In which I realised that we almost forgot to mention we are a finalist in the Dutch Design Awards (again). Perloo is nominated in the communication category, along with some great other projects. Good stuff.

Other things? Sure, but talking about them would ruin all the fun.

Over the weekend, we participated in a pilot project for De Reactor. De Reactor aims to bundle the forces of entrepreneurial professionals in different disciplines, resulting in strong, distinctive creative solutions. Studio het Mes, Hein Alkemade, Antal Ruhl en Wytze Voerman completed the team.

During the pilot, the rapidly growing problem of “digital addiction” was addressed. After three days of heavy brainstorming, rapid prototyping, testing assumptions and little sleep, the “Senang” concept was presented. Senang is Indonesian for “happy” – and that’s exactly what the app, object and campaign are designed to make you feel. So quit watching Pharrell and become Senang!

Also, we finished the secret vault for Navid Nuur, hidden somewhere in an unidentified marble cave. Let’s go there sometime!

With the flurry of World Press Photo projects behind us we've been stretching our legs, contemplating the future and staring at this bird video posted by Navid Nuur.

It’s been quiet at the studio. Xav moved on to start a new adventure at Supersteil – and he took his enthousiasm, positive attitude and incredible barista skills with him. Our donuts have never missed their quintessential counterpart more. Good luck Xavi!

By tradition, April is high World Press Photo season. This week, we finished exhibition apps for iOS and Android and the Multimedia Contest kiosk app. Bastiaan is installing the latter onto 12 iMacs as we speak, so I’m afraid his weekend won’t come early.

Last Monday, we told about the come-into-being of Crowdpilot at This Happened Utrecht, which was fun as we actually Crowdpiloted our presentation. In case you’re interested: check out the 10 minute talk here.

This morning, Finn came by bringing a gigantic box of donuts. Later, an even bigger box full of specialty beers was delivered. I guess life is like a box of chocolates: sooner than later, you’re gonna get pretty darn fat – at least at Perceptor. Bye!

We've been off the radar for a bit. For the most part, this was due to the Perloo launch which completely and totally blew us away. The first week saw more than 200.000 downloads. The realization that people were playing our game after more than a year of hard work was unreal. To top it off, they were enjoying Perloo – just like the friendly bunch to your left.

Also, quotes like this: “If Hegel had developed an iPhone app, we think it would have been a lot like this.”

On to the next!

Perloo is a geometric fairy tale (thanks Marijn!) for your iPhone. It is a series of puzzles of which we do not know the extremes. It features a unique soundtrack by Ella Empress & The Layers of Reality. Perloo is supported by Robert Harrison and Creative Industries Fund NL.

Try it yourself: first week free on the App Store.

Don’t have an iPhone? Sorry. But you can still get a glimpse of the action here.

We released the beast! During an entertaining dating event at Rhizome, Crowdpilot was officially launched. Since then, people worry that the end of the world is near.

Join us in shaping the future of our social interactions on crowdpilot.me.

Crowdpilot is a collaboration with the great Lauren McCarthy.

We've been slacking in the Week Notes department. Mea culpa.

Crowdpilot – the app that will let you crowdsource your conversations – is about to launch after a period of relentless tweaking. Getting the Turks to play along with our little scheme was quite a challenge, but we finally nailed it by going back to basics.

Perloo, our crazy-hard iPhone puzzle game will launch February 20 and we're in the midst of final preparations for that launch. Last week we had a great time showing Perloo at the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht. We met lots of nice people and got some solid advice on marketing the game (thanks Adriaan!). We also has the opportunity to play Metrico and meet the team behind it, which was great and worth the trip on its own.

On thursday, we attended the special IXD14 This Happened in Amsterdam which was inspiring as always. Also on the side: work on Punchtime with the Amsterdam Filmacademy and preparations for other upcoming projects. Phew!

Oh, and that sky? That's Tuna, where we shot the Perloo trailer.

The week kicked off with exciting news: the person we approached for voice overs in Perloo agreed to work with us. This meant that we could finish up a lot of loose ends. We spent time polishing and tweaking the game, and started writing about it. Even though we have a very clear idea of what the game is about, capturing that idea in words is always a challenge. Its the last open end that we're now carefully closing up: a thought that is both extremely satisfying and paralyzingly terrifying.

