.
above: a sneak preview of the Google Santa Tracker which launches on Christmas Eve.
Even without using Google chrome as your browser, you can enjoy the following at the Google Santa Tracker Site:
•Create a Custom Phone Call from Santa in the form of an mp3 file you can send to your friends (This is really cool. It takes a few minutes to make the first one, but it's worth it.)
•You (or your kids) can play one of three games that operates with your keyboard.
Present Drop:
Village Racer:
Jetpack:
If you use Google Chrome, you can download the app and enjoy even more fun like a dashboard tracker, play around with Santa's blimp or elf bus and write messages on a frosty browser window.
The friendly elves have also invited you to explore Santa’s village while Santa gets ready for his journey. So go ahead and explore his village, you might just find some fun activities and meet some interesting elves.
The Google Maps Santa Tracker is created and developed by Google, with a little help from Santa’s elves. Need help or have another question? Visit their Help Center to learn more about Santa Tracker.
adidas has launched its pioneering Holiday Campaign for 2012, enlisting the help of some of the world’s finest sporting and cultural icons, to turn your social media content into a potentially timeline-changing classic Holiday Tale. At the heart of the campaign is ‘The Cautionary Tale of Ebenezer Snoop’ online film (shown in this post), offering you the opportunity to follow a digital journey to find and share your own Holiday Spirit. As the film closes, you are invited to find out if you are an Ebenezer, and if so, the chance to redeem yourself with an innovative Facebook app (screen grab shown below).
The film features global music heavyweight Snoop Lion alongside skateboard OG Mark Gonzales escorting viewers into the illustrated world of legendary Beavis & Butthead artist JJ Sedelmaier. ‘The Cautionary Tale of Ebenezer Snoop’ follows the path of the classic Holiday story, seeing Ebenezer Snoop confronted by the Ghosts of Holiday Past (Stan Smith), Present (David Beckham) and Future (Derrick Rose & Rita Ora), as well as a host of other Global adidas stars that keeps viewers going back to find more. As you continue on your journey through the tale, you return to Facebook to create your own story.
The adidas Holiday Facebook application produces for you, the user, a personalized journey that mirrors the structure of the Ebenezer Snoop film content. Snoop might not be the only Ebenezer. By aggregating your user data around certain Facebook activities such as comments, birthday well-wishes, & event responses, adidas creates your own uniquely tailored Ebenezer film (they choose all the times you declined invites, didn't respond to posts or didn't acknowledge friends' brithdays to prove your 'scrooginess'). The app pulls in these features from your Facebook timeline, proposing what your digital life could look like if you don’t mend your ways. The level of your online interaction determines the film which your journey takes – the storyline and content directed by your digital life.
Examples from my own Facebook page:
At the end of your personal journey adidas offers you the opportunity to redeem yourself by sending a Facebook greeting card featuring JJ Sedelmaier’s campaign illustrations to friends.
You can choose any of the ghosts from the animated tale to deliver your customized card:
David Beckham:
Derrick Rose:
Rita Ora:
Stan Smith:
The gift which accompanies the card is dependent on your Ebenezer levels – one possibility is a 15% e-commerce discount.
A truly interactive online campaign working across social media, adidas recognises the importance of the digital world to its consumers and presents a complete Holiday gift-giving solution to its fans.
“The Ebenezer Snoop Holiday Campaign is the most user-specific app adidas has ever created, examining consumer behaviour to produce a truly personalised online experience. There is so much noise during the holidays, we’ve created a simple yet effective app to cut straight through. The Ebenezer Snoop Facebook app aggregates your personal Facebook information to produce a film entirely for you. Using the Timeline we are suggesting how your timeline could look if you don’t mend your ways!” -- Gabriel Jaffe, Senior Digital Communications Manager, AG.
Creative Credits:
Production Credits
Client: ADIDAS
Creative Agency: SID LEE
Production Agency: JIMMY LEE.TV
Post-Production:MASS MARKET/JIMMY LEE.TV/ VISION GLOBALE
Production houses: Live action – CAVIAR CONTENT / Animation - J.J. SEDELMAIER PRODUCTIONS
Director: Live action – Jake Szymanski / Animation – JJ Sedelmaier
Grading: MASS MARKET
Editors: JIMMY LEE.TV
Sound Design : MACHINE HEAD
Sound Mix: LA MAJEURE
About adidas
adidas is a global designer, developer and marketer of athletic footwear, apparel and accessories with the mission to be the leading sports brand in the world. Brand adidas is part of the adidas Group, a corporation that includes brands such as Reebok, TaylorMade and Rockport.
