I have recently seen a proliferation of photographers' websites created using the same template in LiveBooks. Sigh. The presentation is always clean and viewable, but after awhile all work melds into a single unmemorable slideshow in the same template... This is why, when I stumbled (literally, there was stumbling) across sleeth.info, I was utterly confused.

Matthew Sleeth has created an entire counterfeit world for self advertisement. Instead of maintaining a self-contained and navigable website, Sleeth has developed a page imitating Google with searchable results-- results which always lead to the same six links for Sleeth's career. The imitation continues past the links. Each link leads to a completely disconnected, diversely skinned site, such as the 'Downloads' page which looks like an illegal bit-torrent page complete with porn adverts and ugly flashing banners. Yet all links recirculate back to one of the six original links in the Sleeth network, so don't think topless women will be your end result.

I think it's an interesting to take the variegation of internet trash, information, and interest, and turn it into a single personal page. Sites have become stereotypes (the trashy illegal download site, for example) and Sleeth has appropriated these omnipresent pages and turned the tangle into his representation. Unfortunately, the tangle is what's discernible, while his work appears scattered.

I guess photo websites need a healthy balance between the mundane and absurdly intricate, otherwise the work is lost in the homogeneity or confused in the kitsch.

This is kind of funny... and surprisingly useful as a reminder of some techniques that were getting a bit rusty for me. Not much more introduction is needed. Here it is. Thanks to Stephen Lenz for the forward...

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

The Webby Awards have been announced! There are some overwhelming overachievers who rightfully deserve many a nod (ahem, TED.com), as well as some interesting discoveries. My favorite findings consisted of:

Moo.com- An ingenious printing press allowing users to create paint-swatch-esque "moo cards". The cards come in a petite box and can be used as a mini collection of images or as satisfying business cards.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years- MOMA's illustrious flash experience devoted to the sculptor. Full screen images of work with a nice splitting zygote menu for effect.

Checkland Kindleysides- The most soothing promotional design site EVER. Imagine: a paper tree blows leisurely in the wind while you look at hard-hitting design work for some of the largest corporations in the world. The navigation is as fluid as the calming background music.

PostSecret- A cheap and easy (yet so gratifying) blog. Concepting off of I can Has Cheezburger, this blog takes random doodlings, drawings, photos and offers them vulnerable narratives.

Blurb- Make your own book. Blurb allows users to download software and put together a collection of images/words for a very captivating price. It seems to offer more options than iphoto and has a FANTASTIC URL.

I am sooooo tired of my mouse. Move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click-click-move. We've been using mice for almost 25 years now while movies like Minority Report have shown us a glimpse of a future where all you have to do is wave your hands around a bit to get the job done (OK, you also have to live with Tom Cruze in a distopian future (OK, some might argue that we already are living with Tom Cruze in a distopian future)). Yes, there are some extremely big expensive systems thate promise to do some cool things, but we need something cheap and portable.

The portfolio for Publicis & Hal Riney are taking us into the future with a Flash site that allows you to navigate with hand gestures using your Web cam. Just move your hand over certain "hot spots" in front of your computer (shown in a handy mini-window on the bottom right of the screen) and you can move around their portfolio to see their ideas, news, and examples of their work. It may not be replacing your mouse anytime soon, but it's still pretty cool.

I am digitizing a life. Mine to be exact. One thousand two hundred CDs, piles of mini-DV tapes taken on my camcorder (normal and high def res), many boxes of negatives and prints, drawings I did when I was "destined" to be an Illustrator, the sketches of my growing sons. The list of historical assets seems endless as I troll about the basement. During the process I have occasionally envied those folks that have always been digital because the business of "porting" to a fully digital media life is a lot of work. It has literally taken me 3 years just to get around to digitizing all the CDs alone.

Then it hit me one night recently: "Should I even be doing this?"

Click "read more" for the good stuff...

As I have mentioned in these posts before, the intersection of graphic design and music has probably had the largest influence on me over the years. I was pleased to find this countdown on Spinner this weekend. I have to say they did a pretty good job! Check it out.

I've been fortunate enough to participate in the brilliant taste tests that AOL Food has started to hold on a regular basis. Thus far I have shot peanut butter spoon-fulls, Valentines Chocolate, candy bar cross-sections, and most recently 52 frozen pizzas.

While most of these classy cuisines have been presented in a Consumer Reports format, the candy bar cross-sections are available in quiz form. You think you know what the innards of a Snickers Bar look like? From my perspective, a spelunkers dream. And if you want to see more disorienting cross sections of not so delectable gastronomic inventions, check out the Cross-Sectioning site.

Since its Friday, I decided a nice roundup of photography tidbits should occupy afternoon perusing.

LOHAN, DRAPED.
If you live in the vicinity of media-popdom, then you probably have encountered the Lindsay Lohan/Bert Stern shoot published in the recent addition of New York Magazine. The contemporary shoot was a recreation of a famous session between Marilyn Monroe and Bert Stern in 1962.

