What's New

A dreary and wet week has come to pass. Let’s hope these sights and sounds from around the web will cheer you up for the weekend.

Burning House Project

This project aims to find the answer to the question ‘what would you take if your house was burning’. Users can submit their answers alongside a (usually) great photograph. A lot of people seem to value their cameras and Macbooks very highly!

Find out what other people would save here

960 Pieces of Vinyl

There’s something charming about stop motion animation but you wouldn’t find Aardman pairing Gromit with some dubstep. This incredible video sees a real life audio waveform created from bespoke cut vinyl.

Descriptive Camera

The saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words. Well, this camera can’t quite manage 1000, but it will happily describe any scene you point it at by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. 

Take a more in-depth look at the descriptive camera here

That’s a Big Vehicle

Next time you curse someone’s poor attempt at parking a Chelsea tractor, take a look at the image below. The $100million Bagger 288 is 311 feet tall, 705 feet long and weighs 45,500 tons. The Bagger can excavate 240,000 tons of coal per day.

Take a wide-eyed look at this mechanical monster here

Another week has been and gone, so sit back and take a look at some of our less serious finds from the web this week.

Imaginawesome

Kids have a great imagination, but they don’t always have the skills to draw them out on paper. Imaginawesome takes a kids drawing and the artist behind the project will turn it into something a bit more polished. 

Take a look at loads more here

Jelly Bean Crazy!

Imagine spending 22 months of your life laying out jelly beans? That is just what went into this amazing (and sugary) music video for Kina Grannis’ song ‘In Your Arms’. 288,000 jelly beans, 1,357 hours, 22 months and 2,460 frames later and this is the incredible result.

Crumplestiltskin

Photographer Levi Mandel took some stealthy shots of passers by, printed them out, crumpled them up and rephotographed them to create a curious gallery of fascinating grotesques.

Cast your eye over more crumpled faces

T-Rex Trying

It turns out that, had Jurassic Park actually turned out to be real we wouldn’t have had too much to worry about. Artist Hugh Murphy shows us what would happen if T-Rex attempted a variety of mundane tasks such as riding a bike or using eye drops.

Find out what T-Rex can't do

The weekend is nearly upon us, so without further ado, here’s a few not so serious things from around the web.

Clipart Album Covers

The humble clipart, pioneer of desktop publishing is used here to create some iconic album covers. Marvel at them.

Take a look at some more

Hardly Work.in

It’s a Friday, and instead of doing some work you’re reading this. Really, you’d much rather be on Facebook or reading about Justin Bieber on Twitter but you need to look busy. Lucky for you, there’s Hardlywork.in, turn your tweets or Facebook feeds into an inconspicuous spreadsheet.

Get pretending

Incredibox

This groovy little web app gives us more vocally limited maestros the chance to create our own beatboxing masterpiece by conducting an ensemble of animated beatboxers.

Bust out some awesome tunes, man

Microwhat

This strangely hypnotic project elevates the microwavable meal to a new level of artistic value. See before and after shots of a variety of microwaved objects.

Don't try this at home

Alongside the spectacle of the Olympic events comes the spectacle of the Olympic 'artist series' posters. The first official poster having been produced for Stockholm 1912 by Olle Hjörtzberg. Since then, as with a good 4x400m relay race, the posters are as often hit as they are miss.

London 2012 has seen posters created by Turner Prize winning artists Chris Ofili and Rachel Whiteread, as well as household names like Tracey Emin.

We've cherry picked some of our favourites from the past 100 years.

The weekend is nearly upon us, so without further ado, here’s a few not so serious things from around the web.

If We Don’t, Remember Me

A collection of animated gifs and cinemagraphs from the world of Hollywood to make you smile.

Click here to view some more

Sleeveface

A wonderfully simple idea – just grab a record and use it to complete a picture. Some real crackers in here.

Follow the link to view more 

Comic Sans Project

Goodbye Helvetica, thank you for your years of service. Forget what you thought you knew about Comic Sans, turns out, it’s awesome.

View some more Comic Sans logos 

LEGO Album Covers

To finish up with, take a look at these rather splendid LEGO versions of iconic album covers.

View them all here

So, you want a sparkly new website right? You want it to work on your desktop obviously. And the laptop you use at home. And it’d be great if it looked the same on the netbook you tap away at on the train. And you’ve just got one of those fancy tablet things as well, so it’ll need to work on that. Oh, and your mobile, naturally. Your TV has internet browsing? So does your games console...

As web designers and developers, we’re used to change. We’ve long had to worry about intangibles that few other mediums would for years. Variable window sizes, screen resolutions, user preferences are just a few. And please, nobody dare mention IE6. Every couple of years we experience a new paradigm of thinking – and we adapt. But even in this industry, things are moving fast, very fast.