Also, time was spent on Crowdpilot where we are trying to cooerce the Mechanical Turk crowd to play along with us. Generally, MT tasks don't leave much room for creativity, and trying to get the workers to think outside of habits turns out to be quite challenging. After countless revisions to the style, tone and format of our questionnaire, we seem be making progress.

“Black as midnight on a moonless night”

We're releasing Punchtime – painless time tracking for any project on Trello! After more than a year of internal use, we found that we had something pretty useful. So we applied a bit of polish, and today we're shipping.

Punchtime automatically syncs your Trello boards and makes them available for logging. You can log time using the website, or using our swanky Mac app which keeps time while you work. Logging with the Mac app has proved invaluable to us. The web app also provides an overview of your team is working on and allows for some basic reporting (more is coming in the new year).

So give it a try, punch yourself!

A busy week, with lots of preparations for approaching launches. Somehow, they have a way of coinciding with each other. Fun, but a bit hectic.

Between the bustle we still found time to complete the last piece of the puzzle that is Perloo. A package ready to be sent out overseas marking an end and a future beginning.

Three projects are fighting for our attention at the moment: Crowdpilot, the new World Press Photo website and our soon-to-be-released iPhone game Perloo. Last weekend, we shot some eerie footage in Sweden for Perloo’s trailer and today, Nadine visited us to play the game (she got a banana-flavoured donut in return). It was exciting and inspiring to see her engage with the game and its concept.

Sharing our lunch with her, we ran Crowdpilot since we didn't know what to say to a Canadian stranger. Luckily, the crowd proved to be very helpful by suggesting we ask her about poutine, a typical Canadian dish that, as we found out soon after, is a mixture between Dutch signature dishes patatje oorlog and kapsalon. Let’s have some!

As you can see, we've moved. The new studio is amazing: spacious, inspiring and austere.

After the move, work continued on Crowdpilot and Perloo, both of which are in their final stages of development now. We've also just kicked off a large and ambitious project with World Press Photo which will keep us occupied for at least the rest of the year.

On a final note: as we've only moved one floor up in the same building, our address and telephone numbers are unchanged.

After painting the ceiling, the walls and what not; after sanding the laminate flooring; after three layers of concrete paint, one failed attempt to move, another layer of paint and two layers of lacquer on the floor – we have a new studio.

Let’s move!

Thursday the 26th, Navid Nuur's exhibition Lube Love opened at the Bonnefantenmusum in Maastricht. Navid's typeface DISLECTIKA (for which we made the website) also premiered there. It was received quite warmly with a full spread in the Volkskrant dedicated to it.

In addition, we got some work done on Perloo and Crowdpilot. Perloo is really close to almost ready. Which again reminds us that personal projects are the hardest since there is no client yelling "ENOUGH ALREADY!!" in despair as we prepare yet another sprint of tiny tweaks.

Ah, we'll get it done. Someday.

Today we launch artist Puck Verkade's new website. In designing the website, we established a format that would accomodate the various media in which Puck works: video, installation and performance. The result is not a Powerpoint presentation (really!). We gave Puck a lot of freedom in designing her own ‘slides’, a task which she tackeled with verve and typographical sensibility.

With Dünya enjoying Turkish(?) mussels on vacation, Xavier and me had an easy week with excellent coffee, herring and the occasional tofu BLT. Puck Verkade’s new website is technically ready for launch, as are two small web projects we did for Navid Nuur. 

Also, we got 100 friends to subscribe to our Crowdpilot YouTube channel (thanks guys, you are making possible the impossible!). Not much going on there yet, but work continues on this extremely exciting project. Oh, and Perloo now has a credits chapter!

We launched two projects for Navid Nuur this week. The first one – On the Road to … Tarascon – researches multimedia in the context of online publications. The project seeks to combine text, image, sound and video into a coherent and unobtrusive whole. The second one is a website for DISLECTIKA, Navid's dyslectic typeface.

Quiet, still
You feel there's nothing going on

With half of the studio on vacation, things have been quiet over the past weeks. Nevertheless, we made some steady progress on a couple of interesting projects.

Puck Verkade asked us to create her a new website, and besides being a talented artist, she’s also a great person to work with. We expect the website to launch in the second half of September.