About the adidas Group
The adidas Group is one of the global leaders within the sporting goods industry, offering a broad range of products around the core brands adidas, Reebok, TaylorMade, Rockport and Reebok-CCM Hockey. Headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, the Group has more than 46,000 employees and generated sales of € 13.3 billion in 2011.
Design Within Reach and the New York Times have teamed up to create a very special crossword puzzle for architecture and design enthusiasts that appeared in today's issue of the NY Times T Design Magazine.
For those of you who do not get the New York Times, I have recreated it here for you along with all the clues and some special hints, courtesy of DWR.
This puzzle will also appear in today's October 7 issue of T Design (see page 60) in The New York Times.
HINTS TO A FEW CLUES from DWR:
ACROSS
1. AKA Y-Back Chair designer Wegner
Visual hint: The Y-Back Chair is also known as the Wishbone.
23. A chair to tiptoe through
Visual hint: This chair was designed by Eero Saarinen in 1956.
63. Designer of Womb Chair and TWA terminal at JFK
Visual hint:
103. Egg, e.g.
Visual hint: Arne Jacobsen designed this organic form for the SAS Hotel in Copenhagen.
DOWN
27. They designed and lived in Case Study House #8
Visual hint:
104. Designer of logos for UPS, IBM and ABC
Visual hint, courtesy of Apple Computer
To promote the new Old Spice scent Danger Zone, Wieden + Kennedy Portland teamed up with MJZ's Tom Kuntz, The Mill and Vimeo to present an interactive video starring former NFL star Terry Crews, that allows you to make your own music mix at the end of it. (Crews has starred in other Old Spice spots including one to launch Old Spice's new Danger Zone product line back in January called Blown Minds)
This time around Old Spice Muscleman Terry Crews does what no man has ever done before—play a drum set using nothing but his flexing muscles. In addition to watching his historically important muscle-powered performance, users also have the ability to use their keyboards to control Terry's muscles and create and share their own muscle-powered musical creations.
The interactive site runs in conjunction with the introduction of the indestructible Danger Zone Guy campaign, another series of ads starring -what is fast becoming overly prevalent in the ad world- mustachioed deboniar worldy men.
Both the interactive site and the Danger Zone campaign come on the heels of yet another brilliant campaign for the brand called Believe in Your Smellf, a series of commercials in which our skinny hero gains the confidence to break up with the likes of Heather Graham.
above: a dress and t-shirt made by designing digitally online and then printed and sewn for you by CONSTRVCT.
Having successfully reached their funding goal on kickstarter ($11,250 were pledged of their $10,000 goal), you're bound to hear more about this unique idea by Mary Huang & Jenna Fizel.
CONSTRVCT is an interactive fashion collection. You can design your own wearables that are then printed and manufactured for you. Custom designed art and images are uploaded to your choice from various classic garment silhouettes, digitally printed on jersey fabric and then sewn in your size and packaged by CONSTRVCT.
It is a new system of digital bespoke, where the web and computer driven design and production mediate the creation of unique designs. The name "Constrvct" refers to this act of creation. The collective goal is to create a social fashion label that reflects the creativity of the people who wear the clothes.
How it works:
Starting with a few classic silhouettes, everyone is invited to create their own designs by uploading photos or images that are turned into digitally printed clothing on double knit cotton jersey like simple dresses and t-shirts.
The example shown below is using a photo that Jenna took of stained glass in Barcelona:
When a design is ordered, the artwork and the cutting pattern are printed onto fabric with inkjet textile printing (this allows them to create production runs of 1 in a streamlined manner):
Voila! - Mary wears a dress made from Jenna's photo of the stained glass: For the Jersey dresses, sizes US 0-16 available, in standard, petite, and tall. They can also do custom sizing.
The clothing can be custom sized, and your name printed right into a tagless "label" on the garment. Plus, custom packaging with your fabric swatch and initials:
Their larger vision is to be able to achieve truly crowd-sourced fashion design, where anyone can publish their own fashion collection, with full production and retail ready to go.
The team, shown above, is Mary Huang and Jenna Fizel. Mary in NYC and Jenna in Boston, they have backgrounds in building cutting edge interactive experiences and have a history of creating exciting ideas in experimental fashion design.
To celebrate the opening of their nearly 15,000 square foot flagship store in Taiwan (shown above), Burberry World Live, a 360 immersive experience, began in Taipei on 26 April 2012.
Christopher Bailey designed a custom cylindrical space that brought to life the Burberry worlds of British Heritage, Fashion, Music and Weather to celebrate the opening of the Burberry Taiwan flagship store at Taipei 101.
Combining an eight part 360 degree film, a live musical performance and digital weather experience, Burberry World Live will tour cities globally including London, Hong Kong and Chicago later this year.
This multi sensory experience is the first to blur the physical and digital dimensions of the brand.
