Here’s something to keep you busy over the weekend: The Ghostly Discovery App for iPhone. The free app allows you to create streaming playlists from the Ghostly catalogue by choosing a “mood” via a spectrum color wheel and a “style” via fader-like sliders. It’s sort of like Pandora but instead of picking a specific artist, you use the mood and style of the music you’re looking for as a starting point. And of course, you can find some Tycho stuff in there too. Check it out here
Update: Sorry, but as many of you pointed out in the comments, the app is not yet available internationally. Ghostly is working out the international licensing issues and it should be out soon. You can sign up to be notified when it is available by entering your email at the bottom of this page.
I’m still chipping away at the project I mentioned last week. One of the requirements is the creation of three products to complement the film festival we are creating and branding. The products can be pretty much anything, but one has to tie conceptually to our overall vision for the project. I have no idea what I’m going to do in this regard, and I figured I would knock out the other products first. I decided to try out Schtickers and get a few custom iPhone/iPod skins made. I can’t imagine ever actually wanting to ruin the impeccable design of either device with a sticker, but for a hypothetical film festival mock up, I figured it could at least be interesting. As I am also creating a website for the festival, I thought the iPhone/iPods would look good next to the laptop displaying the page on presentation day. The “electronic” portion of the festival brand fully fleshed out.
Overall, I would recommend Schtickers if you happen to find yourself in the market for some custom skins. I think they are most useful for in-class projects, or perhaps an unusual gift, but are definitely not a serious design option for professionals. Print quality is fairly good, but nothing close to what you’d get on paper. For my image style, it actually ends up looking dead on, but I can’t imagine many people appreciating the softer edges and slight blur you get with the vinyl print. The design/order process was very easy and smooth, and the stickers arrived within two days. Compared to some of the other vendors I am outsourcing to, this was amazing turnaround.
For the above sticker mock ups, two of the images come from agnusleonard and matstace. For the final versions, I will be using my own tilt-shift work like on the record cover. Next up should be the poster, which if all goes according to plan (when does that ever happen?), should be printed tomorrow.
Semi-related, Zweiphone will make your iPhone look like another, out of date phone. (via Subtraction)
I had to use the word vanish today since I saw the movie Prestige last night for the first time and loved it. I was thinking what if my hacked iPhone(that Scott hooked me up with, thanks Scott) vanished and I had to buy a new phone. I couldn’t handle another Blackberry Pearl or that Gphone that friends have and lets pretend those weren’t even around anymore, I’d probably just want to go back to something simple that worked like the Ericsson T610 that I had in 2004 or maybe that clunky Bang and Olufsen? Anyone have something that they love i’m not thinking of? just Skype maybe? either way i’d probably shell out for another iPhone, its just too powerful of a tool that fits in my pocket and gets me out of many jams.
MyFonts released an iPhone version of their WhatTheFont identification tool last week. It has a very simple and easy to use interface. You basically just take a picture of a font, crop and upload it, and it will run the characters through a recognition database and give you possible identities for your mystery font. Works well so far (at least it was able to recognize Futura above), but it will be interesting to see how it does with some more challenging typefaces.
