More About Hyper Island:

During the last 15 years Hyper Island has been designing learning experiences for students and industry. Starting out in what used to be an old prison in the small naval town Karlskrona we now have offices in Stockholm, London, Manchester and New York and are present in almost every corner of the world – from Amsterdam and San Francisco to Tokyo and Berlin.

During this time digital has gone from being another channel for communication to an integrated fibre of the fabric that surrounds us. Hyper Island has been at the forefront of that journey, by working with industry leading pioneers. We have recognized that in this fast changing landscape people will need a different type of education where they can pick up a more dynamic, richer skill set that goes beyond the traditional craft. So, after years of acquiring experience and knowhow, always in close collaboration with the best agencies around the world, we launched the first Hyper Island Master Class in August 2008.

Our educational philosophy “The Hyper Island Way” is founded on Problem-Based-Learning, Experience-Based-Learning and the Case Method. We have high ambitions to break down the traditional walls that separate education from it’s surroundings, society and the work place. We design learning experiences that give the participants the opportunity to work close to reality and coach them through their experiences. The courses themselves are rich practical experiences, both in content and process.

Hyper Island offers the Master Class out of our offices in the UK, USA and Sweden where we also run the following long-term educational programs: Digital Media, eCcommerce Manager, Interactive Art Director,  Mobile Applications, and Motion Graphics.

”Here in the UK Hyper Island is regarded as the pre-eminent breeding ground for top-class digital talent. A Hyper Island student is practically guaranteed a job the moment they walk through the doors.” - Gavin Gordon Rogers, Creative Director, Agency Republic, London

It’s creative content worth sharing. It helps to start with a great product, in this case, an amazing song. The rest is by design, through our process of identifying the target audience and engineering content to appeal to their current preferences, tastes and trends. The content takes on cultural currency, an intrinsic sharable value within a target culture. And content refers to more than video, it could be an app, an interactive story or an augmented reality experience. In this case it’s a music video for a soon-to-be-large Swedish band. This project provided us with an excellent opportunity to apply our thinking to create cultural currency and flex our in-house motion design and 3D skills.

Spotify is a great example of an app that is leveraging the new Open Graph features. Already one of the defining social music apps on the web, they expanded to the US this summer and added well over 4 million new users since f8. If you’ve not tried Spotify yet, it’s well worth it, give it a shot. Full disclosure here, we work with Spotify so we may be partial.

Actions and Objects is one example of the app-enhancing features of Open Graph. For example, on Facebook, you’ve likely noticed friends ‘listening to’ [a song title, by artist’] ‘on Spotify’. Listening is the action, while the song is the object and this activity is happening within the app, in this case, Spotify.

Also, if you’re a developer who has Timeline installed, you’ve seen how your interaction with apps, from what you read, to what you listen to, games you play, are all defining aspects of your Facebook profile experience beyond your ticker and activity log. Looking more specifically at music and the way Spotify integrates with Timeline, you can see the aggregate of what you’ve been listening to lately, what you listen to the most, and playlists you create and subscribe to. If your response is -  um, rad, but why don’t I have Timeline? - fret not, it will soon be available to everyone. And yes, it is tres rad.

So, now your friends on Facebook can know what you are ‘listening to’, what does this mean?

You can rapidly share and easily discover music with your friends. Try creating a collaborative playlist on Spotify and share it out to your friends to contribute. Simply right click on a playlist you’ve created on Spotify and select collaborative playlist. 

But, what if you don’t want people to know what you’re listening to? Maybe some guilty pleasure that could impact your street cred. Simple solution. You can choose to go stealth mode with Spotify. You can choose to go stealth mode with Spotify. Within Spotify, under the application navigation under Spotify select private listening. 

It’s all about you.

If you have an app or apps, you’re likely wondering, how you can use these features to create more meaningful experiences around your app and brand. Glad you’re curious! We’ve been working with new Open Graph features since they were announced and are very excited to be applying and leveraging the new features in ways that enhance the user experience and social interaction of existing and new apps. If you want to know more about what this means for your brand, your action is to - holler.