Also, we’re partnering with World Press Photo to exhibit their Multimedia Contest in Rio de Janeiro. At this pilot exhibition we’ll be trying out a couple of new things, a Twitter-based guestbook app for iPad being one of them.

Lastly, work continues on Crowdpilot, an incredibly exciting project. We’re still in the process of overcoming some serious technical hurdles, but once we have nailed those, your dates, arguments and meetings will never be the same. Ever.

No phone calls, no meetings, no deadlines. People tend to call these weeks cucumber-time. But since we prefer coffee over cucumbers, we drink as much as always. How much? Well, see for yourself: the Log Lady is keeping track of our coffee consumption.

Oh... and it keeps track of our donuts! We also need to eat, right? 

We just launched a new website for artist Navid Nuur. The site features a diary of video fragments and explores tactility in user interfaces. The touch-optimized menu has to be untangled by pulling items out of a jumble of characters. All type is set in a custom font based on Navid's handwriting. 

Other than that, work on Perloo continues.

Like almost every design problem, making a game first and foremost comes down to telling a story. The story Perloo is trying to convey may be a weird, incoherent story that’s impossible to grasp – it still is a story. And thus we we’re honored when writer Niels ’t Hooft payed us a visit last week to get his hands wet on Perloo. We met Niels while working on Ripple Effect, the pilot game we designed for Shell this spring. Niels just interviewed Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario’s father!) so we figured he would be truly impressed by our game, hehe.

What impact Perloo made on him we don’t know, but his visit was very valuable. Niels was the most skilled player we’ve seen so far, and besides his excellent tips and remarks, it provided for a good opportunity to have some exquisite doughnuts and coffee.

Thanks, Niels!

One year of coffee and donuts. Can you spot the different coffee styles? Image courtesy of our coffee-logging app, D3 and Xavier's assiduous efforts.

In which we found the studio littered with phones of all shapes and sizes, taking mobile design to the next level.

Most of our time was spent on our upcoming game Perloo. The audio team – Ella Empress and the Layers of Reality – delivered some otherworldy work this week. We demo'ed the game to Kars at Hubbub and besides some solid criticism, he called the game 'fiendishly hard'. We'll take that as a compliment. 

Also: concept development and some explorational sketching for Murk, debugging Android 'features' of the most vexing kind, final touches on some new things for Navid Nuur and talk about the best places to drink coffee in Brasília.

The work on Perloo continues to wander along an unknown path. Creating a game like this is not only a romance of many dimensions, it’s also a romance of many tests, debugging sessions, heavy mathematics and surprises.

Last week, the very special Ella Empress and the Layers of Reality officially joined the Perloo team. They will be doing the sound design for the game, and the first sketches sound fantastic. Their unique blend of electronic and acoustic sounds fits the game and its concept perfectly.

This week, the latest version of the game will be critiqued by another captain of industry: Hubbub’s Kars Alfrink will probably slice us to tiny pieces. Exciting!

This week, Casper and me gave a seminar on Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology to Media Technology students at Leiden University. The essay tries to determine what the essence of technology is, and how it has changed our relationship with nature. Its an interesting read, especially for 'makers' like us for whom we think it is essential to develop a critical stance towards technology.

Project-wise, we had a small celebratory moment after hearing that a research grant for a project we've been developing with Lauren McCarthy got approved. More about project Murk later; we have a game to finish.

Work on Perloo – our upcoming game – continues and the project is really starting to take shape. This week we had the honor of showing an early preview version of Perloo to some smart people at Gramble. It was great to get feedback from outside our team, and they had some solid advice.

In fact, we liked demoing Perloo so much that we decided to plan our development around a series of demos to people we admire. This also helps set us deadlines and forces us to chunk the project into presentable parts. Planning is hard, and when there's no external client it's even harder.

It still feels a bit surreal, but there it is. A printed book.

So what are you waiting for? Order your copy!

Cheers on a Formal Friday!

Welcome to Perceptor Game Studio, where Quadrophonia is inspiring us yet again and lives are more often saved than lost.

While designing a (very serious) game to improve safety at one of the world's largest oil companies, we’re also constructing oil platform-like structures of our own.

"1…2…3…TECHNO!"

True design serendipity!

