I finished The Umbrella Academy in one sitting, versus Blackest Night which I just got in the middle of. Maybe because I was looking for a different kind of story that didn’t involve typical superheroes. The Umbrella Academy is about 7 “heroes” with extraordinary powers who were adopted by one “father.” They save the world from Apocalypse. Although the story seems typical, it actually sounds like the tv series “Heroes”, it is told in a fresh way. The 7 heroes each have their own history and challenges. I really like how the story is paced. The writer, Gerard Way, is also the front man of the band “My Chemical Romance.” Which probably why the rhythm is very deliberate… almost like a song. By the end of one chapter, I kept longing for more. Possibly also similar to the pace of TV series. The art too is unique. Gabriel Ba is a Brazilian who does comic book illustration for realist series rather than superhero comics. The art adds more to the words, things that were just implied, were spelled out in the art, which in turn completed the story.

Although the series was published in 2007 and this review is 2 years late, I still think it was worth every penny.

But this wasn’t the one that got me hooked. If you go in deeper and look at the other ways they present information, you’ll find 2 other views: using your camera or using your mic. With the camera view, you can flash colors into your camera and the website reacts by showing you the same color on screen with the news inside it. Or with the audio input, you speak into the mic and it blasts out the boxes as your audio gets louder. Excellent! “I gots to hav them killa flash skillz.”

I’m a fan of the futuristic style of the old Tron movies. I think I even had an atari game of it. I have a dvd of the original that I re-watched a couple of years back, and personally I thought it was a bit slow. I guess movies back then were. Still, Tron enjoyed a lot of cult following… if you google Tron, you’d probably get some fat geek wearing a Tron outfit. But I digress.

When I saw that they were doing a sequel to Tron, the images got me excited. Jeff Bridges is reprising his role as the uber-hacker taking down the big corporation. Olivia Wilde, from House MD tv fame and number 1 of Maxim’s Hot 100 of 2009, will also be in the film. They showed the trailer during comic-con and it looks kick-ass:

Big news on the internets is Yahoo’s brave new look. It is on the rollout globally, but from what I’ve been hearing only some countries can accesses it today. In the Philippines, we can actually click on their “try out our new look” banner which will lead you to the new design, as seen in the screenshot above.

So finally Yahoo! is shedding any more traces of its red logo and going completely purple. I feel the renewed energy of yahoo, specially here in the philippines with its Purple Hunt that is currently ongoing. Although I rarely visit the homepage, I do use some of their products often like flickr, YM, yahoogroups, etc. It’s funny to see that they opened up their homepage to add links to other social networking sites like facebook and myspace.

Below are the “before” screenshots of yahoo.com and yahoo philippines, and while looking at it I notice that structurally it is the same. Same information hierarchy and grid but opting for a “flatter” feel removing the beveled glossy buttons and the quick access to your YM, mail accounts. It is also good that they moved their logo to the left instead of center, although this maybe a big departure from all of their previous designs, the logo was taking up too much valuable screen real estate anyway. It’s not a long shot to say that this may be influenced by their biggest rival. Are they playing catch-up?

Instead of simply putting a generic name like “acetaminophen”, it says “help, I have a headache.” Or instead of “ibuprofen”, “help, I have an aching body.” More packaging images can be found in this blog lovelypackage.com and at coolhunting.com

I looked at their website and found that they are really approaching the world of medicine with a quirky point of view. For example, I played around with the images in their website to make it all the same color. Once that was complete, the site opened a new tab to Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation, hilarious.

The general tone of their site is really loose and casual, At one of their product pages, there is a link that says – our sincerest apologies, clicking on it popped up a new window with the following text:

“Dear sneeze fetishist,
Sorry. Help remedies does not intend to deprive anyone of the things that they love in life. In order to counterbalance the impact of “help I have allergies,” help remedies hereby provides www.helpihaveasneezingfetish.com. We hope this will make up for some of the sadness we have caused you.”

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

“Lights On” audio visual performance by ‘thesystemis’ created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria

Watch it… so hypnotic… how I wish I could make something at this scale… This is sorta what I tried to do with my MMDA entry. Makes me cry when I think of the possibilities.. and how the judges missed the chance!

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

I have heard similar stories of designers, some of whom I know personally, that work inside big corporations having similar gloomy outlooks. I cannot clam to know how that might feel like… but I guess it would suck. But personally I think Doug has to see his contributions, no matter how minuscule, as world changing. He helped designed Google Calendar… now, can you imagine how the world would be without the great work he put into it?

Pretty awesome view of the future according to microsoft.  I’d love to be a part of the team that will make that real.

Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab Fluid interfaces presented a demo of their Sixth Sense project at TED recently.  The project is about bringing more information about anything at your fingertips, literary.  

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Pranav Mistry, who is spearheding this project, is shown during the demo with a camera/projector necklace which captures images that your fingers point to then projects more information about that image.  For example, when you are at a grocery, while deciding which product to buy, you hold up that detergent then your necklace gets information from the web and projects it into the box.  Now you know if the detergent is really as environment friendly as they say it is.  Although it is slightly clunky (you wouldn’t catch me wearing colored rings at the ends of my fingetips) the concept is very solid and very likely to succeed.  I hope to see this in the market in a couple of years.