10-4 10-2

We racked up another victory last night improving our record to 3-1, second in our division behind the dreaded Flying Habeneros. After a few errors in the infield, we managed to pull it together and rally back with strong four and six run innings.

The Kid

Friday night Tara and I went to see Griffey's first appearance in Seattle since becoming a Cincinnati Red nine years ago. It was a bittersweet moment for all 47,000 of us to think of what could have become of the Mariners if he and that other guy would of stayed in Seattle as Mariners. I'm glad I had the opportunity with everyone else at the game to show our love and thank Griffey for what he did for baseball in Seattle.

In semi-related news, the HADW Swingers had our first loss of the season on Thursday to the other undefeated team in our league. It came down to a collision at home plate in the bottom of the seventh inning with 2 outs. The runner (who will not be identified here for further ridicule) was tagged out by a the catcher who caught a ball that literally rolled from the 3rd baseman after a relay through from the left fielder. We lost 5-6. It still hurts.

9-7

The Hornall Anderson Swingers are streakin'. We got a little bit of revenge against the team that knocked us out of the playoffs last year by beating them 9-7, bringing our record to 2-0. Pretty much everyone contributed offensively and defensively, a solid team win all around.

10-8

The Hornall Anderson Swingers started the season off with a win last night at Queen Anne playfield. Adrien even had the first double-play in Swinger history, as he caught a frozen rope at shortstop, and managed to double up a runner at first. This season I think we're definitely looking to go deep into the playoffs, especially since our female players are really stepping up and hitting the ball!

The Seattle Show

Last night a bunch of us from HADW attended the Seattle Show, an awards show to honor the best in advertising and design from–you guessed it–Seattle. Despite a "History of Seattle" lecture, and having to listen to countless sponsorship plugs and radio commercials, we managed to have a good time and earned a couple of Silvers for the Memory Serves and Census Complete sites we did for MyFamily.

Reality Check

This Saturday, I along with a few other designers will be representing HA for AIGA's Reality Check. I'm really interested in seeing what young student designers are producing these days. We'll definitely be looking for potential interns and/or junior designers to join or interactive team. It's being held at SPU at freakin' 8:30am, so I'll be in a really good mood for giving honest critiques!

Launched

It's been a pretty big week for us at HA. The SkyQ at the Space Needle project officially opened to the public. I guess the mayor and some other "big wigs" were there for the opening ceremony. Unfortunately I didn't make it in time to tell him to keep the Sonics in town.

There was a write up in the Seattle PI yesterday, and King 5 also covered it on the local news. It's a pretty satisfying feeling to see "real people" using the stations after many months of work.





The other notable launch was Redfin. Essentially Redfin gives people the ability to buy or sell a home over the Internet without the need for a real estate agent, which ultimately saves them money. They've built a model for buyers to shop for homes online, compare their prices to adjacent properties, check property taxes and sales histories, view large photos of homes, and then fill out standard sale documents.

We were responsible for a new identity and the look of the website, which they built out themselves. See their official press release for more info.

Mad Hectic

After a hectic couple of weeks, Drew, Joe and I went up to the market for lunch to relax. Two huge projects with essentially the same deadlines really makes you focus.





And for those of you that haven't already seen it, Joe's Security Pattern Collection has reached 100! Be sure to send any unique patterns you receive in the mail to him and he'll add it to the collection.

Good People

Finally, after many years, I'm happy to say that Adrien, Drew, Joe and I are working for the same company. We were finally able to bring Drew to HA Interactive, and I'm looking forward to working with him. Time for the takeover...

Speaking of good people, yesterday during lunch I ran into Graham Stinson outside of Cafe Umbria. Graham was a designer at Dual who I learned tremendous amount from. Congrats to him on girl #2 and I hope that you, Tony, and Paul are kicking ass at Ratio Interactive!

SkyQ: Map Station

Here's a video of another one of the stations we did for Space Needle. It was focused on "extending the view" for Space Needle visitors to the neighborhoods of Seattle via photography, narration, videos, and articles.


SkyQ: Map Station on Vimeo

SkyQ

For the past year or so, I've had the pleasure of working on a project for the Space Needle, a Seattle landmark. For me, this was one of those dream projects where I got to be involved with almost all types of design, including interactive, industrial, environmental, and even a little bit of identity.
The goal of the project was to extend the 360 degree view of Seattle for visitors by use of an engaging interactive experience. The interactive team which I am a part of, at Hornall Anderson here in Seattle, came up with five experiences.

