Amazing news from McDonald’s Japan, who have launched “No Brand” stores. I say “No Brand” since it does have a brand, in fact it’s very branded, it’s just not branded as McDonald’s, and it’s lack of obvious clear branding is in fact part of the brand effort. Someone has clearly spent a lot of time looking at this. It seems (with my limited knowledge of Japanese culture) to be something that would be an interesting fit, they are a very brand conscious consumer and yet often seem to rebel against overly traditional brands (think golden arches and clowns).

Interesting that the site has a picture of the statue of liberty. Is the “quarter pounder” store coming to New York soon?

London (harder, better, faster, stronger) from David Hubert on Vimeo.

I love stop motion when it’s not just people doing that weird bent leg flying thing round a park. I especially love stop motion of London and people moving around London. It’s been a long time since I left Fulham (9 years this Xmas), and I really do miss it sometimes.

This is an amazing HD video constructed from 3328 static pictures, covering the crowds in London, above and below ground. Great work.

Had to order two of these, actually I ordered the limited edition black ones. For no other reason than I might want to give one as a gift and keep one for myself. It’s an awesome graphic, especially the ones without the shorelines. They have a certain abstract quality. Such a beautifully simple idea, very well executed.

Ecommr.com is a pet project for my friend and colleague Tom Sullivan (he of noturnonred.org). He’s had me involved in gathering some of the content. This last weekend he updates the layout and added content so there are now 80+ screenshots of various ecommerce sites specific areas or content anything from Navigations to Rich Carts to Promotions. Check it out, post some comments - if you have any suggestions for sites we should cover, please let us know.

Some amazing examples of imaginative and inventive bathroom tiling, by Christoph Niemann. As someone who might possibly have 3 bathrooms to redo in the next 6 months, I’m totally going to do one of them with something like this. Someone should have a tiling service where they just source plain tiles but in a huge range of colors and you send them the image and they send you back the tiles and a diagram explaining what goes where. It would be easy enough to write an application that could do the tile color conversion - it’s just a more detailed version of the one I did for hexday image sampling.

Via ffffound.

I love this commercial, for the Acura MDX from a52 masters, something about it reminds me of the work of Denis Darzacq. Via Motionographer.

I will start using these to explain why I’m growing my winter beard again.

As part of the terms and conditions of usernamecheck.com it does state that we store every unique username that is checked, it also goes on to explain that I will not share any of the usernames or display them online. That said, it doesn’t say anything about running statistical analysis on the names to see if there are any interesting patterns or trends.

I just put this one together and if I have time over the weekend I’ll put together some more. But for a first pass here are the counts for the initial letter of the username. For perspective the Ä has 58 counts, I don’t show anything below that value (or the chart would be enormously tall), and at the other extreme S leads the way with 22,722 unique usernames. The sum total when I ran this test was 241,412 usernames in the database.

I was working on some browser stats that a client sent over this morning. I was just formatting them into a more readable chart like format. Despite knowing all the bad press that pie charts get I rendered one out in Pages, then exploded the pieces and randomly rotated it…. until before me I had the perfect analogy for browsers.

Amazing poster for Adobe Photoshop CS4. Via Design you can trust.

Change.gov, went live yesterday but was slammed most of the day (could it be the first Government site to suffer the digg effect).

As someone who works in the industry, I’m most eager to see what an Obama administration does to embrace and utilize web based technologies. Could this be the first President with a facebook, twitter and youtube account.

Change.gov has a similar polish that the previous campaign sites had, I just hope they can keep the momentum now that maybe the budget is tighter.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

One of my oldest and dearest web apps reached 1 year old today. Hexday was launched Nov. 6th 2007 and has now been going for a full year. Funnily enough, as you can see for the screen shot above, the first 6 months were a little slow, we averaged maybe 4 or 5 color picks a day. The last 3 months have been really awesome, with an average of 40 picks a day by some dedicated regulars - many thanks to all of them, they are making the experiment what it is.

Some news, this weekend I will be working on finishing off the 1st Hexday Book. The book will cover the last 50 days of this year, and will have a page per day with an index of users and hex values. I will be publishing on demand through blurb and will post more details once it’s ready and I have one printed and photographed. I’m very excited and consider the site a success for no other reason than I can publish this book for every color loving coffee table. The top 5 posters on Hexday will be recieving a complementary copy for their dedication. I’m planning on printing one of these books on a regular basis, just need to try and work out the logistics.

Dahl and Dane are offering a great little custom screen print service where for $50 or so you can have your own I heart T-Shirts printed with up to 6 characters after the heart . The only problem now is coming up with something that’s awesomely clever.

How about…

I heart Icons

Jared Jurkiewicz, long time Dojo contributor takes issue with a recent online “performance testing application” that has been pushed out by Adobe Evangelist James Ward. Having read through Jared’s post I have to say it looks like the original application seems pretty flawed and shouldn’t be used as an example of a benchmark. It seems that Adobe is employing generous amounts of Spin that they should maybe go into politics. Of course the issue is, that the benchmark page will be emailed around business users, who will see how “fancy” it looks, and how outrageous the differences in speed are, they will then make business decisions based off it that will trickle down to technical implementations. If you put enough polish on a half truth it’ll make it harder to debunk.

I often enjoy the UI’s that people in movies use more than the movie. Possibly the pinnacle of these was in the Minority Report. I’ve always been curious who’s job it would be to build these UI’s, whether they contain any real interaction or if they are all just scripted and if the people who build them ever care about things that “real” UI developers have to worry about - like usability. Well most of those questions are answered in a great interview on Feed with Mark Coleran, who makes these UI’s for a living.

via nolegacy.

“Yet Another Election Map Post”…. sorry I know there have been a dozens of these this morning. But I wanted to add my 2 cents in, since most of the threads I’ve seen don’t include the maps I think really stand out…

The Daily Kos has an awesome Cartographic example:

The BBC has another great proportional map:

New York Times has a nice Bubble version:

And finally the washington times has a rather nice 3d proportional county map as well:

As you can see I’m a bit of a fan of showing the proportional nature of the whole process rather than the geographical size of the county or state which is actually very misleading.

Great post on the sparkfun blog, with a flow chart showing the correct tactical usage of the term “Oh Snap!”.

A couple of sites have passed by me this morning that I really like for looking at how the world has viewed the election of 2008.

Tom has a great post over at robotictom, showing screen shots of the major news organizations the moment the election was called for Obama.

Jason Kottke has a great post, with screen shots of a bunch of news organizations maps that were used online to cover the election.

And the newseum front page today is a great reference point.

Beginning of the year, I wrote a quick and dirty Automator action that runs every day at 5pm, it takes an photo with the built in camera and saves it in a directory with a unique number at the end. The other day I stumbled across this folder and realized I hadn’t uploaded to flickr any of these in months - to be frank apart from the occasional surprise as my computer beeped and then flashed at me, I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Anyway here is my update so far. Only a month or two to go and I’ll have an entire years worth. At which point I’ll make a movie with annotations for the entire year.