The brief

When Mendo approached us about the project, they had a simple brief: translate the experience of visiting their beautiful Amsterdam store to the web. If you've ever visited Mendo, you will realise that this is easier said than done. Their shop is a dimly lit, cavernous space where the walls not made of bricks, but of thousands of custom-made black Mendo books. A bookstore made of books. Scattered throughout the space are small piles of books on photography, fashion and design. Their colourful images complement the dark walls perfectly. Next to their impeccable presentation, service is equally important at Mendo and they go to great lengths to make shopping at Mendo a pleasure. How does one go about translating that experience to the web? We chose to go back to the core: the book.

The book

Just as Mendo literally built their physical store out of books, we would do the same for the online store. We also decided that the way books are generally presented online is terribly boring and doesn't do the contents of a book justice at all. Tiny thumbnails and and lengthy lists of metadata are not appealing. In our designs, we approached 'the book' from two angles: the book as a material object and the book's visual contents (and by extension, the book as a carrier for ideas).

Early on in the project we made a bold decision: we would only show books on a shelf. One thing we didn’t like about the tiny thumbnails other bookshops use is that they do not take the material qualities of the book into account: they reduce the object to a small illegible image that has all but lost its relation to the actual book. By placing our books on shelves, we give them place and context. Their tactility is emphasized, even at small sizes.

Mendo books are exquisite objects that are beautiful even without opening them, and this is something we wanted to show. We do this by starting the gallery with a custom-made photograph of the book laying on a black surface. A huge, sharp, beautiful photograph.

We also created "how big is this book". A feature where you can compare the size of a book with a sticky note or iPad. Judging the size of a book is something that is particularly hard when shopping online. Numeric measurements are not intuitive, and you don't want to make your visitors go look for a tape measure (although that is what every other online bookstore seems to be doing). On the other hand, nearly everyone knows how big a sticky note is, and most people know how big an iPad is.

When you open a Mendo book, it's contents are visually powerful and you quickly find yourself sucked into it's world. On the website, we achieve the same effect using crisp full screen images. The best books are the ones in which the images are not only visually appealing but also evoke ideas that shape the atmosphere which surrounds the experience of reading the book. Of course, this is quite an ethereal concept, especially when applied to a website. We tried to achieve a similar captivating experience by cropping full spreads to powerful full-bleed photographs. When reading a book, the distracting aspects of a spread blur into the background because of the book's material qualities. On a website, these material qualities are lacking, making the distractions of a full spread containing bylines, whitespace and complex compositions all the more apparent, and distracting from the visual experience of the book. Reducing visuals to a single image mimics the experience of reading the actual book much more closely.

A curated experience

In their physical store, Mendo makes a big effort to make every customer feel at ease. They know about each book they sell because they pick each book by hand. They also do not sell books that they personally think are lacking, and are not afraid to tell customers so. Mendo offers a curated selection of books: every book is there for a reason.

In the online store, these aspects have been woven into many parts of the site. Books can be browsed by way of curated shelves where Mendo and guest curators shares their thoughts about a selection of books. Every book has a review written by Mendo (not one boilerplate publisher's description). The Shelf Service feature allows you to request personal buying advice in the form of a shelf filled with books chosen by Mendo. If you're ordering a gift, just enter a personal message and Joost (with his examplary handwriting) will write your note and send it along with the book. Finally, if you're feeling adventurous, just go to any shelf and hit the 'buy all books' button. This will automatically put all those books in your bag, and you will be only a couple of clicks away from a huge pile of great books at your doorstep (and a sizeable hole in your bank account).

Beautiful seams

If everything looks the same, nothing stands out. Our design put much emphasis on using large images and sparse typography throughout the browsing experience, with the aim of drawing the visitor into a world where the book takes central stage. While very effective for browsing books, this approach also narrows the mental model a visitor forms, and limits it to a passive viewing experience. To break out of this similarity and activate the visitor we consciously created seams in the visual and interaction design that would function as a mental anchor for the visitor and effectively split the site into two realms.

The first realm is the viewing experience. The second realm deals with everything that surrounds this browsing experience, the most important of which is actually buying books. By making the transition to a visitors bag – and the checkout pages – a very distinct one, we place extra emphasis on the fact that this is a shop.

