The continuing story of our recent art installation project…

During the original proposal phase, we investigated how we might project animations onto a sheet of clear glass. Obviously this is not normally possible (try it - you get a faintly ghosted image and… er… thats it). However, we had previously discovered a product called HoloPro which seemed to fit our requirements: it is virtually transparent, so when placed on glass provides a near-invisible projection surface. In addition, it doesn’t display black, so if you project a white animation moving over a black background, what you see on the glass is the animation apparently moving in mid air. Nifty!

Ben Aquilina stood behind some sample HoloPro glass.

With the project secured, we began negotiations with the HoloPro supplier, Pro Nova and their UK representatives, Amvida. Our requirement was a single sheet of HoloPro film, which would be sandwiched between between two sheets of glass, each 4 metres wide by 1 metre high. At the time Pro Nova had not produced a single sheet anything like that size, so our initial plan was to create three sheets and have them butted together inside the glass.

To help with our investigation, Amvida kindly lent us a small sheet of HoloPro glass for the duration of the project.

The tech department install the test sheet of HoloPro.

A close up of the HoloPro film, showing the individual ‘cells’.

Joe stood behind the glass, running a demo animation. Simple lines and objects seem to work best on HoloPro.

The nature of HoloPro began to determine how the final animations would look. Clean simple lines and strong areas of colour gave the most impressive results. One of our earlier ideas was to have a sense that images and text were ‘growing’ onto the screen - HoloPro seemed to work brilliantly with this style of animation.

After a series of workshops with Prudential to determine the basic approach to the animations, we determined they would:

be slow and elegant
would build up over time
would be mainly black and white but incorporate key brand colours as highlights
would be ‘organic’ in nature i.e. waterfalls, globes, trees etc.

This gave us a good brief to begin development of the graphic and animation style. It now fell to our tech dept to build a software solution that would deliver these massive scale animations…

In the next blog: our technical solution, delivering ultra-wide screen projections (on the office’s back wall)

Flash on the Beach, the UK’s premier Flash event, took place last week in Brighton. There was a strong thread of generative art running through the conference, and how it can be used to create things that would be barely physically possible using traditional illustrator skills.

This post is going to be a bit epic, so here’s a pretty picture. The rest of the text follows after the break.

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This time last year Cogapp embarked on one of its most extraordinary projects. A project which would involve: creating and installing the world’s largest single piece of ‘HoloPro’ film, embedded in a four metre sheet of glass; writing custom software to display, synchronise and merge high definition content over four ‘hidden’ projectors; and ultimately the creation of a unique and breathtaking piece of multimedia art. This would come to be known as the Prudential Eye.

The Prudential Group has a long history of sourcing and displaying beautiful art around its buildings. In 2006 they approached Cogapp to create brand new kind of art installation - one which would be challenging and thought-provoking, engaging but not distracting, and one which used state-of-the-art technology to tell a range of stories about the Group. This installation would be both art piece and storyteller.

Our solution was a sheet of glass, four metres by one, suspended in space, beautiful and ethereal, a real talking point - even when switched off!

Below: Early concept illustrations as presented to the project board.

Animations, text and images would dance across the glass, examining the past, present and future of the Prudential Group. A thoughtful mix of art and storytelling - using technology which did not yet exist, and on hardware that had never been built to this scale. The challenge was clear!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be putting up more ‘making of…’ posts about the Eye, taking you from the concepts above, all the way through to the robot assisted installation. To end part one of this story, here are some early mockups of the concept and a 3D walkthrough of what we planned to create…

Concept renders created by Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson.

iDesign, London’s first big conference on digital design, provided the main digital focus for the London Design Festival, backed by the London Development Agency. The event brought together online, mobile, film, games and TV, aiming to discuss how these affect our collective digital future with a focus on design principles and practices for both economic and social benefit.

iDesign itself was organised by Dynamo London and New Media Knowledge, and hosted by Simon Waterfall, who established a company Poke, and is the current D&AD president. Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson and Production Director Jason Ryan were in attendance after Malcolm Garrett of Applied Information Group nominated Cogapp as a creative inspiration in the digital supplement for Design Week magazine. The panel of judges, including Malcolm Garrett, talked about their inspirations, with some quite experimental and ‘out there’ ideas.