HD Camera Station

camera and housing in the skunkworks shop
one of two HD cameras on the roof of the space needle
Users are able to control a broadcast quality (same kind they use for NFL games) HD camera mounted to the roof of the Space Needle. The video feed is sent to a 1080p LCD where they can zoom in REALLY close to things miles away. There are two camera stations, one facing North and the other South, with the ability to pan the cameras nearly 180 degrees. I'll post more pictures and a video of this in action later.

Map Station

my workspace
capitol hill neighborhood view
The first time we see the a built out station with final hardware
South facing station shows neighborhoods south of the Space Needle
international district history view

Adjacent to each of the Camera Stations are two Map Stations (four total). These provide a richer amount of information as to what you can see with the camera, as well as the things you can't see. Major Seattle neighborhoods are featured along with brief descriptions of things outside of metropolitan Seattle. The interface is built in Flash and it's hooked up to a centralized CMS using Django. It's also hooked up to a couple of live webcams, and we built a custom cloud generator that reads in an xml weather feed that determines the density, speed, and direction of clouds on the maps.

Voices of Seattle Station

Vignette Station Prototype on Vimeo
Early prototype
Space Needle employee watching vignettes of fellow Seattlites
first time viewing for some of my coworkers who weren't working on the project
This station consists of a 42 inch 1080p HD LCD, custom 42 inch touchscreen and two directional speakers mounted overhead (pictures below). We filmed real Seattlites in HD and asked what they loved about Seattle. I'll post a vid of the final version later.

360 degree Time-Lapse Station

SkyQ: Seattle 360 degree Panorama Time-Lapse on Vimeo
Jamie, Dan, Joe
the knob allows by-the-minute control of the time-lapse, the touchscreen allows people to jump around in the 24 hour period quickly

center console for controling time and pan
Twelve 10MP cameras mounted on the roof of the Space Needle took photos every minute for 24 hours to create this. Users can pan and control the time via a central touchscreen and knob.

360 degree Factoid Reveal

SkyQ: Seattle Factoid Reveal on Vimeo
prototype in the skunkworks shop
hand movement revealing illustration and factoid button about Boeing 747 underneath photo

Another panoramic station, but for this we commissioned illustrator James Jean to create a 360 degree panoramic illustration that, well, illustrates interesting facts about Seattle. Each of the five displays making up the station has a touchscreen and a camera mounted above it for motion detection. Users wave their hands over the screen to reveal James' illustration hidden underneath a regular photo of the Seattle skyline. Next to each of the dream-like illustrations are buttons that users can touch to find out what James is drawings are about.

The displays, touchscreens and camera controls are all hooked up to custom server enclosure via fiber optic cables to here:


Sound is output through these crazy directional speakers. This is the type of technology they use for crowd control when riots break out! They literally output a cone of sound. But we're using it to keep the ambient noise on the observation deck of the Space Needle to a minimum.


I'll post more pics and photos of the project as we put the finishing touches on the installation, but you can see the photos I took through the entire year long project at my flickr account or at Adrien's (our developer) account.

Crit Wall

Today was a really big day for me on the work front. This morning started off with a client meeting to get the final go ahead from their CEO about the design direction we've been developing. One of the great things about our office is that we have a dedicated "digital crit wall," which is really just six flat panel LCDs mounted to a wall in front of a bar table, run by a single computer. Here's a picture (screens blurred):



This setup does three things for us:

1. Display digital comps in a storyboard format. This has been invaluable when presenting any type of interactive process, such as a buy-flow on an e-commerce website, to people who aren't as savvy with the the internet


2. Comps are shown in an end-user resolution as opposed to using projectors. Additionally, color, size, and quality of image is less of an issue than it is with projectors.


3. Not only is it great for showing a progression of screens, the multiple monitors spread out along the wall allows for showing larger groups of people the same content in an end-user format.

It's been great to see HADW, a company traditionally known for their print, brand, and strategy work, to invest heavily in our team (the interactive team); from the people we hire, down to the way in which we show our work. I think it's paid off heavily in the quality of work that we've produced in last year, which I'll post about soon.

Season 1

Phi Slamma Hammered finished our season strong, but ended up losing to the dreaded Real Networks last night in the first round of the playoffs. It's too bad their product isn't as good as their jump shots.

Major Alarm

All of the phones in our office this morning read "Major Alarm." The phone company must of known I had a crit coming.

A few months ago I got to design a prototype interface for TV Guide's set top box guide to replace the terrible guide that's currently out there (Seattle area Comcast subscribers know what I'm talking about). Can't really go into details, but the basic concept is a dashboard idea, where personalized content for you entire family (dad, mom, kids) is displayed based on preferences, dvr recordings, and collaborative filtering. I finally got to see what it looks like on a 42" 1080p HD TV, so I snapped some photos.