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Online > offline: we still love paper goods
Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)
It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design types larging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.
The exhibition covers the gamut of design: architecture, furniture, product, graphics, interactive and fashion. One of my favourite pieces was a bit of folly with a serious message: ‘Panda Eyes‘ a crowd of WWF Panda collecting tins, wired up to a camera in the sky to detect human movement and shift in sync as you walk around them. Its intention is to raise awareness of pandas’ plight in the wild. I think.
What I found interesting is that some of the graphic entries were really all about the relationship between online and print (and therefore arguably candidates for the interactive category). These three entries all had online generation in common: the articles, images, comment and opinion are all drawn from the crowd, using twitter, blogs and data to bring a concept to life.
Newspaper Club (which for some reason has a bit of an ugly website, but produces beautiful papers) allows anyone to create and print their own newspaper, without the need to be a multi-millionaire media mogul.
Here’s a particularly cool example that’s both useful and will please anyone who likes a bit of data visualisation loveliness. The Postcode Paper was an experiment from the Newspaper Club themselves that took information from data.gov.uk such as local services, crime stats and other useful stuff you need to know when you first move somewhere, like TFL transport links, and republished it in one handy, paper format.

(Photo credit: Newspaper Club)
It’s Nice That brings together the best of the creative industry in one place. As well as existing online, they also produce “a bi-annual printed publication, monthly talks and videocast, an online shop selling exclusive products as well as regular interviews and features with current practitioners.” I haven’t seen the print publication, but they feature some mighty nice stuff online.
And having recently received an extremely dull pre-conference magazine for SXSW, I can appreciate how something like The Incidental would be refreshingly interesting and bring the good stuff to your attention when wading through the programme at a conference. Essentially, it’s “a community-generated news pamphlet and website at international design events which offers debate, reviews, news updates and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about.”
This has given us some ideas for SXSW…
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Crowdsourcing Examples
Crowdsourcing is something that keeps coming up in our work at Made By Many, and I’m sure in a lot of other places as well, given that the power of the internet is growing ever stronger. It’s always useful to see and learn what other people are doing in terms of harnessing the power of online communities. So I’ve created a wiki that lists all the examples of crowdsourcing that I could find listed across the internet. Here it is.
There were a number of places that were very useful as I went about the process of collecting this information, such as Peter Kim’s wiki of social media marketing examples and the Mobile Youth blog. There’s a full list of these on the wiki itself, so go and check it out. And keeping in the spirit of crowdsourcing and wikis, if anyone here is interested in contributing examples that aren’t already listed, give me a shout and I’ll set you up as a contributor.
For more about crowdsourcing, check out Jeff Howe’s blog – the guy who is credited with creating the term ‘crowdsourcing’.
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“Twitter: What’s all the fuss about?” presentation
Despite the promotion of Twitter to the ranks of “the great issues of our day”, and 24/7 coverage of new Twitter stories via TV, radio and newspapers, some people (normal, well-adjusted people) still need that basic introduction. What is it? How do I use? and What’s all the fuss about?
So Made By Many, along with BBH Labs, put have put together a presentation that we dusted off today at BBH’s London office to a crowd of excited advertising folks. We’d like to put this presentation out there for the rest of the world, under an Attribution Creative Commons license, for anyone who wants to explain Twitter to colleagues, clients, friends, relatives and their spouse – including the illustrations. Please use them (just give us a credit). We couldn’t find any attractive Twitter iconography – so we made our own: the first in what we hope will become a series.
Credit goes out to Mel Exon and Ben Malbon of BBH Labs, Anjali at Made By Many, and especially to Tom Harding at Made By Many for creating the the charming illustrations and presentation style. You can find the presentation on SlideShare.







