John Kilpatrick's Blogs

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

An ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden.

This is simply amazing.

Last week we launched a new PC gaming download experience called BIG Download. GameDaily and Joystiq are partnering on the editorial coverage.

Take a moment to check out the personalized "game tracker" If you add [+] games to your tracker, we'll automatically place the downloads in your queue, whenever there's an update!

I really like where we landed with the branding... we wanted to have fun with the logo. It's a downloading site for PC gaming enthusiasts and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Look out in the future to see more of the big guy doing different things across the site.

Looking for a good movie to see this summer? If so, check out the latest Summer Movies feature on moviefone.
I'm hoping this summer's Incredible Hulk may be a little better than the first one.

It's hard to find a website with a concept more simple, or addicting, than fffound.com.

Have an image that you absolutely love? Post it on fffound.com for others to see. See an image on someone else's profile that you like? Add it to your favorites and the site will direct you to similar images. That's it. This site is based around a single, focused idea: building a community site around imagery. If you like one image from a user, most likely you will like other images that that person has collected.

I keep returning to this site as a place for both inspiration and escape. I've used it for everything from research for artwork for my apartment to scouting out new design talent. But mostly I just find myself aimlessly clicking around and getting lost in the experience. Fffound.com owes it's success to two things: it's simplicity of design and the creativity of its users. Let's hope that both stay strong as the site grows.

Here goes another one... we launched a new blog today called Urlesque. Following up on the success of Asylum, we developed a new site that will focus on "what are people blogging about today."

Let us know what you think about the design.

The auditorium at the Rem Koolhaas designed Campus Center in Chicago was the perfect setting for a discussion about design process. Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Jason Fried (37signals), and Carlos Segura (Segura Inc. ) lead a "presentation and discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration."

Lately, I find myself focusing on creative process. How to create great work, keep the team inspired and avoid some of the pitfalls that happen to a creative team while working at a large organization. So, I headed out to the Seed conference in Chicago to get an outside perspective.

It was a strong group of speakers, and I enjoyed the range of disciplines. I was inspired by the broad range of work from Carlo Segura's design studio, and the high level of design he maintained over the years. The redesign of Corbis is briliant. But, I really went to hear Jason Fried from 37 Signals talk about his work process. Jason Fried's work philosophy centers around the principle of working with small teams, but I still took away some basic concepts I could apply to the AOL entertainment design team.

A few key points from Jason presentation that hit home:

Ship when the core product is ready. Nothing is worse for team morale than long development cycles.

Your work expands to fill the time available.

2 or 3 people work on a core product. If that team can't do the work, they scale the work back. They never add people to the team.

Interruption is the enemy of productivity. At times, collaboration can be considered an interruption and a fragmented day is not a productive day.

Meetings are symptoms and not solutions. Meetings should be a last resort as they require preparation that people aren't going to do anyway. Meetings shouldn't last more than 30 minuets.

"I would rather people grow out of our products rather than not be able to grow into them." Jason Fried

The AOL entertainment team in New York launched a new men's lifestyle blog called Asylum. In response to a new programming strategy at AOL, we're developing new brands and creating relevant content to serve new audiences. The design captures a clever editorial feel that should sit well with the target audience, while not taking itself too seriously.

What is Asylum all about? Better let Jared and Neil explain.

In my opinion, the clean design style is one of the most elegant designs on the Blogsmith platform.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I wanted to attend the Seed conference in Chicago, but couldn't get away from the office. Based on these amazing notes from Mike Rohde from the conference, looks like I missed a good one.

There are some really good themes I caught in the notes. It's worth a quick moment to read. I really like the quote "forget about the valuation of facebook."