Droops, bloopers and what geeks, babies and whales have in common.
Coolness often comes down to how well you handle the uncool stuff that inevitably happens. On the intertubes, that stuff is known by one infamous, universally hated number: 404. Today, we look at those coolest error pages that manage to inject some irreverent fun into all the frustration.
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This lovable big droop extracts an “awww” from even the most cynical and web-raged of us, making us wanna hug him and tell him it’s okay.
GEEK SQUAD
Who can get mad at an awkward know-it-all geek? Okay, plenty of people. But this one aptly walks the fine line between know-it-all self-righteousness and it’s-all-in-good-fun self-derision.
MIXX
In terms of “personality,” Mixx has long been our favorite of the social bookmarking platforms. Their irreverent humor comes through here with both the clever pun and the sheer hilarity of the video.
TWITTER
Most of us have been hit with the dreaded “Twitter down” message. And, come SXSW time or another major live blogging event, we’ll no doubt be hit again. (And again. And again.) But nothing softens the “Grrr!” like a simple image of serene empathy. Bonus points for using pastels to dampen the reds and yellows you’re feeling.
LOOK IT’S ME
This one goes all the way with a flash animation. Watch this little guy as he jumps around, wiggles a reprimanding finger at you, then finally gives up on your obvious idiocy and stomps away.
There you have it, a cool error page can make the difference between “ugh” and “heh,” and works wonders for fostering that elusive devil’s-in-the-details emotional connection we have with our favorite sites.
We’re actually quite disappointed with the lack of clever 404 pages in some of our favorite, should-know-better web dwellings. (Wired, PSFK and Creativity, we’re looking at you.)
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In the year of the YouTube election, innovation in political communication spanned virtually every medium. As the big day is upon is, we look back on an incredibly tumultuous political season with our selection of the smartest, most revolutionary election-related ideas.
THE SAYHEAR PROJECT
In a political climate where the “get out and vote” message seems to be spewing out of everywhere (and rightfully so), it’s worth taking a step back and asking ourselves the simple question: Why are we voting today?
That’s exactly what design studio Gershoni did with their experimental sayHear project, which assigns a toll-free number to each of the 4 voting options – Obama, McCain, 3rd party, and non-voter – and invites people to call with the reason for their choice, then displays the results in a neatly designed interface.
You can hear all the confessionals on the project website, ranging from the fully serious to the giggles-in-the-background prank calls. Listen to one particularly funny one here.
The best documentaries record monumental events that change the course of history. That’s exactly what The New York Times is out to do with their Polling Place Photo Project, the first-ever nationwide experiment in citizen journalism.
The project aims to create the largest photographic archive of the actual battleground of every presidential election — hum-drum polling places — capturing the richness and complexity of voting, a visual record of human behavior in that final stretch of choosing our political destiny.
You can already browse photos from this year’s primaries and caucuses, or upload your own. So don’t forget your camera today.
MICHAEL MOORE’S SLACKER UPRISING
Notorious filmmaker and whistle-blower Michael Moore made movie distribution history this year with his latest political documentary, Slacker Uprising, which became the world’s first feature-length film to launch as a legal free release.
The film, covering the filmmaker’s failed attempt to save the Democrats from themselves in the 2004 election by rallying people to vote with a grassroots tour of 60 cities in the battleground states, is above all a call to action in hope for redemption this time around.
After Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech in January, artist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas got overwhelmed with the desire to prevent the “unfair, backwards, upside down, unbalanced, untruthful, corrupt” process of the last election. So he called up a massive lineup of celebrities to produce a revolutionary music video based on Obama’s speech. (We first covered it here.)
The video became the most-watched election-related video on YouTube, with over 30 million views across its various uploads, and set off an avalanche of buzz across the social web. It inspired an equally moving spinoff, the HOPE.ACT.CHANGE. project, which invites Obama supporters to upload images of themselves and rebuilds the video into a gloriously designed multimedia mosaic of them.
SHEPARD FAIREY’S OBAMA POSTERS
In January 2008, artist Shepard Faireydid what he does best to show his support for Barack Obama – he designed a poster.
Little did he know the 350 limited-edition PROGRESS screenprints would sell out in minutes, the HOPE print would go on to become part of the Obama camp’s awareness campaign, and the posters would become the most iconic images associated with this presidential campaign.
Here’s to the power of supreme graphic design and art direction.
There were, of course, a ton of other tremendously innovative efforts. A few more of our favorites included the Obama social network; the efforts to give voice to those who are impacted by the American election but can’t vote, like the nation’s 29.1 million home-owning, tax-paying legal aliens or, you know, the world; the clever and tremendously amusing Things Younger Than McCain site-turned-book (which is funnier if you skip back through the archives); and the Field of Hopecrop circle in Pennsylvania.
But what we really hope is that all this innovation is indicative of a greater cultural hunger for change. And as the 11th hour of this grand race is upon us, we can almost taste it.
So get out and vote today — and enjoy it. Your children will read about it in the history books.
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Why hover is the new click and how to undo 30 years of habituation.
The best of innovation usually involves taking something completely mundane and turning it into something completely different. Which is why we’re all over DONTCLICK.IT, a revolutionary interface that does away with web standbys like clicks and buttons, and lets you navigate in a radically new way with the mere position of your mouse.
The project was born out of an experimental idea that questioned the conventions of browsing behavior. Phase One, going on right now, invites the public to join in and explore the interface. Phase Two digs a bit deeper, analyzing users’ behavior within the interface to find out just how deeply rooted our browsing habits are.
The Button Lab showcases a few alternatives for the click — different mouse motions or a hover timer. And the Autopilot feature allows you to observe the first 20 seconds of browsing behavior of the 20,000+ site visitors — it literally replays their motions within the interface. There’s even a Mousecamp where you can get trained into getting the hang of clickless browsing.
The project has received multiple interactive awards — which is no surprise: Even though the site has been up for nearly 3 years now, it remains innovation unlike anything else out there. So go ahead, explore. Let’s see how click-hooked you are.
What peer pressure has to do with revolutionizing social media monetization.
THIS JUST IN
YouTube just announced its first move into retail land: click-to-buy links in music videos. Like most Google initiatives, the move is informed by pure organic consumer demand — Google folks noticed that the comment area below vides is fertile ground for consumer discussion of the music used in a video, so they jumped on the opportunity with an e-commerce platform that provides the answer in a direct click-to-buy format.
Currently available to U.S. users only, the platform links to iTunes and Amazon downloads from the EMI Music catalog, but is said to eventually expand into other media like TV, film and print.
We, of course, are not surprised — if it were any other company, Google would be doing this mainly as a reaction to the monetize-YouTube-already peer pressure, but because it’s Google, we know that no action is ever a reaction. There are greater forces at play, and we’re here to tug at their toys.
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LOOK IT’S ME
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