Posts Tagged ‘design’

Vordometer, an app to cut the wheat from the chaff!

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

The Vordometer App

Nation is naturally drawn to making stuff that is fun to use and a bit cheeky. Adam & Eve London approached us to help them create an app that automatically ages your significant other and then judges their attractiveness against Carol Vorderman. How can you refuse a brief like that? The app prompts you to take a photo of your partner and proceeds to do some complicated maths stuff to make him/her look as hot as The Vorderman (if you like that sort of thing) or somebody who the incessant march of time hasn’t been quite so kind too.

You can share the photo’s with your internet companions via Facebook and Twitter. Best of all? it’s free. Enjoy!

Grab the app by searching the ITunes app store for ‘Vordometer’, or clicking this link: Vordometer on the app store

More images after the jump

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BCKCHNL (Back Channel)

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Back Channel on a desktop and a phone.

BCKCHNL (short for Back Channel) is a super simple Twitter search app. We built it with ’2nd Screens’ in mind so whether that’s monitoring a hash-tag you’re interested, or following a specific keyword. The app uses javascript to constantly refresh the feed with new results so past the initial search it’s essentially a passive experience of watching the tweets roll by. We wanted a simple clean interface that worked across big screens, projections, tablet devices and mobile devices alike.

BCKCHNL is one of our many internal projects to finally see the light of day and conceived and designed and built as a collaboration between Nation and our good buddy Al Monk

The app is still in alpha, so there may be the odd bug or two, but check it out BCKCH.NL and let us know what you think.

We’re trying to keep it as simple and as minimal as possible but there are a couple of things you can do to push the functionality if you’re so inclined:

You can pull in multiple search terms by adding a comma (and no spaces) in between words.

If you don’t even want to go to the homepage to search you can just add the search terms to the end of the url with a hash. So for example: http://bckch.nl/#happy,sad will show you a feed of tweets containing either the word ‘happy’ or the word ‘sad.’

The size of the tweets in the stream are large by design, but can easily be adjusted in your browser by holding ctrl/cmd and pressing +/- on your keyboard.


Testing BCKCHNL on the ipad while watching tv

Cartoon Network: Total Drama

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

So we just finished a flash microsite for Cartoon Network UK to help promote a show called ‘Total Drama: World Tour’. The site allows visitors to create their own character, set their various attributes, special skills and then share the creation with their friends. The campaign is primarily targeted at central european and nordic countries and will be live until early October but if the site continues at it’s current rate we may need to upgrade our hosting package (200k+ hits in the first week). Visit the english site here: http://www.cartoonnetworkhq.net/tdwt

Total Drama World Tour Homepage

WTF shall I do this weekend?

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Weekends are for expanding the mind and getting involved with diverse cultural and creative offerings, or sitting in your underwear eating cereal and fighting nazi’s in a room filled with only the flickering of a giant TV. To push ourselves out of doing the latter we decided to make a little website to display neat stuff happening near you. The site uses the eventful API and an idea wholly inspired by http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/. It throw’s up obscure, interesting and occasionally amusing stuff; See it here

The Facebook Like Button Stamp

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

We had an idea, we got it made. Now people all over the world are using it on 90% of the things that cross their desks. The Like/Dislike stamps were something that started out life as a joke in the studio. A rubber stamp we could use to attack each others paperwork with. Once twitter and a couple of the big tech blogs got hold of it we were inundated with requests. Cut to a month later and we were in full production of the stamp, selling it through our own online store to people all over the world (including one to the man himself, Mark Zuckerberg.) An internal project that went awry in the best possible way.

If you’re so inclined you can also keep track of updates in the studio and to the Stamp by following us on twitter @Nationstudio and joining the Facebook fan page

**UPDATE, DECEMBER 2010**

A new more affordable version of the Like/Dislike stamps is soon to be available in all good retailers. If you live in the US the stamp can soon be bought from thinkgeek.com and for the UK and Europe you can pre-order at Firebox.com

Prototype:

Like_001

Like_004

The Nation Newspaper 2009

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

P1000142_blog

As is the way with most design studios we spent a couple of weeks before Christmas scrambling to get something together to send out to clients, friends and anyone else we may have worked with over the past year. Despite being a digital studio, we were tired and unimpressed by 99% of the ‘digital Christmas cards’ we’d seen over the past couple of years and know that the people we work with are similarly unimpressed. We wanted to produce something that may be of some use and would hopefully engage with people for more than 5 seconds.

We decided on kicking it old school and printing a Newspaper featuring all the interesting things we’d seen, enjoyed and been inspired by in 2009. Videos, product designs, computer games, installations, experiments, interesting blogs and even some stuff that served no purpose at all. To run along side the Newspaper we built a mobile friendly blog featuring further info and video of the stuff in action. The newspaper features QR codes and shortcodes to enable people reading the paper to quickly jump to a video they were interested in or simply pull the blog up on their mobile device/computer and browse along as they read the paper.

You can see more photos in the Nation flickr stream and if you didn’t receive one and you like a copy of the paper send us an A4 envelope with 2 x 1st class stamps on it and we’ll pop one in the mail for you.

Our address:
Nation,
Top Floor Studio,
51 Hoxton Square,
London,
N1 6PB (more…)

Alice by Temperley

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

001_Alice_HomeBIG

A little peek at some work we’re doing for fashion designer Alice Temperley’s new brand. More news as we’re allowed to talk about it.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

wizardofOz

Unfortunately for Fran (our new and most excellent intern) the only desk currently free to sit at in the studio is where our server sits. Tom discovered a new way to creatively direct the work she’s been doing with screen-sharing, Ustream.com and a webcam. As well as having his giant face loom-large, we stream music from that computer so his voice booms out through the stereo.

Fran quickly located the off switch on the monitor.

Shelley Fox

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Shelley Fox is an haute couture designer who needed a website to represent herself and house her extensive body of work.

Whilst working at Digit, Tom worked in close contact with Shelley and her associates to achieve an end product which represented her way of thinking, and was in line with her aesthetic. He was in charge of designing and managing the build of the Flash site that holds 11 years of collections, projects, exhibitions and press clippings.

http://www.shelleyfox.com

shelley001

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