Home sweet homepage

After lots of searching, Bright Spark Digital has a new home. We’ve not moved far from our temporary home in Bermondsey Street and will now be located in-between London and Tower Bridge.

The obligatory trip to IKEA beckons as well as some serious cleaning and painting work before we’ll be all set. Please see the Contact page for the new address.

Speaking of new homes, you’ve probably also noticed we’ve finally got our new website up and running. As well as a fresh lick of Photoshop paint, we’ve also added a Twitter feed so you can see what’s getting us fired up over BSD HQ.

Thumbs up for the Web Open Font Format

Since the birth of the World Wide Web and HTML browsing, web developers have always had to work hard accommodating the typographic dreams of creative directors and designers. As browser technology has evolved, so have the options for web typography. Over recent years, there has been an ever increasing number of ways to render type within a web browser (GIF image text, SIFR, FLIR, SVG, EOT, Cufon etc.) None of these have been truly standard, cross platform and cross browser solutions.

The latest Firefox 3.6 browser release adds support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and will hopefully provide real momentum for its acceptance as the de-facto font file format for use within browsers and web pages.

Whilst SIFR and Cufon provide decent vector font replacement techniques, creating WOFF files and embedding them in a page using CSS3 syntax really is a breeze (anyone who’s used Microsoft Weft to create Embedded OpenType files will certainly appreciate the simplicity).

There are a lot of folks hoping Microsoft and Google also get behind this one. If they do, it might finally allow web developers and designers to get on with things font-related using a standard convention rather than wondering which hack to use or which browser they won’t support.

As well as improvements in browser capabilities, such as Firefox’s WOFF support, websites such as TypeKit and FontSquirrel provide simple mechanisms to generate or embed custom fonts within web sites. FontSquirrel provides access to many fonts free of EULA issues as well as an excellent web font generation service. This creates a pret-a-porter zip file containing web font files, sample CSS and HTML for OTF and TTF fonts that you upload. This is a great way to simplify getting the correct files and font-face definitions into your web pages.

TypeKit takes a slightly different approach, operating as a subscription service and uses a JavaScript include file to add bespoke font-face rules according to a browser’s capabilities. I’m sure there are many more font services out there too, hopefully all helping drive towards an open standard for web fonts.

Overall it should be an interesting year in web typography for designers and developers alike. We'll be keeping our eye on how it all unfolds.

Useful links
http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/About_WOFF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator
http://typekit.com/

Flash bang wallop, what a picture.

A few weeks back something arrived in my twitter feed which really caught my attention. Someone posted a picture they had taken of a train station. Ordinarily it would’ve been the sort of thing I would’ve quickly closed and not thought of again, but this had something different.

It had obviously been photoshopped to give it a particular style; kind of Polaroid like, a greenish colour cast, distressed markings. It had an overall feeling of ‘faded glamour’ that really appealed to me. As it turned out it wasn’t photoshopped but had actually been taken using an iPhone app called ‘Hipstamatic’. Intrigued, I downloaded it to take a look.




What is it?

Hipstamatic is essentially a camera app which applies a set filter effect to each picture you take to give it the aforementioned style (I can hear the tuts and curses of a thousand designers already). But hold on a minute. Let’s have a think about this…

Is it cheating?

Well, yes and no. And honestly, more yes than no. But that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t worthy of attention. The app allows you to mix and match between an array of different lens types, flashes and films, so there’s still a certain level of creativity there. Plus you still need to choose and frame a shot, which is surely still the biggest creative variable? Is it really any different from using a Photoshop filter or brush? Or a Javascript plug-in?

Don’t get me wrong, part of me feels that as a graphic designer I should be the one manipulating my photographs, experimenting and exploring with visual effects of my own, and to be honest, I still do. If anything, Hipstamatic has been somewhat of an inspiration for me to do more of that, which can only be a good thing.

Hipstamatic for the people

What’s really nice here is that people who aren’t skilled in the dark arts of Photoshop are being given the means to play around with visual effects they would otherwise have no idea how to achieve, and they’re producing some really interesting results. And I think the key word there is ‘play’. It’s a fun tool, not a serious piece of software, so let’s play with it.




Not just a pretty face…

Finally, there’s more here to appreciate than just the output. The application interface itself is beautifully designed to look like an old school SLR, there’s obviously been a lot of care and attention gone into it.




Will it get tired quickly? Maybe. Is it impressive in the short term? Definitely.

Check out more about the app here:

http://www.hipstamaticapp.com

And to take a look at some of the results, check out this Flickr set:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hipstamatic/pool/

Gold, Frankincense and Beer...

Late November we went live with our latest project, a global Christmas Campaign for Stella Artois called ‘Send a Card, Save a Tree’.

We were approached back in October and asked to come up with a killer campaign idea that would capture people’s imaginations, and 6 weeks on and a lot of hard work later, we believe we’ve done just that.

