Following on from the somwhereto_ BT Tower digital animation competition here are the 5 lucky winners. Congratulations to Lawrence, Will, Joe, Dean & Emma. All had their work showcased on the iconic landmark’s giant LED screens.

Suzi Williams, Director of BT Group Marketing and Brand commented: “The standard of animations we’ve seen has been phenomenal – it’s as high calibre as work from professional designers.”

More information about the winners can be found here.

somewhereto_  is a UK project set up to help open up spaces for young people to do the things they love in arts, sports and culture. They have been in touch with TDOD regarding a competition they are running over Christmas until January 13th, offering young digital artists the chance get their piece of .mov digital art/video animation work displayed on BT Tower’s giant LED screen. All the info about entering etc can be found here.

Last time this year I will post a self promotion, but this one is all about sharing and it’s the season of goodwill, so forgive me.

Anyone using Instagram on the iPhone who tags a photo with the hashtag #Christmas automatically  has the dominant colours picked from it and turned into  their own unique digital bauble. Take loads over the holidays to create your own personal collection. What better way to say Merry Christmas than a load of brightly coloured balls.

Loads of #Christmas love from ico.

More details here

If you didn’t manage to watch this, it’s well worth spending an hour of your day and catching it on iPlayer.

Will the rise of electronic books mark the final chapter in the love story between traditional books and their readers? Alan Yentob discusses the subject with a host of writers.

It’s that time of year again. There’s something about the festive season that says self promotion here at ico.

Last year we designed a website that automatically turned all of the tweets with the hashtag ‘xmas’ into typographic snowflakes, and displayed them as falling digital snow. From this we could also extract individual tweets which enabled us to send unique Christmas cards to friends and clients.

The next logical step was to create a physical document of these global digital communications. With this in mind, we recorded all the Twitter messages sent on 25th December 2010. We then took the unusual route of using Processing to layout all 6651 tweets and tweetflake illustrations across the cloth bound tome’s pages. Arranged in chronological order, the book becomes a work of reference. Look closer and each tweet holds its own personal sentiment. Whether serious, touching, funny, ridiculous, or just plain rude, together the messages paint an honest picture of modern-day views and values associated with the festive season.

Are you one of the 6651? find out here.

Gary Whitworth, 2nd Year student of Graphic Design at UCLAN has contacted TDOD with his self initiated project “Phonetography”.

Gary explains:
Technology is everywhere around us, including the palm of our hands. Mobile phones have evolved from being giant clunky boxes that required the strength of an Olympic strongman to carry, to being small futuristic boxes of information that can fit in the pocket of your jeans. Over 70% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone and with more and more phones containing a camera of some sorts it makes it much easier to capture important moments of your life on them. The problem I find is now that we have this technology we don’t use it to it’s full potential. Memories are stored on these phones and forgotten about, piled up amongst the pictures of yourself in the mirror or of a photo of your dog that you feel that everyone in the whole world needs to see on Facebook or Twitter.

My attempt with Phonetography is to release the great photographs that we all take on our phones, the pictures that have a story to them or that tell a story themselves and show them to the world before they get deleted or become corrupt beyond salvation. This zine is the first attempt at this and I hope you all enjoy it.

Here is a link to the blog page where you can download it :
http://designlame.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/phonetography-issue-1/

BH: I particularly like the shot above of the couple on the bus, not because as the photographer commented that…

“They just seem like they stepped in from another era.” 

A pretty common sight in San Francisco if you ask me, but that the guy has a Nordstrom bag on his lap (equivalent to House Of Fraser, with what looks like a recent purchase, probably by his wife?). Rock & Roll!

Michael Johnson comments “Our old website was, in its time, admired and of its time. But finally we’ve had some gaps to develop something more iPhone/iPad/iWhatevernext friendly.”

The new site is nice, and I’m glad they kept it in line with their old one.

There is also a really interesting section about the company, giving us an insight into their studio, the way they work, and there is some nice pics as well to have a nosey inside thier studio.

There is also some nice new work up.

Definitely worth a look, as well as again Michael Johnson’s Blog ‘Thought for the week’

Gif shop is kind of a cool little app for your iPhone that allows you to make animated gifs via the camera in your phone and then publish them quickly.

Congratulations to UCLAN graphic design final year students Naseem Naeem and Matt Slade who have swept the board as winners at this years Little Chip Digital Awards and YCN with their work on the “20 Years Of Sonic” advert. Great work.

How did you come to find yourself reading this blog post? Redirected through a Twitter link possibly? Or stumbled across it while avoiding doing something more important by any chance?

If so, you may benefit from the Pomodoro technique, a productivity aid developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s to combat the constant interruptions and distractions of daily life. Named after the tomato shaped timer he found in his kitchen, the basic concept is simply to commit yourself to 25 minute periods of dedicated work.

Each 25 minute block equals one pomodoro and at the end of each one a five minute break is taken. After four pomodoros you can have a longer break, but if a pomodoro is interrupted for over a minute it becomes void and and you have to start another. Don’t worry though, the next pomodoro will go better!

There’s a lot more to the system, including software and timesheets you can download for free from the website.

With more and more technology and distractions competing for our attention, the ability to focus on one task for an extended period of time is becoming increasingly rare. Hopefully this technique can help you claim some of that ability back.

And if that’s just not enough, you can always resort to blocking your own access to the offending sites using this nifty piece of software.