Pocket Noodle - Eventually, everything connects

The BBC have just launched a public beta of their music site, BBC Music. Using data from MusicBrainz! and Wikipedia, BBC Music Beta enables users to explore artists played on BBC Radio. Artist profiles currently show a biography, discographies, BBC appearances and related artists information with the data available in a variety of ‘RESTful’ formats including XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS.

The IA is good and the overall design works well within the new BBC web guidelines. It definitely looks like it should easily scale as more data gets added and it looks like there’s plenty of scope for integration with other BBC data sources such as programmes, events, news, album reviews and even iPlayer. One to keep an eye on!

• Watchmen – The first trailer is out and it actually looks like it could be pretty good.
• Eight issues in and Frog Design finally release a print version of their fantastic online resource Design Mind.
• Intua Beatmaker – sequencer and sampler app for the iPhone/iTouch. Get a copy here.

• The Dark side of Switzerland – Swiss Darkside Poster from Areadesign
• Lost tapes of the Dr Who composer – Found recordings from the composer of the original Dr Who theme tune, Delia Derbyshire.
• One of my favourite apps for the iPhone/iTouch is the New York Times app. It’s a great example of how a newspaper can get its content online and I’m hoping that the British press (Guardian, BBC are you listening) will get in on the act. There’s a great article on the design of the icons over at Felix Sockwell’s site, Drawger.com.

Radiohead’s latest video for the track ‘House of Cards’ has been released through Google Code. Shot without cameras it uses two 3D capture technologies, one that captures images at close proximity and one that can capture large environments such as landscapes. The cloud point data used for the video can be downloaded for anyone interested in putting together their own video of the track. Click here for the ‘making of’ video.

• Stanley Kubrick – 79 – Hertfordshire, St.Albans. Interesting MySpace ‘homage’ page with a great collection of photos
• BBC’s IPlayer 2 goes beta. There’s been some major improvements to the interface but I guess the big news is that radio and tv are now in one place plus there’s improved functionality that allows for quick resume playing and personalisation
• Penguin announce the winners of their 2008 Design Award.
• Goosh.org. Google ‘unix-shell’ interface

• Pentragram discuss their work on the new brand identity for AkzoNobel
• If I had some spare time I’d spend it on these two projects. A paper V12 four-stroke Engine and R2D2
• Kids on decks, rocking the house
• Guardian article covering the recent MySpace redesign which focus on usability, interaction and a ‘more intuitive, customisable, and private experience’. Be interesting to see if they’ve made changes to the underlying structural code which has always been a mess and whether they’re going to migrate their backend from Coldfusion.

• Big Ideas (don’t get any). James Houston’s entry for Radiohead’s Nude remix contest put together using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Guitars), an Epson Dot Matrix (Drums), a HP Scanjet (Bass) and a hard drive array (Vocals/FX).
• That design is money! – A look at the work behind the new UI for Wells Fargo’s touchscreen ATM upgrade
• Carlos Segura’s Cartype gets a redesign. It’s a great resource for anyone interested in automobilia and car typography.

• The Fontonola – typographic loop machine that projects typographic phrases whilst triggering looped samples.
• Nice interactive graphic from the New York Times showing how different groups voted in the democratic leadership race
• Carnegie Mellon Universities ‘Swiss Posters‘ collection. Fantastic collection of posters from 1971 onwards. Via AisleOne.

• Beautiful typographic motion work for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra by Swiss agency Euro RSCG that shows the score as a roller coaster
• Just discovered the Instructables after looking for some diy bike hacks – apparently the ‘world’s biggest show and tell.’
• Just got my invite for ‘Tin Eye‘, an image identification based search engine that bases it’s query on an uploaded image or image URL to search for the same image on the web. Uploading Saul Bass’s 1958 ‘Vertigo’ poster came back with 40 results from a supposed total collection of 487 million images. Not as many as Google’s text based image search but still pretty impressive seeing as it’s image based.

• Freak bikes. There’s more as well if you look around Peltirumpu’s photobucket including this all white cruiser. Via Bikehugger
• A pig’s tale – Roger Water’s on the Pink Floyd pig
• John Gall’s, Art Director of Vintage and Anchor books discusses his ‘five rules of book cover design‘.