Oh yeah. Procrastination. What you always wanted to know about it! (via)

An upcoming documentary about the Swiss born designer Herbert Matter. He did pioneering work in the last century in the field of graphic design with the use of photos and graphics. Get into retro-design vibes by watching this video: “When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo.”

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Travel through the time – with Berna. This low-priced software is a complete “1950s style electronic music studio” that communicates audible and visually vintage into your ears and eyes. The Berna website says about this small suite:

At that time there wasn’t any electronic musical instruments market, as a matter of fact, most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes the equipment was built from scratch cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes and pots, more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium and the Theremin. Contrarily to what happens today, electronic music then was everything but fast and easy to create. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than one year of work.

This makes Berna not only interesting for film-score enthusiasts, but also a good choice for people who like to get into the history of electronic music as well. However… you can make funny tones with Berna. And that should be reason enough!

Only available for Mac, but at a nice price of 10.69 Euro (or try before you buy).

Tweakbeat is an extremely reduced sound-(beat)-sequecer, availlable for iPhone / iPod touch for free. Tweakbeat basically only has 16 steps, a little bit of tempo and shuffle and you can customize 16 different “instruments”. Each one is a basic synth with elementary parameters like pitch shift, waveform modulation, decay, tone, release. Although it is only monophonic and doen’t even has anything like cutoff or resonance it rocks like hell!

I’ve never seen such a small music-application, that was so well balanced with the features. If you got one of this magic-phones: a must download! Here is the developers site and the app-entry on playstate.org.

Good news for people who like to tinker with Flash and/or creative code. Branden Hall and Joshua Davis released today the initial version of HYPE, a Flash-framework, that is suited to creative code experiments. The goal of HYPE is to enable non-developers a fresh and easy start into coding Actionscript 3.

Flash has matured incredibly in the past decade, but it has done so in a way that has blocked non-developers from even getting started. The simple fact of the matter is that with older versions of Flash you could learn the tool and how to program ActionScript almost entirely through creative play. With the latest iterations, unless you have a background in object-oriented programming, that method of learning by doing is simply not an option.

It’s a little like the idea of this Flex-tutorial, I wrote several months ago.

Less messing around – more playing with the code. I haven’t tried HYPE yet, but I am sure, that it will be worth taking a deeper look at. (via)

I am glad to annouce the preview from Krystian Majewskis upcoming game “Trauma“, that will be released for free later that year. He worked at it for really a long time now – and renamed the game now from “Illucinated” to “TRAUMA”. The game is a little bit like a “point and click adventure”, but it focus is on “creating a rich experience rather than an elaborate puzzle challenge”. The game is meant to be played by a literate and mature audience. The game features an unconventional approach, telling the story of a woman, that tries to get herself after having a car accident. Watch the video, to get convinced, that this game follows more higher reasons, than just to please for some minutes of fun.

Majewski submitted TRAUMA to the Independend Games Festival (IGF). The good news are: in any way, this game will be available for free in a Flash-enables browser near you by the end of 2009.

Uh, I almost forgot… The game features real pictures from the Cologne-cityscape. There are work-in-progress pictures available.

What a wonderful short movie. This is almost a little bit too extremely cute. I love it! More of this stuff at the site of Jonathan Kim. He says about himself at his page the insanely brilliant words: “I can save my progress ANYWHERE.” So go for it!

The Independent Gaming Source is heading for another very interesting indie-game competition. This time it is two-part:

1. In the first part, artists and musicians will have a month to create as many art and music assets as they wish. These assets will be voted on at the end of the month based on the quantity, quality, and variety of the assets provided.

2. In the second part, designers and programmers will have a month to take the assets created in part one and make games with them (assets used need not be limited to one person or team). The programmers cannot make any changes to the assets unless it’s done during runtime. The best game will be voted on in the normal fashion.

I really love this kind of “constraint” setup, that forced people to be creative. (And to add some lovely easter-eggs into the assets for the coders). Read everything in details at the TIGSource blog or the forum.

I found a Facebook-Album, that utilized the game Farmville to execute very famous video game characters. See the rest of the picture here. 21th century kind of thinking: There are cubes, hm let’s make some kind of pixels…

Wild Wind is the title of an accurate pixel-animation short, that shows a very, very everyday-situation (for the other half) I guess nobody really likes. It could be the perfectly opener for a perfectly accurate game. I think that much of the sounds are doing the magic at this shortmovie. Wild Wild was made by Leonardo Campasso – in pixels. Like Drawn says, the guy is only 21, making Flash stuff since the age of 12.