For Disney’s “TRON: Legacy,” Bradley Munkowitz, better known as GMUNK, was the lead animated graphics artist. He assembled and led a team of GFX all-stars who conceived, designed and animated approximately 10 minutes of UI sequences and holograms at Digital Domain for director Joseph Kosinski and visual effects supervisor Eric Barba. I was so happy that he agreed to do this interview about his involvement in that film. Q: Can you talk a little about…
 
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Over the past couple years there’s been a lot of buzz around crowdsourcing. There’s a real believe that it has the potential to transform everything — from how agencies work for clients, to how customers interact with brands. And, as everyone explores how “the crowd” can participate, a wide variety of pretty cool things (can we call them experiments?) have come along… creating new content (The Johnny Cash Project), design contests (BBHLabs logo), to change…
 
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There’s no reason I can’t talk about my own projects on this blog, right? Just keep in mind that this story starts in 1999, when the web was mostly just html pages, some Director/Shockwave, a little Flash, and mostly dial-up modems. The social web didn’t yet exist. Napster was being sued by everyone. And the idea of selling music online was considered crazy. But lots of companies saw that something was about to happen and…
 
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Back in the late 90′s and early 00′s, Quokka Sports was doing some pretty groundbreaking design. Their sites were unlike anything I’d seen online before. An amazing mix of raw data, bold images, and real-time data that really connected you to the events. Quokka was founded to cover the 1997-1998 Whitbread Round the World yacht race. After the race, they aimed to become the premiere digital sports media company. And they produced some great sites…
 
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After posting about the UI in Avatar, I was so happy that Neil Huxley agreed to an interview about his work on that film. Neil was art director and motion graphics supervisor for Avatar‘s UI at Prime Focus VFX LA. Q: Can you talk a little about your background and how you got started. I was born in London, and lived there for 26 years then moved to Australia and now I’m based in LA….
 
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In What Movie UIs Say About the Future, Tony Walt reviews a variety of interface types featured in some recent movies. His discussion on Complexity was particularly interesting — especially in the context of the iPad and its move towards simplicity: I’ve noticed that UIs in feature films are continually getting more elaborate and complex. Meanwhile, though, real-world interfaces are getting more simple and intuitive. It seems an odd contradiction that the futuristic UIs we…
 
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In 1994 Muriel Cooper presented work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA that changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. The work, from her group at the MIT Media Lab‘s Visible Language Workshop (or VLW), took typography, literally, into three dimensions — and gave it dynamics and interactivity that had never been seen before. Tragically it was just after this that she passed away. I was a grad student in…
 
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