Pod1 Blog

Why not explore our local favorites in NoHo, New York?

Morning?
Grab a coffee or a Kombucha at  Gasoline Alley on Lafayette & Houston.

Lunch?
Delicious Brazilian curry and many more at the small BarBossa on Elizabeth & Prince St.
+wifi spot!

Korean food at Choga on Bleecker & LaGuardia Pl.

Dinner?
Enjoy the very hidden decor and great food of Freemans Restaurant off Rivington, between Chrystie and Bowery (Freemans Alley).

Let MonoMono seduce you with thousands of vinyls, great decor, soju and simply Korean fried chicken. On E 4th St Between 1st & 2nd Ave.

Cocktail?
Go celebrate your success with bespoke drinks at Mulberry Project on Mulberry St and Grand St.
+ Food and outdoor space.

Video Games. That’s the song that played in my mind when I first saw ASOS’s groundbreaking digital campaign – a shoppable online video that launched late last year. Scenes from Lana Del Ray’s music video for her smash hit play in my mind. Her obsession with collecting vintage video clips fascinates me. Why would one want to collect moving images? But then again, why not? Our society seems to have been preoccupied with the moving image since the late 1920s when television was first made commercially available. The screen has always played a huge part of our lives, now so, more than ever; it is a platform that documents the progression of our culture and history in the making.

Pier Paolo Piccioli, creative director of Valentino, recently commented on fashion saying, “If you don’t think about fashion, you just do clothes. Fashion needs culture or it becomes empty.” And so, what better medium to seamlessly merge fashion and culture than the moving image? And where better for the consumer to look for inspiration for their own style than on a screen?

But a television set just doesn’t cut it anymore. As technology improves, we spend more time consuming information from the screens of our computers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. As e-tail has exploded, fashion retailers have found value in combining online retail experiences with a medium that we are all so familiar with; the moving image. Brands like ASOS have pushed the envelope by combining those experiences within the video itself. It’s a way of unifying entertainment, editorial and shopping within one medium.

With technology’s ever-changing fast pace, and as consumers spend more of their lives online, what’s become the familiar online shopping experience is going to have to adapt. We’re going to have to continue to find creative ways to immerse the consumer into the brand experience and convince them that the brand is not only there for them but also willing to grow with them. Perhaps shoppable videos are the answer, well for now anyway – until they too become the norm of the online shopping experience. Watching scenes from the likes of Harry Potter and The Matrix where moving pictures are seemingly integrated into the characters’ everyday lives no longer seems to be a far-fetched fantasy.

Author’s note: The ASOS shoppable video is not the first of its kind, but it does take an innovative step in e-tail as it targets men. As men spend more time consuming information online as opposed to more traditional glossies, they look to culture, bands and films to shape their look. And what better way to include male consumers than by using a medium that has been documenting culture since its invention?

These guys seem to think they know…take a look:

It’s that time of the year again, when men put their faces on the line to raise awareness of how cold not having a beard is at this time of year.

Myself and Mr Chris Pendse are flying the Pod1 London Movember flag this year and have shaved off our usual facial adornments to raise money and awareness for some very good causes

We’ll be posting regular updates on how our moustaches are growing, if anyone has any requests, let us know. Not that we can promise an exact replica of your chosen style.

To donate generously to our cause, please go here

Thank you!

The New York creative team recently took some time out to visit The Museum of Modern Art (Moma) exhibition, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects. This exhibit was particularly relevant to us as it focused on objects that involve a direct interaction with its user. As contemporary designers, we are tasked with the responsibility of combining form, function and meaning to create the language and emotion that people and objects share.

According to the exhibition’s curator, Paola Antonelli, life in the 21st Century “is now pervaded by the need to communicate”. People from all walks of life have, for the most part, access to a wide range of technology that enables easy communication with each other, while also communicating with the technologies themselves. Not to mention ubiquitous objects, cities, governments, the internet, buildings, communities, social networks, systems and artificial worlds. Thus, designers have become the facilitators of these ‘conversations’; the dialogue between people and the dialogue with everything else.

The exhibition itself reinforces the notion that communication surrounds us by embracing the web in two ways. Firstly, by documenting the curatorial process and the exhibition’s progress via an online journal. And secondly, by allocating each object a hash-tag and a QR code, giving visitors another platform on which to easily learn more about each object.

The exhibition looks at examples of interfaces, information systems, visualization design and communication devices ranging from the 1960s to projects that are currently in development. From the 194 projects on display, here are a few that caught my eye:

Hello World by Bernhard Hopfengärtner
Hopfengärtner created a QR code visible on Google Maps using a lawn mower. The 160 x 160 meter wheat plant square grid read “Hello, world!” when decoded. Marrying low and high tech technology, the installation updates the ancient language of runes and crop circles. Can you imagine the possibilities for using this visual language on a global scale?

MetroCard Vending Machine by Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna Design, David Reinfurt, Kathleen Holman and MTA New York City Transit
Once a month, I use the MTA’s vending machine to get my unlimited monthly rider’s card. Touch screen technology and large, clear buttons make the purchasing process a simple and efficient one. And it is cleverly made of enamel-coated steel to prevent graffiti and scratches.

GE ecomagination: Home Appliance Energy Use by Lisa Strausfeld, Hilla Katki, Michael Deal and Adam Suharja of Pentagram
Pentagram developed a website as part of General Electric’s ecomagination environmental-awareness and education program that visualizes energy consumption by translating seemingly abstract measurements (watts and kilowatt-hours) into easily understandable volumes. Commonly used appliances appear in a grid in descending order of wattage consumption, such as cost, gas usage or kilowatt-hour performance. Energy usage is estimated by year, month or day allowing users to see where they can save money and energy.
View the project here.