We’ll start with the “art” piece of the headline. Motion design is the practice of bringing graphic design to ‘life’ through -  yes! - motion. 2D, 3D, live-action video, stop motion imagery and beyond. Starts to make more sense if you think of it as ‘Motion [graphics] design’.

Where do you see it? On every screen you use. The user interface on your smartphone, online videos, motion picture titles, video games, and broadcast commercials are a start. The digital “revolution” has accelerated it’s adoption and created the necessity for well considered motion pieces. Everywhere. Yet there is no single resource dedicated to this discipline that has it’s origins with the advent of the motion picture.

Knowing that and having likely encountered the question “what is motion design” numerous times, Paola Boileau & Kook Ewo two talented motion designers have created the first of it’s kind motion design resource. What is motion design With the objective of “opening the world of motion design to the public.” They have done an amazing job of explaining what is perceived to be a nebulous creative discipline in this video and on this website. They do a great job explaining the rich history of the discipline starting at the beginning.

Is this something I was supposed to know? Not really, motion design gets confused with character driven animation (think cartoons) all the time.  Having created motion design work for various brands from consumer goods to healthcare including AT&T, HTC, to Thomson Rueters, Dell and Microsoft. And not surprisingly, some form of the question “what is motion design?” regularly arises in meetings or creative reviews. Fortunately the source of this question is almost always someone that parachutes into the project after it is well under way. And we’d like to thank the guys at Motion Plus Design for doing such an excellent job of answering the question.

Motion design as a discipline is responsible of the most eye-blasting, contemporary work in the creative industry. Think about the last video you you saw and asked yourself “how did they do that??”, probably included some motion design.

And now for the commerce part of the headline. You may be asking yourself from a marketing perspective, why do I care? Well, internet video from how-to’s to promotional pieces are being rapidly adopted for a couple of key reasons. First they increase conversion rates, sometimes as much as 30-40% in our experience in consumer goods, electronics and software industries. And motion design pieces based on branded graphics are an excellent way to tell your brand and product story while increasing conversions. Art and commerce.

In web development, finding bugs can be challenging and costly.  Even more challenging is making sure more bugs aren’t created as new features are added and updates are made. Instead of trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results, to help keep us sane and to avoid these regression bugs, we have begun employing a test-driven development (TDD) process for many of our more complex web application projects.

We literally set the application up to fail.

With TDD, we first write a failing automated test case that defines the results of a new feature. The test itself is a simple block of code that performs an action and checks to see if the desired result occurred. Once the feature is added, and working, the test will pass. As time passes, more features (and their tests) are added. With the tests in place we are notified immediately when a new feature causes an older one to break. So, while writing the tests is initially more time consuming, in the long run, we are way ahead of the game.

By having thorough tests in place, our codebase is much more resilient to future bugs, which saves our time and therefore our client’s money. The alternative to TDD, which relies on the developers (in all our imperfection), to test everything manually, is beginning to look downright wasteful. There are testing frameworks available for most code languages… we are mostly using the RSpec testing framework for our Ruby on Rails applications.

Speaking of “test driving.” this M1 is pretty fresh.

WINTR SEA > NYC for Fashion Week

WINTR and Spotify have teamed up to sponsor the sounds for designer Logan Neitzel’s upcoming Spring Summer 2012 collection with a live collaborative Spotify set on 09/09 starting at 7pm EST.

Collaborate on the playlist for Logan’s show and after party and follow @WINTR_US for live updates during the show.

Need Spotify?

After party? Check our Facebook where we’ll post the final playlist enjoyed live by Spotify, Vogue, W, Style.com and other peeps at the exclusive event.

And Courtney made a cameo.

http://www.oneandonlyresorts.com/Default.aspx
http://www.sofitel.com/gb/home/index.shtml
http://www.canyonranch.com/

Adidas, Game Face:  http://www.facebook.com/adidas?sk=app_156823704374730

Levi’s, Calling All Curves: http://www.facebook.com/Levis

Levi’s, Free Forum: http://www.facebook.com/Levis?sk=app_11007063052

Oakley, Rise Up: http://www.facebook.com/Oakley