Mark Weiser – a pioneer of ubiquitous computing – claimed that making technology seamless is akin to doing everything the same way, and that it is better to set focus on making seamful technology with “beautiful seams”. We tried to do just that.

More about Mendo
Visit mendo.nl

In which we launched 5 projects and lived to tell about it. Craziness!

A bit late – we're already well into week 143 – but that was to be expected. Last week was a monster, with 5 launches and its fair share of last-minute surprises (expedited review, anyone?).

On Monday, we flipped the switch on the new C-Roots website. C-Roots is an Amsterdam based agency for identity, strategy and creativity. We've been working with them over the past months to create a dynamic online experience that matches and emphasizes their brand. Dig at the roots!

Tuesday was a day of dotting i's and crossing t's. Dunya, Xavier and Casper labored away at the studio and I visited Hubbub for a day with the Ripple Effect team.

Wednesday me and Dunya traveled to the Huygensmuseum Hofwijck in Voorburg to install 7 interactive installations we created for their re-opening on thursday (attended by our national Space Hero André Kuypers). The museum chronicles the life and work of both Christiaan and Constantijn Huygens.

Huygensmuseum Hofwijck – photo by Jörg Franken

On thursday the World Press Photo exhibition season kicked off at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. The exhibition showcases past year's best in photojournalism. Our contribution is twofold: we created an on-site installation that showcases this year's Multimedia Contest winners, a part of the annual competition that was absent at the exhibition before.

Second, we created an Exhibition Guide for iOS and Android that supports the images on display with a wealth of background information in the form of audio captions, location information and technical details. Another interesting feature of the Exhibition Guide is the automatic creation of an anonymous personalized profile that allows anyone to continue their visit online and view personalized recommendations, photographer interviews and more. Visitors are notified of this personalized page via a push message, one day after their exhibition visit. I hope to write a more in depth post about the Exhibition Guide soon.

Last but not least: on friday we finished up work on the Ripple Effect pilot and after some last minute tweaks Kars at Hubbub launched the game on sunday. Ripple Effect is a game about process safety we're making for Shell. About 90 players from around the globe will put the game through its paces.

Ripple Effect – Photo by Kars Alfrink on Instagram

Friday afternoon Xavier and me rushed to the /dev/haag meetup to give a talk about Untime and our work with artist Navid Nuur. We were a bit underprepared due to the hectic week, but had great fun nonetheless. Thanks to Jonathan and Tijs for having us!

Finally, we get to show you something. Check it out. Your name. In gum.

The week kicked off with Xavier starting production on Hofwijck and me finalizing the first public bits of KAIGARA (a collaboration with Hubbub). Casper spent the week drawing maps and tweaking typography for Mijn Rondje.

On thursday, we presented Mendo at the first This Happened in Rotterdam. The venue was packed and the atmosphere was great. We had fun. In addition, we updated our Mendo shelf with some fresh publications.

Finally, work also continued on the World Press Photo Exhibition Guide for iOS and Android, which we were able to call done on friday. A swift submission of the iOS app to Apple's Ministry of Truth closed off the week.

In which we drank a total of 38 cups of coffee, worked on 5 different projects, ate 3 donuts, vistited Hubbub, made 1 call to Bangalore and 1 call to New York, ate 1 loaf of home-made bread (thanks Xav!) and found 1 mysterious bottle of beer at our doorstep.

In which we found out about one of Untime’s most excited fans. Feel the vibe.

We also kicked off two new projects: one for World Press Photo, and one super secret project for which we were approached by Hubbub. Work continued on Hofwijck, C-Roots and something called "Your name in gum".

I wonder what that might be.

After realizing we started the Weekly Notes series to keep our loyal fans updated on the things we’re working on, here’s what:

We kicked off designing several audiovisual installations for the newly renovated Huygensmuseum Hofwijck in Voorburg. Some of you may know the place, since it’s one of the most beautiful places to say “yes” in the area. The opening is scheduled for the end of April, so we have no time to waste.

The new website we are creating for Amsterdam based strategy agency C-Roots is nearing its launch. While we don’t want to give away anything yet, we can tell you it’s going to be a corporate website unlike any you have seen before (clue 1, clue 2, clue 3).

We also worked on MENDO’s online shop this week. Amongst other things, you can now browse (and buy!) books from your mobile phone, view your order total in pounds or dollars and add a phone number to your account. Details, but it’s the details that make a product great.