Over in Las Vegas this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, dozens of devices have been proudly displayed to the world for the first time, from mobiles to tablets to televisions. Devices of all different sizes and many which can be viewed both landscape and portrait.

The rapid influx of new browsing devices means that we are now at a point where it is impractical, both financially and otherwise, to try and keep up.

Thankfully, there is an alternative to supporting each and every user agent by creating bespoke versions of each and every website.

Responsive design is perfectly suited to the multi-platform world that we now find ourselves in. Simply put, responsive design is flexible, device independent design for the web. Even more simply put, the web content that you’re viewing will adjust itself to the size of the screen you’re browsing on. 

The primary appeal is to build a website which can look great on both your mobile and laptop, without having to create a mobile specific version. The size of the window is the key, not the device being used to view it. 10 years ago the notion of a 24” monitor being common place would have seemed almost unreal. Responsive design also allows us to go BIG. Banishing the ungainly white space which sits on either side of the web content and increasing the size of images and videos would dramatically change the user experience.

There are all sorts of clever tricks and tools that can be used by delivering media queries to enhance the user experience as well. On smaller screens or touch devices the ‘hit area’ of a link could be increased and typography can be spaced differently to improve legibility and much more. 

Responsive design is a technical mixture of fluid layouts, flexible images and media queries. Tackled from a design perspective, more than ever, the way in which content could be viewed is of huge importance and the way that content translates from one device to another is crucial to the success of a project. 

And for once, it really just might be about making the logo bigger. 

Picture this scene for a few months time if you will. Instead of sitting on the Underground listening to the rustling of newspaper pages as the tunnel dwellers flick through their fix of free gossip and lonely hearts you can expect shaking, spinning, flipping and tipping as excited readers tuck into their new eBook, Alice For the iPad.

This 52 page app features illustrations restored from Lewis Carroll's original book and promises that no journey through the timeless tale will ever be the same - tilting the iPad in a different way will make the Mad Hatter madder or grow Alice to the size of a house.

Take a look below.

Unfortunately I suspect you won't be able to pick up a used iPad on the Central Lines for the journey home though.

The internet is such a vast and wonderful place, full of sneezing pandas and Rickrolling that it's easy to miss some of its entangled strands of delight. Luckily, I'm going to post up a few things which you might like to ease away your midweek blues.

Twitter gets a new homepage

Twitter unveiled a new homepage on Thursday and I’ve got to say, it does a much better job at demystifying just what it is that the micro-blogging service is actually all about. As with the previous design, search is still a strong focus but a lot of the vagueness which surrounded the service has been given the boot.

For a few months, Twitter was so chic it didn’t need to actually tell anyone what it was about, instead relying on word of mouth and enthusiastic web agencies to pass on its message. Or that’s how it seemed to me at least. I can’t imagine that many curious business owners would’ve felt the need to create an account based on the previous homepage.

With the new web design, it’s far easier for a potential user to understand what Twitter is all about. A nifty algorithm plucks interesting tweets from the Twittersphere and places them front and centre on the page. Couple that with the block of brands and celebrities using the service and the decision to click ‘sign up’ seems a lot easier to make.

The Twitter Blog describes the change as:

“... our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It's a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there's something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn't been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.”

I think that sums it up nicely.

Album covers make great book covers

Something to inspire you next, a collection of album covers re-imagined as Penguin Classic books.

If Picasso had a netbook, this is what he’d be sat doing right now

Well, sort of.

This little project makes use of HTML 5 which will be rolling onto a browser near you in about ten years. This really is a glimpse into the future of what websites could be capable of.

One of the main features of HTML 5 is the dramatic reduction in the need for resource hogging, constantly updating, randomly crashing RIA proprietary plugins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Java. HTML 5 will also mean that embedding a video is as easy as , and common CSS elements such as and will create much cleaner code for everyone involved.

The good news is that, although it isn’t expected that HTML 5 will become the norm for a few years yet, many aspects of it are currently stable and open for exploratory business. Watch this space...

Dexter has amazing opening credits

The title sequence for the US show Dexter is a work of art. Every time I watch it I am compelled to turn around to whoever is within earshot and tell them just how brilliant I think it is.

On my ‘top title sequences ever’ list, this sits at number one.

And finally...Even evil scientists tweet

In the style of a true James Bond villain, the gaggle of Nuclear physicists who are in charge of the world’s largest death ray [which they refer to as the Large Hadron Collider] over at CERN in Switzerland yesterday revealed that their plan for world domination was close to completion. And how did they decide to broadcast this proclamation of doom [and scientific revelry] I hear you cry... Twitter of course.

The one update I don't want from them is 'Oooops'.

Be sure to follow the end of the world in 140 characters or less.

Oh...You didn't click the Rick Astley link did you?