SweetTweet - Concept / Design / Front End Development

The anti-Cursebird. A realtime feed of people telling others they love them via the Twitter service. From conception to deployment took about 6 hours.

www.sweettweet.co.uk

Utterly gorgeous.

• Large Organ

Spent the last few evenings messing with this and decided just to chuck it out there. Crap name, massive bassline.

If you like it there is a 320kbps MP3 version for download here

One word.

Want.

Spent some of the weekend fine tuning this trace of a famous image of Delia Derbyshire. Now I need to find some way of getting it onto a T-Shirt.

Was experimenting with creating text with particles and a friend who runs the Sound of Habib record label said that he wishes he had time to mess around with stars so this is a little christmas gift for him.

I started messing around with sin/cosin based grid manipulation a few days ago and posted the results on Flickr along with an abstract of the code and equation I used to generate the images.

This prompted Andy Best to amend the code to create two animations. Inspired by his efforts I decided to do my own animation in response.

The music is a quick edit I did of a Sir Drew bootleg 12" I've had for years and always loved.

Code after the jump.

import processing.opengl.*;
import oscP5.*;

OscP5 oscP5;

float xrot = 0;
float zrot = 0;

float xrot_targ = 0;
float zrot_targ = 0;
float orientation = 0;

float dampSpeed = 5;

void setup() {
  size(400,400, OPENGL);
  oscP5 = new OscP5(this,8000);
  smooth();
}

void draw() {
  camera(  0, 0, 300,
         0, 0, 0,
         0.0, 1.0, 0.0
     );
  background(0); 

  // Basic value smoothing

  if (xrot_targ > xrot) {
    xrot = xrot + ((xrot_targ - xrot) / dampSpeed);
  } else {
    xrot = xrot - ((xrot - xrot_targ) / dampSpeed);
  }

  if (zrot_targ > zrot) {
    zrot = zrot + ((zrot_targ - zrot) / dampSpeed);
  } else {
    zrot = zrot - ((zrot - zrot_targ) / dampSpeed);
  }

 // Detection for if the iPhone is upsidedown or not

  if (orientation < 0) {
    fill(255,0,0);
    rotateX(radians(xrot));
    rotateZ(radians(zrot));
  } else {
    fill(255,255,0);
    rotateX(radians(xrot*-1));
    rotateZ(radians(zrot*-1));
  }
  box(130,10,60);

}

void oscEvent(OscMessage theOscMessage) {
  if(theOscMessage.checkAddrPattern("/accxyz")==true) {
      xrot_targ = (theOscMessage.get(0).floatValue()*90);
      zrot_targ = (theOscMessage.get(1).floatValue()*90)*-1;
      orientation = theOscMessage.get(2).floatValue();
  }
}

Absolutely loving the latest work from Frederik that popped up on my Flickr Processing Group feed. The neon colour scheme is almost 80's in feel but it really works for me.

...to my mate Marc for letting him down royally and not doing his website for him when I said I probably could I thought I'd at least let you know that his site is up and full of yummy graphic design that he's done.

To make this work you'll need a few bits from around the internets. First up is the FFTOctaveAnalyser]]> Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:38:40 -0800 http://virb.com/stabilizer/posts/text/909941 http://virb.com/stabilizer/posts/text/893903

I've been tinkering with audio visualisations in Processing for a few years now. The three animated ones I was happy enough with to show I have been adding to Vimeo but the still versions had never seen the light of day apart from glimpses as part of the audio player on this site.

I finally signed up to Flickr and added a few higher res artifacts of the experiments over there as Marc Bessant had posted about them on his blog recently so thought I should out the rest myself. There are two kinds that I've done. The 'Fingerprint' and the 'DNA' styles are very closely linked in terms of back end code but produce very different results.

'Fingerprint' was the first one chronologically I wanted to get something organic feeling and at higher resolutions and with the right colour palette they can look almost watercolour like. 'DNA' was the offshoot. The result of a conversation with the aforementioned Marc Bessent about creating something to etch onto the empty side of a 12" single release. The release happened, but the band in question didn't go for the designs. Not sure what was used in it's place.

Over tonight the audio files and some images may well be missing as they upload on my terrible connection so apologies if things are missing. Hopefully as things calm down I'm actually gonna start putting some posts up but in the meantime you could always look at some of the photos I've taken recently and read the occasional tweet I post.

--update--

Content should all be up now and it should be fairly un-borked in IE7. If you use IE6 then to be honest you've only got yourselves (or your stalinist IT dept) to blame. Firefox and recent webkit browsers get the rounded corner love, which means I've chucked CSS validation out the window and I've got a stray p tag that's appearing as part of the audio players that is breaking HTML validation. Despite this the world turns still upon it's axis.

I will track it down eventually and squish that little bugger. But not tonight.

I have to say it's been a delight to use. Very intuitive and lovely sounding with some very unique features that make getting oddness out of this synth a breeze.

Came up with this track in a few evenings and it's 100% Circle. The only other bits are a touch of Reverence (Audio Damage reverb plug in) and the built in Ableton Live compressors and EQs.

Amazing piece of HTML/CSS/jQuery hackery by Cameron Adams that just begs to be played with. It looks like my future will mainly involve creating nostalgic Q-Bert landscapes.

Cubescape

Stolen.

So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.

We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.

Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn't just a simple backup restore.

The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.

As ever having Peter's name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.

Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register

Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.

WOMAD Shop - Website / Backend Design and Development

Brand new replacement shop for Real World which currently has a 7 figure turnover thanks to the exclusive stocking of WOMAD tickets.

Front and back end rebuilt from the ground up to enable products to be grouped in dynamic ways so digital downloads can be incorporated in the next phase with lots of work done to make the front end as simple as possible to create a higher conversion rate despite the relatively high amount of information required on-screen.

www.womadshop.com

Ana]]> Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:08:40 -0700 http://virb.com/stabilizer/posts/text/513131 http://virb.com/stabilizer/posts/text/510207

Ellipsis Copy- Website Design and Development

One of my few "Moonlance" jobs outside of work. A new website and identity for a Bath based copywriter's new company whose brief was for a very clean design that highlighted the copy above all else and using a personalized variant of the Tripoli CSS framework made the typography quick and easy to lay out.

The rest of the design went through many iterations, mainly stripping off all the clutter and cleaning up the layout.

www.ellipsiscopy.co.uk

It's not often you get to meet a legend, but working at Real World you get more than your fair share.

Not long ago I was scared half to death by Robert Plant when he excused a sneeze in my office when I thought I was alone and obsorbed with code and today I got to meet (again) one of the kingpin producers in my world, Adrian Sherwood.

Adrian is at Real World Studios mixing a project for Little Axe - one of my favourite Real World artists - and I was there trying to capture some moments on video for the forthcoming EPK but during some downtime we chatted for a moment about music production and he offered up some top tips and my boss, York Tillyer, captured the moment when Sherwood laid down the knowledge.