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Another launch day in the office, with our new iPhone app “Slurp” up on the App Store, just in time to use on your new iPhone 3GS! We’ve almost had around 100,000 people download our previous App for Cravendale, the Pocket Pirate, and are hoping this will follow in it’s success.

We’re pretty chuffed with this, it’s a lot of fun, and the perfect way to while away a bus journey. Try and top Edd’s high score of 14 if you can!

Oh and if you haven’t got an iPhone you can still play the game online at the Milk Matters site.

I find the RSS feed for The New York Times Technology section a daily source of joy. It’s always interesting, the writing is exemplary and the content is always relevent. And none more pertinent than in their recent piece on Tweeting Your Way to a Job, which details the ongoing trend for companies recruiting people into social media positions, and the tribulations that some people will go through to get them.

Outside Line were one of those companies. And when I came in for my first interview here almost 5 months ago I realised I was one of those people. So once a second interview was confirmed, and while waiting for a working brief to be sent through, I set up a secret Twitter stream where I could capture my work in progress for the presentation I was preparing. Thinking back to my Maths GCSE, and how “showing your working” was important as the answers themselves, my thinking was that Twitter was the perfect tool to capture a stream of consciousness.

I came, I saw, tweeted. And bagged a job.

And the learning? Twitter is a tool, not an idea. So if you’re using it to find the dream job, find some way of tailoring it towards to role itself – build a Flickr page of images you’ve found that might inspire the company, record a YouTube video of you using their products, set up a Tumblr of what you think will be relevent articles to your new position.

Be creative. Don’t just use technology for technology’s sake.

First, a recap: The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a famous thought experiment stating that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare”.

So why not put it into practice? Of course, we don’t have infinity, and typewriters have been replaced by keyboards, but we’ve still got monkeys! The Lucky Monkey is an insane site, which has a live feed of a room containing a monkey, a PC, and a connection to Twitter. You follow Jimmy (the monkey) on Twitter, and if the monkey types your username you win! ( don’t know what you win exactly, but it’s pretty neat nonetheless)

Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day thinking what thought expiriments we can make digital. Maybe we could stick a webcam in Schrödinger’s box?

If you haven’t seen it yet, you must watch this beautiful animation for The Beatles Rock Band, written and directed by Pete Candeland of Gorillaz music video fame and produced at Passion Pictures here in London.  The styles between the first and second half are clearly distinctive yet manage too blend together beautifully, starting off in traditional 2D animation and flowing into a full three-dimensional tripped out musical extravaganza.

Storyboards and style for 2D was created by Robert Valley, who has an amazing collection of work on his Flickr account. Illustrations for the little musical characters in the second half were done by South African illustrator Ree Treweek, one third of the Blackheart Gang, who shot too fame in 2006 with The Tale of How.

With this much talent flying around, how could they go wrong?

We see it all the time, and now it heads to Twitter : “There’s Too Many People Here Syndrome”.

You know the place, that little bar that was once hip, and then everyone found out about it, it got busy, all the early people weren’t recognised as “being there first”, so they decided it wasn’t very good anymore. And it happens all the time on the net – Usenet groups, IRC channels, forums. And now Social Media Snobs are leaving Twitter in numbers as they believe popularity and credibility are mutually exclusive, and even if they can prove they were “here before you” it doesn’t change the fact that something that was once “their special thing” is now part of the mainstream.

But allow me to offer a counterpoint: what if it’s not snobbery? There have been significant studies in the area – the Dunbar Number, made popular by Gladwell’s Tipping Point, states than around 150 contacts is as many stable personal relationships our brains can manage. So it could be argued that as the number of people visiting somewhere increases, the chance for our brains to process all these people is reduced.

I’d love to know your thoughts – snobbery or science? And could this diagram be bettered in anyway?

(With credit to Diesel Sweeties for the original “Music snobs” idea, go buy his stuff!)

Winning awards for websites isn’t easy. The competition is huge, the stakes are high, and what might be internet heaven for one person is holy hell for another. But we’ve won them in spades for our Milk Matters site, created last year for Cravendale. We recently added 2 FAB awards to our many commendations the site, one for the Best Website and the second for Most Creative Digital Work. And we thought this would be a great chance to discuss some of the design decisions that went on behind the scenes which we feel made the site chime with so many people.

So a bit of background – Arla gave us the task of a re-designing their site we made for them in 2008, and one of the key objectives was to deliver their key 2009 brand messages, such as “Milk is great for strong, healthy teeth”.

So we decided to create a new animated character for the site that would be able to deliver these messages whilst the user browses. This character would have to be easy to draw and animate, giving us flexibility for animations and updates over the course of the year.

The initial interface designs were focused purely on the bottle, and the way our character could interact with the milk bottle while displaying key messages. Looking back you can see how the different initiatives had taken a back seat in our original designs, they weren’t very flexible and didn’t allow room for loads of content and promotions being added to the site throughout the year.

We wanted to move away from typical images in boxes you see so often in web design so we experimented with different ways of navigating around the site. The stage area became larger and scattered more objects around which represented current and future initiatives. These navigational blocks became more individual with each adopting their own unique look. We made our character smaller so that he could interact with the bottle as part of the site. At this point we liked the look of the 3D boxes sitting in the site.

Here we have a slightly more developed version of the homepage, the 2D character is amongst the 3D blocks and large typography in the background denotes the current site section. The navigational blocks are coming to life with more colour and their own distinct look and feel. One problem we came across was we felt the 2D character and 3D objects did not work well together on screen at the same time. The decision had to be made between a 3D or 2D world. The 3D route would allow us to create some really nice objects, but restricted the interactivity our character could have with the site. A 2D world would let us implement a flash physics engine in the site, therefore allowing the user to pick up any block, object or even the character and throw them around the stage.

The decision between 2D and 3D had been made, and 2D won! The navigational blocks were changed to be completely  flat, with the graphics on each more colourful and distinctive.  They are now all on one plane, allowing our character to run around the site with greater freedom.

At the finishing line, we had a problem with the blocks potentially covering the Cravendale bottle so we moved it to the front giving it prominence on every page. Everything has been brought closer together and the site looks cleaner and more minimal than ever.

So there you have it – from an initial “boring” design into an award-winning site with an integrated physics engine. And at this stage we had fun sticking a few Easter Eggs in there too – for instance, our office telephone number (0207 841 3970) is one of the only numbers that will make the mobile phone ring. There are loads of other hidden gems in the site still waiting to be found – why not head over there now and have a play?

Click for HD

Our South African motion wünderkid Kris Cook has knocked up “A Tale of Two Spreads”, an incredible piece of motion work for our recently launched Friends of Butter site. Friends of Butter aims dispel “unhealthy” myths around eating butter, with testimonials from top chefs extolling the virtues of using real butter rather than margarine. We’re hoping that this video does for the butter vs margarine debate what the Crisis of Credit animation did for the financial apocalypse.

Obviously, this is best enjoyed on our Vimeo page in it’s full HD glory.