The event show stealer was Martyn Ware, a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17. Martyn’s current work with illustrious focuses on public space interactives that are very information driven. Martyn works in collaboration with Vince Clarke, from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, and showcased some terrific soundscape material, focusing on 3D sound and interactive spaces. Other contributors included (Malcolm’s fellow student) Peter Saville and Nick Knight’s SHowstudio, and D-Fuse.

Other speakers included Adam Gee, who presented on Channel 4 Big Art Mob – an arts-based cultural project housed by Channel 4 which uses mobile technology and user generated content to create what “the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art”. Although not fully cross-platform yet, the response from users is already encouraging.

Interactive lighting artist Jason Bruges, showed his illuminated visions of architectural augmentation. He has a strong body of work, doing public space projects like wind-generated light sticks, with really beautiful design. Dazed Digital have a feature on Jason to watch here.The iDesign panel showed a great deal of pioneering and emotive projects, and the design discussions were very broad in topic. There was a really nice wide discussion about how these things need to start connecting with the important side of user experience, online and offline campaigns, and more; bringing a very intelligent and fun edge to what was a pure design conference. You can read a full report on the Dynamo London site here.

Here is a video clip of Malcolm Garrett’s talk at the conference we thought we’d share, with some rather familiar characters featured. Thanks to Youtube user Drumgold who has lots of other material from iDesign.

Chances are, if you’re watch telly any point soon you’ll probably be seeing a font created by Fontsmith.

Ben, Fiona and I have come across Fontsmith a few times this year, they’ve created a number of stunning typefaces used by a few of our clients and are currently the ‘tour de force’ of type design studios.

One of the things that really sets Fontsmith apart is their ability to create really beautiful typefaces that work superbly on screen; BBC One, Channel 4, More 4, ITV, Film 4 to name a few.

Enjoyable and well worth looking at - Fontsmith

In the spirit of debate about the 2012 brand launch, design consultancy Bibliothèque exhibited their fantastic collection of design work by Otl Aicher and his team for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

It’s a timeless and extensive communications system covering books, posters, signage and was executed by a team of over 4o designers.

Wonder if 2012 will be admired in a similar way in 25 years (hope so) ?

Bibliothèque 72 Exhibition

Wiki - Otl Aicher

Character designed by Dainippon Type Organization - http://www.kokuyo.co.jp/hiramekitoys/toypography/

The font set is broken down into parts which can be transformed into Japanese text, or fun creatures!

Using a tool called Walrus, a clever chap called Young Hyun thinks it looks like this:

“Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, it provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context.”

The Gallery of images depicts nodes in a surprisingly organic and natural looking way, featuring visualisations of web site directory hierarchies, CVS repository (not normally known for their visual beauty), and directory trees.

Much prettier than we thought it would be.

If anyone has any children’s drawings of ‘What the web looks like’ we would be interested to see.

Created by Brand New School in New York, this interactive billboard was designed to in conjunction with the launch of Adobe’s new CS3 range of products and it’s tagline ‘Creative License’.

It’s an interesting execution of a simple idea and one that starts to push the boundaries of brand experience a little further away from the standard self contained brand showreel approach towards something a little more interactive.

http://www.brandnewschool.com/project.php?id=410

I found this site whilst doing Discovery for a pitch earlier this year. I’ll make no bones about it, it’s pretty ‘out there’ in terms of design and IA, the idea of placing the car parking information in a giant pop up car possibly verges between madness and genius, you decide.

It’s certainly memorable…

http://www.airport-cgn.de/

After a few minutes playing with the site I actually quite liked it, in a crazy, chunky soft icons sort of way.