Hasta La Ideas

The Museum of London has launched an iPhone app which cleverly brings its extensive art and photographic collections to the streets of the capital…

The free app, called StreetMuseum, has been developed with creative agency Brothers and Sisters and makes use of geo tagging and Google Maps to guide users to various sites in London where, via the iPhone screen, various historical images of the city appear – just like in the image above.

OK, so here’s how it works. You open the app and allow it to work out your current location. A map then opens showing you your position and also showing the locations of the various sites where you can view historic images of London – see screen below:

If you touch one of the tags, a small window opens up to describe the location and also the date and author of the image – as above. Click on the blue arrow on the right of this window and the image appears on screen thus:

tap the screen to read info about the image

tap again to remove the text from the image and feel free to enlarge it on screen just as you would any photo on the iPhone…

The really clever thing about this app is that if you are in the location pictured, you can click on the “3D view” button and the app will recognise your location and overlay the historic image over the current view – augmenting the reality that the built in iPhone camera perceives. We went to Carnaby Street to see if it worked and took this screen grab of the 3D view function in action:

Here are some more examples of the kind of augmented reality views of London the app offers:

More info on the app can be found at museumoflondon.org.uk/

StreetMuseum credits:

Executive creative director: Andy Fowler
Creative director: Steve Shannon
Creatives: Kirsten Rutherford, Lisa Jelliffe
Account manager: Emma Simmons
Developers: Gavin Buttimore, Robin Charlton
New business director: Helen Kimber
Head of digital: Kevin Brown
Digital project manager: Tanya Holland
Digital designer: Mateus Wanderley
Image geotagger: Jack Kerruish

ustwo – the app developer that gave us Mouth Off and also the Granimator iPad app – has just released Inkstrumental, the interactive fruit of a collaboration with illustrator Jon Burgerman…

The idea for Inkstrumental is simple and fun – users ‘audition’ various Burgerman characters, each of which makes a particular sound (could be percussive, bassy, vocal or a bit synthy) when you tap him. So you decide which eight characters you want in your Inkstrumental band by scrolling along and pressing each character to see what they sound like on the screen below…

Then, with your eight characters selected you go to a screen like the one below where a looping beat plays (you get to choose the backing beat too). Simply press a character at just the moment when you’d like its sound to be added to the back beat et voila, you’re making music!

Once you’re happy with your new doctored beat, you can press the TV button on the screen and the band members are transported to a stage where they proudly perform your tune for you. You can send this film to the Inkstrumental YouTube channel or simply show your friends on your phone when you see them.

Here’s a short film of someone actually playing with Inkstrumental to help you get a better idea of the fun that can be had:

Jon Burgerman and ustwo are presenting Inkstrumental tomorrow evening in a special talk at 7pm at the Apple Store on Regent Street in London. Visit the apple website to find out more: apple.com/uk/retail/regentstreet/

AND, fans of Burgerman’s work might be interested to know he’s got a solo exhibition entitled Brain Drain, currently running at Winchester Discovery Centre until July 7. Here are some images:

The above “soft sculpture” was created in collaboration with Felt Mistress

jonburgerman.com

ustwo.co.uk

inkstrumental.com

Above: screen grab from McLaren Mercedes F1 site created by Work Club and Pirata which uses the @font-face css rule to use non system fonts in the site design. Read our blog post about it here

In our March 30th Anniversary issue, we asked a range of prominent figures, including practitioners, critics, curators and academics, to tell us about one thing, person, idea or place that they were excited about for the future… Regular CR contributor and writer of the ever enlightening magculture blog, Jeremy Leslie, chose to nominate and write about @font-face css rule that will allow designers of websites to specify and licence a chosen font to use in a website (rather than relying on the limited selection of standard system fonts) which is then downloaded from the website’s server for the end user to see – in the same way that graphics and Flash movies appear on a website.

“Not only does this provide a broader choice of font,” wrote Leslie, “but also gives better control of the font, with properties such as letter-spacing – long available to print designers – now specifiable for the web.”

Various type foundries have been creating their own technolgies to make their faces available to designers in this way and yesterday type behemoth Monotype Imaging announced the public beta of Font.com Web Fonts – which looks to make a whopping 2,000 fonts available for web designers to try out for free and then licence and use accordingly if they so wish in the building / designing of a website.

We put a few questions to the guys at Monotype to find out a little more about Web Fonts and how it works:

CR: What is Web Fonts?