Finally: paperwork, several interesting new leads, Skype sessions spanning three continents and coffee. Great coffee.

The only thing missing is the small zipper. And the actual book, which is what we’re working on next.

Let’s make a book!

A week of systematic investigations. Dünya studied the origin of his recent nightmares, a mobile application development platform likely created by the same guys who designed the Fyra.

Xavier was mainly preoccupied with his observations of planetary bodies and the functioning of the human eye, while I was having difficulties freeing some precious time to concentrate on optics and astronomy.

All the while, Bastiaan did some thorough empirical research on influenza.

After seven sleepless nights for our loyal fans, we can finally announce the winners of last week's Facebook contest! The lucky recipients of a limited-edition Meesterplan IPA are:

☛ Ruben Reehuis
☛ Rémi Bouwer
☛ Menno van Duijn

Congratulations!

At Perceptor, we love to stimulate your senses. This time, we’re aiming for your taste buds with our homebrew, translatlantic IPA (we’re talking about beer here).

Meesterplan comes in a limited edition of only 50 bottles. It is a fruity, fresh beer with a bitter aftertaste — a true master plan.

With only a few bottles left, get yours by liking us on Facebook!

This is week 128.

At Perceptor we believe design is not a project phase or singular activity. Instead, we believe in design thinking. An approach that is to be applied at every stage in a project. Creating a concept is as much a design process as pushing pixels or writing code is. Modern technologies demand this hybrid approach to design, as our media are inherently unstable and unpredictable. Technology should be embraced if we are to design it.

We were invited to speak at a symposium for policy makers in arts education yesterday at ArtEZ in Zwolle. It was an inspiring day centered around the role of technology in art with many well articulated views and opinions. We presented our work and ethos alongside Belgian studio Unfold, DMA's dean Henri Lucas and several other inspiring people.

And we’re back after the break. We burned the Christmas tree, vacuumed the studio and cleaned the coffee maker.

The past week had us reflecting on the year that’s now behind us, in which we had the privilege to work on great projects with so many inspiring people. We look forward to continuing doing so in 2013.

Happy New Year!

And according to some, our last week before the katabatic legacy of the Mayan calendar will wreak its havoc on our fair planet. We, however are not inclined towards to these eschatological travesties and are going about our business as usual.

The past weeks have been particularly busy, with a series of projects coming to an end (or pause), and a host of others just starting up. Christmas feels like the eye of the tornado.

Update: the cat is out of the bag!

Sometimes, working at Perceptor feels like working at a car manufacturer. Everyone got their hands dirty on heavy digital mechanics this week, while Bastiaan also took the necessary preparations for his upcoming holiday.

White Russians on a white Friday.

Here at Perceptor, we're always looking for new business opportunities.

Time to kick off a new series: Ladies enjoying their Donuts.

If you are also a Lady who enjoys her Donut, why not participate? Send our Lucy your motivational letter and a recent photograph to to be considered.

Something tells me this next project isn't going to be a website…

quote by Hélder Câmara

It has been a long wait, but it was worth it: the Giant from Another Place we announced here earlier has finally arrived. Besides being a professional barista (ever tried to do latte-art in a flat bottom tea mug using a Rancilio Silvia?) and experienced DIY’er he also occasionally does state-of-the-art things involving creativity, code and some obscure network called ‘The Web’ — a true creative technologist.

Welcome, Xavier!

Since we were nominated for a Dutch Design Award with Mendo, we're also in the Dutch Design Yearbook 2012. On the left you can read their review of the project. "Redefines the online book shop genre.", "A game changer in the sector." Sounds pretty good!

Back in the studio it's business as usual. Dunya's been working hard to make test driven development an integral part of our process. Casper is running around telling anyone who will listen to "make it flatter" whilst working on new designs for Liftcap. And I have been busy with a new project for Malmberg in collaboration with IJsfontein.

Unfortunately, we did not win a Dutch Design Award (that is, not this year). However, we stick to Henny Huisman’s wisdom “participating is more important than winning”.

Besides, we were ‘beaten’ by a truly brilliant contestant (just don't judge the game by its website). Congratulations, Proun!