The result is an e-Card campaign with a little more oomph, the oomph in this case being the use of augmented reality, one of 2009’s most interesting trends.

Using Flartoolkit, a Flash based AR framework, the e-Card recreates the look and feel of the Stella Artois Christmas TV Commercial and provides the audience with a new and truly engaging brand experience.

Users are asked to hold up a marker image to their webcam and in return are presented with an interactive 3D winter scene, complete with a chalice of Stella Artois, blowable snow and a personalised Christmas wish.

But as the campaign name suggests, there’s more to it than just a cool e-Card to send to your friends, there’s also a great environmental incentive for taking part. Stella Artois in association with the World Land Trust have pledged to save a tree in Argentina’s rainforest for every e-Card sent.

Introducing the Rolls-Royce of websites

We’ve been off the radar for a couple of months but we’re finally pleased to announce the launch of Rolls-Royce Motor Car’s new global website. The driving force behind the website is the unveiling of the new Ghost model at this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show and it was all hands on deck to deliver the site by the September deadline.

Brought on board by advertising agency Partners Andrews Aldridge for our experience within the luxury sector, Bright Spark Digital took creative and technical lead on the project. We set out to capture the essence of the new forward-thinking Rolls-Royce brand. Visually, it’s simple and light on style, which is at the heart of Rolls-Royce’s design approach. As is said of the new Ghost, "It’s natural, not styled".

The technical solution reflects the brand values of "effortless and seamless" using AJAX transitions and some clever "hidden technology", another key component of all Rolls-Royce cars.

Overall, we’re hugely happy with the result and you can check out the site for yourself at www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com.

So there's good news and bad news...and great news

So, let's start with the good news. It's very simple. We're still here. And with the current economic climate the way it is, I'm personally very relieved and happy that's the case.


It's been a real rollercoaster few months for us here at Bright Spark. We've all been finding ways to stay busy and motivated and at times it's been tough, but it doesn't take much to remind us that we're exactly where we want to be, doing exactly what we want to do.

It all started with the release of TwitCal back in May, our first venture into designing and developing on top of the Twitter API. And that's where the bad news comes in.

It was a project we were very excited about when it first rolled out, but unfortunately we hit a pretty major barrier not even a month after it went live...

Being at the mercy of Twitter's search database proved to be the nail in the coffin when we found out they had started archiving it on a regular basis. Basically what that meant for TwitCal was that if you placed an entry into your calendar, it wouldn't be there in a months time. Annoying. We may still pick it up and try and resolve the issue somehow in the future, but for now we'll bow out gracefully and peg it up as a fun learning experience.

Anyway, as mentioned in the title, there's also some great news. And it's really great news. We were contacted at the beginning of June by an old colleague who said he had a piece of work we may be interested in. To keep a long story short, we were interested, and it turned out to be our first big break. In fact you couldn't get much bigger. We can't mention the brand right now (I know, I don't like to tease but I really can't say) but needless to say it's probably the most prestigious global brand in it's field, and it's a full dot com redesign.

So it might be a poor excuse, but we've been so busy of late, that's the main reason for us going dark for a while. We'll make more of an effort from here on in, afterall, the success of our company doesn't lay solely in this one project, no matter how big a deal it is. We're on course to go live with it at the end of August, so check back and we'll have more news soon.

In other news, we have a number of very interesting prospects on the table that will hopefully land in our laps in the coming months (we're not just saying that you a sceptical bunch - it's true!), as well as plans to launch our first iPhone app by the end of the year, which was actually the brainchild of a very famous comedy writer...

ITV's best ever ads

ITV’s countdown of the twenty greatest commercials of all time was wonderful. I laughed and cried at the pure genius of the creators of such fantastic content and admired the brand managers for having the guts to let their agencies create such iconic Telly.

As online moves from pure search to entertainment I wonder if we will ever see the 20 best banners, buttons or websites. More interestingly will they deliver the same emotional experience that we can get from big broadcast? Certainly YouTube is funny and I can cite a long list of virals that have made me double up with laughter.

Somehow, it’s just not the same and although TV and the Internet are converging. There is still a difference in the mindset from surfing the web to skipping through the channel lists. You may even be doing the two things together but doing them for a different reason. People are watching TV through their computers, but to them it is still TV and that is key.

The Internet is an incredible marketing tool and as technology changes it becomes ever more powerful. It can enable you to find the opening times of your local chemist and with a click transport you on a photo extravaganza of the Amazon, it can tell you what you workmates are twittering and let you video call your best friend in Australia.

We are a digital agency, we design and build highly creative and rewarding solutions for the digital world; we watch streamed video on our laptops and phones, we play ‘Call of Duty’ online in Hi Def wirelessly through our TV. Yet we also sit down on a Saturday night, watch a good old-fashioned commercial on ITV and it still makes us laugh.