Monotype: It’s a hosted service that, for the first time, enables designers to choose web enabled fonts from the Monotype, Linotype and ITC typeface libraries, in addition to third-party foundries, for website design. Designers can leverage important designs such as the Helvetica typeface, which is exclusive to Monotype Imaging’s web collection. When the service launches commercially later this year, additional world-class designs will be available, including the Frutiger  and Univers typefaces, which are  also widely used for brand and corporate identities.

Web Fonts are fonts that are specially formatted for use on the world wide web. Historically, different browsers have varied in their support for web fonts and only consistently supported system fonts which are resident on client machines could be relied upon.  This gave designers no choice but to design using only a handful of fonts.  Also, fonts are licensed by the foundry according to usage. Foundries have not been comfortable with licensing standard TrueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf) formatted fonts because there was no protection from piracy in this format. More recently the Embedded OpenType format and now Web Open Font Format offered more security but these formats do not necessarily make it simple to support typography across all browsers. Fonts.com Web Fonts overcomes these inconsistencies for web designers to make it fast and easy to select fonts and add them to a style sheet that will then work across all key browsers.

CR: How does it work?

Monotype: To use Fonts.com Web Fonts you just

1. Create a project and assign the domains you want to use the web fonts on,

2. Choose the fonts you want – you can see samples of them first in different sizes, colours etc…

3. Assign the fonts to the appropriate CSS headers in your webpage code

4. Fonts.com Web Fonts generates a string of code to add after your tag

CR: Why is this good news for designers?

Monotype: Fonts.com Web Fonts makes it fast and easy to access thousands of fonts used in every day design.

Now designers can take typography used in their print-based designs online for a more consistent brand approach; websites can be differentiated as clearly as print media.

All browsers (including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera platforms) are catered for making site design simpler.

When Monotype Imaging’s solution launches commercially, fonts will be licensed on a subscription basis so you don’t need to worry about licensing individual fonts. There will also be an entry-level tier that will enable users to enjoy more than 2,000 fonts at no charge. Participants in Monotype Imaging’s public beta will be able to use more than 2,000 fonts for free even after the public beta concludes, since these fonts will constitute the free tier. Alternatively, participants may upgrade to a higher level of service when the solution launches commercially later this year.

Websites can become lighter and more effective as fonts can be used for headers instead of graphics improving speed, searchability and accessibility.

Pages can be updated quickly using the service, no need to re-code.

Fonts are secure, and delivered fast over a cloud-based global distribution network with world-class back up.

Designers can try out the 2000 free-tier fonts in prototypes free of charge.

CR: How can CR readers find out more / get involved with the beta version?

Monotype: Your readers can view more about the service and sign up to beta test at webfonts.fonts.com. Here at Monotype Imaging, we’re keen to receive feedback from beta testers who will continue to receive access to the free service fonts after the launch.

Meet Mildred, the amazing surfing sheep, spokesbeast for Cornish surfwear brand Finisterre (motto ‘Doing clever things with wool’)

Mildred is a Bowmont –- a rare breed of British sheep that Finisterre has been attempting to revive in order to reduce its reliance on imported Merino wool for its clothing. Ernest Capbert, who is in charge of marketing for the company says “We’re all surfers, we’ve got sheep and so we’ve taught one of our Bowmonts to glide”…

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More info about Finisterre and the Bowmont here. The ad was produced with DLKW.

We’ve launched a new digital subscription to CR which means that you can now access all the magazine content, going all the way back to 2006, at a much-reduced price, anywhere in the world

If you only read the blog posts here at creativereview.co.uk, you are missing out on an enormous amount of content. Each month we also post up the stories, features and reviews from each issue of the magazine online (check out this month’s issue here), but this, as well as some CRTV and Feed content, is restricted to subscribers only. Now you can access all that content via our new digital subscription.

It’s aimed primarily at overseas readers, who make up two thirds of our online audience. Shipping physical magazines around the world has always been a problem – they can arrive late and sometimes in bad condition. And it’s costly.

So we are now making the content of each magazine available through the website to anyone, anywhere in the world for a special offer price of £40 a year. This is a 60% saving on the cost of a rest of the world print subscription, and half the price of a one-year US or European sub. You’ll have to hurry though, because this offer applies for a limited period only.

For £40 a year, you get access to all the content of each current issue of the magazine. The magazine pieces online frequently have additional content not found in the printed version, including extra images and, of course, video. And you will get to see all the content selected for our Annual, Illustration Annual and Photography Annnual, which will not be available on the blog.

Digital subscribers also get full access to the archive of every issue going back to July 2006. Many of these issues are now sold out and so their contents is unavailable elsewhere.

You also get access to all the online issues of Monograph. And you will also qualify for discounts in the CR Shop and on extras such as awards entries.

To subscribe, please click here