Creative inspitation can manifest itself in many forms, some being more obvious than others. Sure, we admire the work of Dieter Rams, Wim Crouwel, David Lynch, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright and many, many more. How original.

Perhaps a less well-known source of inspiration has been transiently present in the studio on a weekly basis for about 114 weeks now. Each friday afternoon, Klaus kicks off our Friday Informalities, in which we spend time working on our own projects. This week we were given the honor of having him with us physically.

Thanks, Marijn!

Untime is featured in the just-released Grote Haagse Kunstkalender (which roughly translates to the Big The Hague Art Calender). We were given the opportunity to create an image for march 28, which was great as this is actually my birthday.

Rich, our open source rich text editor for Rails got some love from the community. Contributor Daniel Westendorf sent in pull requests to enable file uploads to Amazon S3 and direct object linking. Thanks Daniel!

Nope, that handsome lad is not one of us. Nor do we know him, or he us.

The image is part of an intriguing project by artist Navid Nuur. Bored at the museum is an expanding collection of images found on the internet, depicting the “creative boredom” that often seizes visitors to traditional museum spaces.

Initially published as a dead tree edition, we had the pleasure of working with Navid to bring the project back to where it came from: the internet.

Enjoy.

Nothing worth mentioning happened, but take a look at this week’s number.

Ain't she pretty?

Thanks to our friends at Motoko, Perceptor is happy to introduce two new inhabitants of the studio to you: The Man from Another Place and The Giant. In November, The Giant from Another Place will also join us. Neat.

Next up is another trip to the desert! While making the necessary preparations, we're munching away home grown grapes from Bastiaan's vinyard. 

Casper and me have been working hard on Liftcap, which is a new project that's going to take up most of our time in the forseable future. In the process, we've been talking about feedback loops, meaningful videos and creativity.

Also, Dünya is back and busy working on InTime. Which will be like Untime, but totally different.

A while back we mentioned working on something with Navid Nuur. 

BOOM

This is week 108.

As if nothing ever happened, the events of week 107 have been reversed, transformed and archived for the future. To be continued. Soon.

This wonderful tile flooring from 1889 decorated my short vacation in Northern France last week. Although this was a very welcome break from the storm, it's good to be back.

We have been kicking off two extremly exciting projects. Unfortunately, we cannot give away too much information about these at this point. One of the projects is about time. After I turned thirty years old a couple of weeks ago, Bastiaan told me to forget about the idea of time as a whole, since it's really just an empty concept. However, the project we're working on right now is setting time into stone: it doesn't get much more concrete.

Hopefully, time is on our side.

And we're back! Unavoidable circumstances (i.e. summer) caused a one-week hiatus in our weekly notes. Alas.

This week, work continued on Dimencer (hit me up if you'd like to be a beta tester – we're almost there) and we wrapped up Project NN. A launch is imminent. We also kicked off something new which will add a fourth dimension to our favourite list-making tool. Lastly, there is some experimental hardware hacking going with the amazing $25 Raspberry PI board (pictured), combining optics and sound. 

Next week, our focus will shift a little as we approach the tornado.

Komkommertijd (silly season — thank you Wikipedia). The perfect time to move house. Take a vacation. Turn that dusty prototype into something real. Dive into the Trello API and build something cool. Start an ambitious and enormous international project. Realize that our schedule will probably be packed well into the next year. Yeah. Silly season indeed.

After all the excitement of our Dutch Design Awards nomination, we're back at work.

Dunya has immersed himself in Game Kit and is finishing up something very nice (hint: it's not a spreadsheet). I've been working on Untime 3 and a fun new project for a new client involving diamonds, rubies and Paper.js. Casper drew the shortest straw this week. He is working on proposals, doing our taxes and making sure our to-do list doesn't grow to insurmountable lengths.

Wowzers, we're a Dutch Design Awards finalist with MENDO!

To celebrate, we bought ourselves a coffee grinder (that makes a hell of a lot of noise) and we will be creating our very own game (that will be almost impossible to play).

Need we say more? Both things have been on the top of our wish list for like ever, so we're quite excited.

There's been a lot to celebrate lately. Many things we cannot talk about (yet), but one of the things we can talk about is this: starting next week, Perceptor will be +1.