The Lohan slideshow clogged New York Magazine's server. You would think that the past ubiquity of Lohan's nether regions would settle such reactions to suggestive silhouettes, but the shoot is going strong, producing headlines such as "Lindsay's dad won't view her nude pics", and feature articles in almost every single pop-media source. I sense an overflowing 'outtakes' onslaught.

I've always had visceral reactions to political paraphernalia . I remember ogling my father's I LIKE IKE pin when I was younger, wondering if Ike was a favored relative or a loved dairy product. And then there was the incident in the FAO Schwartz store, where I cried violently because my father wouldn't buy me a Bob Dole hand puppet.

And now I've stumbled across the CafePress political mecca of paraphernalia. Hand puppets, laminated items, t-Shirts, and tote bags represent mudslinging, lobbying, campaigning, parodying in one convenient location and in a variety of sizes.

The trek to the White House has been one of complete accessibility-- from powerhouse candidate webpages, to the CNN streamed debates, to facebook groups, to CafePress's consumerist appeal. And what's so appealing about this accessibility? Beyond the obvious fact that information is readily available, the opportunity for mass participation is as easy as an upload button or as obscure as throwing a sheep at a candidate. The phrase that 'every vote counts' is now extended to every myspace friend, every connected stream, and every submitted t-shirt design. Participation is becoming more creative.

Alright, I agree that this may be the stiffest corporate presentation of a cool idea ever, but this is the closest we have to beaming somewhere today ala Star Trek.

If Instant Messaging is possibly the lowest fidelity form of instant communication, this absolutely must be the highest. Incredible to think that what you see here in this video will someday be the expected form of instant communication. It's inevitable, I think. May take awhile though. Hard to get a banner ad in there somewhere.

(BTW, perhaps IM will be around forever, like radio, sitting in a very special niche. This is an interesting innovation from Cisco, either way.)

Yes, it is that time of year when every agency tries to outdo each other with the ultimate Holiday card site. I am giving the award to RGA this year for this hilarious use of new Flash "Papervision 3D" technology. After Christmas R/GA can just change the subject to Cupid and have a huge hit on Valentine's day as well. You'll know what I mean after you send your loved one a personalized tattooed Santa card.

If you want to know more about "how they did that" you can check out this overview and tutorial by Paul Spitzer, an ActionScript Architect writing on the Adobe Developer site. He says, "With the introduction of a new 3D engine, Papervision 3D, the creative control you can exert over Flash video has gotten a whole lot wilder". Just when you thought video playback was becoming a stable and standard "viral play" implementation. This new wildcard will ultimately allow ads and other related video to be played on the surfaces WITHIN a video! Far out.

Our Key Experiences team is already thinking of ways to leverage this within our programming and interfaces in 2008. I can't wait to see what they come up with.

It's the most wonderful time of the year, right? The whole world decorates, the lights are up, the candles are ready, the air is crisp and full of spirit. We've all received holiday catalogs, been spammed with wonderful offers, and are struggling to schedule our holiday calendars to be full of cheer and low of stress. It's a time to give good tidings to all and special gifts of thanks and love.

This also happens to be the time when really cool interactive greeting cards make their way onto the stage. Instead of our usual daily gruel of news and RSS we finally get a chance to sink our dentures into some figgy pudding. This was my favorite from last year:


http://www.bigspaceship.com/holidaycard2006/

Brilliant! Make your own Mystery Science Theater 2000 piece... send it to others. How funny. How creative. How easy. How.. well, jolly!

Please sir, may I have some more?
Tell us about some of the best ones you remember?

Let's all try to put some silly (Ger. selig "blessed, happy, blissful") into our holidays (O.E. haligdæg, from halig "holy" + dæg "day").

The Freakanomics blog, part of the New York Times website, is a fantastic source for irreverence... and brilliance. I recently held a video marathon of Freakanomic's collection of three minute shorts, covering such poignant topics as the evolution of abs and ridiculous shwag. The videos are oddly hilarious while basking in the crudeness of presentation. I recommend taking a half an hour to participate in this idiosyncratic enlightenment.

As a promotion for the new mini-seriesTin Man and inspired by the Zoomquilt Project, the Sci-Fi Network's Infinite OZ takes the viewer through the Outer Zone (the O.Z. for short), a re-invzioned version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The original concept of the Zoomquilt was to create an immersive visual experience that takes you through an infinitely zooming looped world. Infinite OZ uses that same concept to explore a rawer and more seedy world than originally envisioned by Baum's books, but also adds excellent atmospheric soundscapes and punches of dialog from the series.

The basic concept is to take a stack of Hi-rez images that are stacked on top of each other with a transparent hole cut into the middle of each. Those images are then zoomed into one at a time, giving the appearance that the viewer is moving through the environment. Infinite Oz uses 15 separate images from 9 different artists.

The Flash experience is seamless, combing motion with breathtaking imagery. The interactivity is a a bit on the simplistic side?there's a controller so that you can move backwards or forwards in the zoom as well as control your speed? but it's great first step for a hi-traffic site to take .