I love L.A. And when the game L.A. Noire was recently released I was first in line to get a copy. It’s a fantastic recreation of Los Angeles in the 1940′s. So I’m really happy that Simon Wood, who was the production designer for the game at Team Bondi, was able to talk about what’s involved in the design of such a title… Q: What is your background? It’s a journey… I was 8 yrs…
 
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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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Back in 1998, when I first saw The Lair of the Marrow Monkey I was totally taken in. In an era of CD-ROMs which sequenced the user through mostly static screens, or of experimental works with seemingly random or chaotic interactions, Lair‘s merger of storytelling with focused interactivity was really special. And then, three years later, along came Chroma (2001), which took those ideas and advanced them to new heights. The work connected the interactive…
 
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Way back in 2008, when Modernista! launched a new version of their website, I was blown away. It was such a simple idea, but it was daring and revolutionary. And it generated a ton of buzz. The site was super-simple, just a navigation layer that connected live Modernista-related pages from sites including Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and Google News. It’s embrace of Web 2.0 concepts startled some, but it positioned the agency as innovative and creatively…
 
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Small Design Firm‘s recent Pledge Wall for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautiful interactive installation with a unique pen interaction. David Small, the firm’s founder, is a friend back from when we were both students at the MIT Media Lab. I’m a little jealous, as his firm has gone on to create some remarkable projects, while my former firm, Triplecode, is in deep hybernation. But despite that I’m super-glad he was able to take…
 
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Check out this recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte on The Engadget Show. A little background: Nicholas founded the Architecture Machine Group (or ArcMac) at MIT in 1967. His aim, partly inspired by Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad was to create an “architecture machine” — an active partner to help architects design buildings. The group also was responsible for the Aspen Movie Map, anti-aliased text, telepresence research, and online personal news aggregators. He then founded the MIT Media…
 
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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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