Do Not Touch is a brilliant crowd-sourced music video for band Light Light’s new single, Kilo. Created by Moniker.

Each visitor’s cursor movement is tracked and added to the video. Lovely — have a go over here.

FriendsWithYou update their happy brand of kawaii, insane optimism with a new site featuring some great new projects.

Their work never fails to make the FFF team smile.

Forage Press is a nice new blog celebrating the union of audio and visual creativity with guest posts from selected artists and designers.

Check it out.

Nice new site and project updates from field.io.

More over here.

Some nice portfolio updates from Sawdust.

You can see more on their portfolio site.

Nice new site and folio updates from Falko and Valeria at Transfer Studio.

The absolute highlight of this year’s OFFF festival for me was getting to see Jonathan Harris.

Harris is a designer, thinker and storyteller whose projects are often highly conceptual and ambitious. He strives to change the world for the better through design and storytelling.

He opened his talk, with an overview of his (by now well-known) 2006 project, We Feel Fine — in which the internet is scraped for uses of the term “I feel…” in a bid to gauge how the world is feeling at any given time. This still holds up as an amazing piece of work.

But since this and other data driven projects, Harris has gradually and consciously moved on a different path, believing that there is only so much you can learn from data.

In 2010, he released his Today project in which he took a photo every day for a year — an original idea at the time, which has since been mimicked to the point of overkill.

This, along with The Whale Hunt give a good sense of the importance of storytelling in Harris’ work.

He’s also openly taking a step away from the ubiquity of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, believing that they lead to a short attention span and neverending pursuit of novelty over depth of experience. Instead he wants to develop platforms that engage and tell real warts-and-all human stories.

His current work Cowbird, a storytelling platform tries to do just this. It is described as “a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.”

So, no less ambitious than his earlier projects then.

Further recommended reading/viewing

Cowbird And Humanizing The Web A recent Jonathan Harris talk about Cowbird and his approach/philosophy.

(It’s worth checking out his other talks too).

Modern Medicine by Jonathan Harris — a brilliant, thoughtful essay drawing comparisons between software and medicine (way more interesting than it sounds!).

And the winner of our ‘SHE’ best image-caption competition is…

“In the year 2375, a traditionally dressed Prince Harry MXII represents Earths best hope in the first inter-planetary bean polo championship.” — Matthew Burvill

Congratulations Matt, you win a copy of Brosmind’s new, exclusive two-part comic SHE, packed full of bonkers drawings and a crazy narrative.

Joshua Davis is no stranger to the OFFF Festival series. This year incredibly being the tenth occasion he has taken to the stage. Little wonder then that he was invited to live draw (shown above) an artwork in front of the 3,500 visitors over the event’s three days.

If you don’t know him, Davis rose to prominence in the late 90s under the Praystation moniker and was a pioneer of programmatic, generative design, created mainly in Flash.

Before his talk, having not seen much of him since those days, I questioned whether his work was really still relevant, but I had him pegged wrong.

Despite not being a huge fan of his aesthetic, from the first moment of his talk, ‘Beyond Play’ I couldn’t help but be won over — his enthusiasm for what he does is boundless and pulls you on side.

He’s very much an experimental artist — mixing digital and analogue techniques to produce works based on things he encounters in nature and the world around him.

He talked a lot of his fascination for feedback loops — drawing on paper and in software and feeding these drawings back into programs to see what comes out. Ultimately, he does this stuff for fun. There is no distinction between his work and play.

And that was the take away message of his talk — it’s a simple one but it’s still resonating with me —

“Make the kind of work that you want to get hired to do.”

Or to paraphrase — publish the personal, self-initiated work you love and you might just get hired to do it for money.

Not a bad idea eh?

Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator who now resides in New York.

It was nice to go to her OFFF talk without any preconceptions, having not seen her work before. She put her illustration work in context through an honest and very human account of her life.

She grew up in a traditional Japanese family, always held back from pursuing a path in art as it was just ‘not an option’ there.

As a result, much of her work is concerned with a coming to terms with her ‘Japanese-ness’, the American perception of Japan and themes of sex and female empowerment.

She has a comic illustrative style with strong bold colours and lines, but also married with echoes of Japanese traditional painting.

What’s amazing is that she didn’t start a career in illustration until she was 34!

She is a great example of it never being too late to start on a new path and believes artists can’t help but embrace change and move forward.

“You are never too old to do ____”

In showing her process, it was brilliantly refreshing that she also showed work she was embarrassed by, her personal failures. (Not that I can find any of them since the talk!).

Take a look at Yuko Shimizu’s portfolio over here.

I arrived in Barcelona on the second day of the OFFF Festival in time to see Pete Hellicar & Joel Gethin Lewis take to the stage.

Hellicar and Lewis got together in 2008 and the focus of their work is in “creating groundbreaking experiences that use art, technology and design to take people into the moment and impart lasting memories.”

Essentially, things like this, this and this.

They are interested in making one off interactive pieces and talked about a project called Coke 24Hr Music in which a band could interact with their fans’ tweets.

Much more interesting though was the fact that the code from this large commercial project was then adapted for use in a suite of interactive therapy tools for autistic children.

They told a captivated audience how their Somantics software was helping over- and under-stimulated autistic children to temporarily escape the prison of their condition through touch, gesture and camera input.

It was really nice to see a large commercial piece of work used to go onto enable great stuff like this and to see design being put to good use to help others, encouraging stuff. You can read more about the project and watch some videos here.

In closing they explained that they believe all software should be free and that their code is available for download from Github.

A great, thought-provoking talk.

We were lucky enough to be invited to attend this year’s OFFF creative festival which just wrapped in Barcelona.

With a fantastic line up and an all new, spacious venue at the Disseny Hub, Barcelona, OFFF played host to a wonderful selection of talks, presentations, workshops and more.

Due to busy schedules, only one of our team, Guy Moorhouse could make it for a portion of the event, but in a short series of posts we’re going to cover our highlights from the festival, so stay tuned for more soon.

We’ll also have a little giveaway competition later this week for an exclusive new comic that debuted at OFFF from crazy, happy illustrators, Brosmind.

For those considering going to OFFF next year, it was confirmed at the end of the event that it will be at the same time and place in 2013, so hopefully we’ll see you there too.

More soon.

Fantastic work and portfolio site of design duo Craig & Karl.

Really love the programmatic, generative illustration and motion work of London based, FIELD.

Brought to our attention through their collaborations with Universal Everything, the studio has an awe-inspiring portfolio.

Rainsworld is the newly launched online home of talented designer, illustrator and motion director, Chris Rain.

After seven happy years at Airside, Chris has decided to spread his wings and seek new opportunities and challenges.

Take a look through his portfolio and he also has some lovely illustrations over on his blog.

Good luck Chris!