Homeless City Guide by Emily Read and Chen Hsu
The centuries-old language of the hobo-code was revised for the urban homeless to use as a means of easy communication for the cost of a piece of chalk. A series of simple symbols is inscribed with chalk on sidewalks, buildings and other surfaces to share information about safety, shelter and free food.

If you’re not in New York, visit MOMA’s online exhibition catalogue to view more projects.

Speed up the web

Just a few days ago Google and OpenDNS teams to speed up the web by better routing of the web traffic. This action did have significant results on mainly US based users and to work on its full potentials ISPs will need to adapt the new standard they introduced.

In the meanwhile improve the web experience

The lets make the web faster team of Google cannot wait for ISPs to adapt. It is continuing releasing applications and services which will instantly improve the web experience, although the web itself might still be slow!

“Yet Another Caching Solution” many might say. Instant pages is pre-loading pages on your browser which are available for instant viewing.
Well, not quite…. “Yet another solution with a touch of AI” is what I would say.

Knowing the user behaviour it will not pre-load every search result. Only those pages a user is likely to click will be pre-loaded. Here is how Google announced Instant Pages:

We introduce Instant Pages, a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster–in some cases even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we’re very confident about which result is the best answer for your search.

Available on Chrome

You can try this interesting caching solution by downloading the latest development version of chrome, or you can wait until the new version.

Firefox responds?

The firefox community will need to respond as they did on the release of Instant Search with the 3 Firefox Addons That Let You Search Faster Than Google Instant. For now Firefox just becomes slower, but we should expect a response very soon.

What Instant Pages mean for you?

Webmasters and administrators should follow closely this new tool as often Google will preload content from their website and a spike on traffic will be noticed.
Knowing that loading speed still affects rankings, make sure those preload requests will not slow down your hosting speed!

Once again a 4+minutes video from our favourite Matt Cutts.
The question this time was:

Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?
How About how many redirects I can chain together?

First free tip is: Try to deep link on the most relevant page of the new site. Do not just redirect to the home page. This is bad for both Search Engines and User Experience, as they are both looking for a specific page and not for your home page. You will be impressed on the ‘influence’ this will have on your bounce rate percentage.

On the number of redirects you can compile from site1 to site2, the answer is: There is no limit on the number of redirects you can compile. Feel free to be as precise on your 301s as you like. Google will not punish you! On the contrary both Google crawlers and human visitors will appreciate this extra effort of yours

And last is the tricky part. Although there is no limit on the number of redirects, there is a limit on the number of hops/chains we can build until we reach the final URL which resolves and returns an HTTP  200 result. Search engine crawlers are likely to stop following the redirects after 3 hops and will certainly not follow any hops after the sixth. Keep in mind, that even if due to luck or due to high reputation of your website, crawlers do decide to follow the long 6 chain of redirects you have, the latency will be so high, that your pages SEO value will be decreased and as a result your page will not rank as expected.
The wget tool can help you into counting the number of hops/chains until you reach your final destination. Those familiar with Linux/Cygwin can use it straight ahead by typing “wget www.yoururl.com/yourpath –delete-after“. Windows users can download the wget tool here

And some Matt Cutts infographics: 4.1% of Matt Cutts videos are over 4 minutes and Matt wears a yellow t-shirt on 8.1% of his videos, see more Matt Cutts Infographics here and the full article from Google webmasters blog

A designer’s role often includes the task of asking seemingly stupid questions. These questions are part of the designer’s quest to solve a given problem or, in some cases, stumble upon existing problems.

At ‘Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference’, students focused on the latter, delivering a 10-minute presentation on their thesis topics. Cramming months of research into just 10 minutes must have been exceptionally hard (I’ve been there and done that and, trust me, it is) but each student succeeded in articulating their complex ideas. Topics ranged from the design of playgrounds to the use of sound as a communicative tool in design, but all shared the common thread: asking stupid questions about the present tense, and design’s relevance as an advocate for change in the social and environmental spheres.

Keynote speaker Rob Walker, a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and author of ‘Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are’, opened the conference with his observation on our relationship with objects, referring to his project, Significant Objects throughout his address. This set the tone for the rest of the conference during which students critiqued our relationship with existing design practices and artifacts and, where relevant, how these can be improved upon for our benefit and that of the environment.

In conclusion, a panel discussion featuring several key figures from the design industry, and moderated by writer and freelance documentary film producer and director Adam Harrison Levy, was held to discuss the priorities, possibilities and impact of design criticism. Although the panel discussion was short, many important issues regarding design as a whole were raised and debated.

In an age where regular Joes and Janes have easy access to design tools such as Photoshop, and websites that enable just about anyone to create their own virtual space, it begs the question; how will this affect our roles as designers in the future?

Attending this conference was worth the reminder that our process – the constant pull of insatiable curiosity and critique – is what gives the design industry its credibility.

Videos from the conference are available here

We are really pleased to announce that Pod1 was ranked as one of the best agencies in the Top 100 design groups in Design Week’s 2011 independent survey of the UK’s creative services.

The highly respected Design Week survey is based on audited fee-income and is a measure of how successful companies are in the UK’s creative services market.

In the full top 100 listing Pod1 was ranked at number 23, up 8 places from the previous 2010 survey.

Pod1 was also listed in the top 10 UK digital consultancies in terms of market share.

And last but not least we were also positioned at number 10 for “leapfroggers” within the consultancy chart.

We are very proud to be listed amongst some of the UK’s finest. It’s also a great testament to the outstanding expertise and creative talent we have at Pod1.