Dünya Kirkali will be joining us full-time as a software engineer. When Dünya isn't working his magic with languages – computerized and not – you can find him rolling sushi or solving wooden puzzle boxes.

We have an interesting chart for you. It graphs the relative amount of sentences containing statements about policy in Queen's speeches between 1945 and 2010. Higher bars mean more policy sentences. The width of the bars is determined by the relative length of the speech. Shorter speeches get thinner bars.

The point here is that since Beatrix became queen, speeches have become much longer, while the percentage of policy-containing sentences has dropped a little. In short: she likes to talk.

Five star accomodation.
Five star weather.
Five star host.
Five star experience.
(Who cares about football?)

We’ve given our best at proposing, now if she’d only answer “yes”…

This week,

☛ we created a three dimensional LP representing 24 hours of noise pollution around Schiphol

☛ we presented this interactive audiovisual sonification at the VPRO/Nederland van Boven Beamlab Special at Pakhuis de Zwijger

☛ during the presentation, Untime was projected on 6 screens simultaneously, adding up to over 90 square meters of black & white pixel goodness

☛ we have been as stupid as to not having taken a single good picture of this spectacle.

Lots of things are boiling beneath the surface. In the meantime, we’re playing flight records.

Coffee-wise, this has been a turbulent week. While we couldn't get a fresh load of Malawi beans to taste anything better than your average cup of Senseo, Bastiaan was seriously attacked by our sweet Silvia. Fortunately, today she made up by serving us the best espresso we've tasted in a long time. More on our coffee consumption here.

Between writing proposals, tracking manure transportations and mining airplane callsigns, we've been working with artist Navid Nuur to create some pretty glitches. More on that soon.

We were honored to be invited by Zefir7 to talk about our work during their monthly ‘designer's café’ in Zeebelt theatre. Honored because of the many great creative minds that preceded us, but also scared to be grilled. Presenting at Zefir7 means presenting to co-creatives, whom are probably the most critical crowd imaginable.

However, the engaging audience, the great venue and the delicious Indonesian food accounted for a wonderful evening. Moreover, the crowd stayed for a beer afterward. We met some inspiring people and would like to thank Zefir7 for this amazing opportunity!

When completed, this will probably look nothing like what you see on the left. 

After the busy period leading up to the release of the World Press Photo iPad app, the studio has quieted down. Time was spent sorting papers, clearing email backlogs and generally winding down a little.

Not that no actual work happened, not at all. In fact, another project went live just yesterday: a new website for the place where we have our studio, the DCR. One interesting aspect of the project is that it was a collaboration between all graphic designers in the building. Check it out.

Two pieces of new work: a flyer for Bram Vreven's residency at DordtYard (pictured) and the 2012 World Press Photo Contest app for iPad. The app is free this year (with a paid upgrade to premium content). Get the app.

The week in which we worked our collective asses off to finish the upcoming 2012 World Press Photo Contest app for iPad. And the week in which we got to taste my latest batch of beer. Extra stout, which seems appropriate.

A sneek peek at the upcoming 2012 World Press Photo Contest app for iPad. We're churning out images like there's no tomorrow, and things are beginning to take shape. Next week we submit to Apple!

We're in crunch-mode for World Press Photo. Do not interrupt. Or do, but bring us a gift, like Q42 did with a luxurious edition of their bible, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Again a busy week. Casper has been finalizing work on two games for the newly renovated historical museum in Brielle (their website could use a refresh as well though). The opening of the museum (with the Queen) is next week, after which we'll post some more info on the games.

At the same time, work on the World Press Photo iPad and iMac apps is in full swing. The team is knee-deep in Objective-C code and Casper and me have been working on finalizing the designs. Next week a lot of separate parts should be coming together when we integrate this year's data into the applications.

Of course, we're optimizing the World Press Photo app for the new iPad's retina display. We picked up our device this friday and we're impressed. Especially for an app like World Press Photo, the increased resulution makes such a difference.

Finally, the usual suspects: quotes, RFPs, meetings, discussions on coffee grinding.

After more than six months of hard work, we flipped the switch on Mendo.nl this thursday. MENDO is a creative bookstore based in Amsterdam. Now for the first time, you can order their exceptional hand-picked collection online.

We also quietly launched a new version of our own website. It's still rough around the edges, but we hope to fix that in the coming weeks.