When I first saw Khoi Vinh’s collaborative design app Mixel, I wanted to throw up—from jealousy.

I’d first met Khoi while moderating a Layer Tennis match between him & Nicholas Felton, and at the time I was brainstorming about designers’ needs for tablet apps. “What about ‘Photoshop Volley,'” I asked Khoi, describing a totally non-destructive, cloud-backed design environment centered on playful exchange of ideas & artwork. It turns out he was working on something very similar, so we went off on separate paths. My team ended up building Photoshop Touch (a far more traditional app than I wanted to make), and Mixel launched as much more what I had in mind.

Sadly the app didn’t take off, but Khoi has continued to think about ways for tablets to help designers think & share better. He’s been working with Adobe on a new iPad app call LayUp, letting you make quick sketches that can evolve into styled renderings, and the response looks pretty enthusiastic. Check out some demos:

The sketch-to-shape tech reminds me of (and almost certainly was lifted from) Adobe’s innovative Adobe Proto (for sketching wireframes that turned into real code), the moodboarding aspects recall Adobe Collage—apps that were launched 3 years ago, then summarily executed some months later. Maybe LayUp’s export of native PSD, AI, and InDesign files, its Typekit integration, and its cool history feature will change the game this time.

What do you think? Will LayUp earn a place in your design process?

Lumino City looks amazing: 

Three years in the making, it’s handmade entirely out of paper, card, miniature lights and motors.

Sequel to the award-winning game Lume, Lumino City begins where that game left off. Begin by exploring the city, and using your ingenuity piece together all sorts of puzzling mechanisms to help the people who live in its unique world. Discover gardens in the sky, towers marooned high on an immense waterwheel, and houses dug precariously into cliffs.

To create the environment, a ten foot high model city was built by hand and by laser cutter, with each motor and light wired up individually, bringing the scenes to luminous life.

[Vimeo] [Via Lex Van Den Berghe]

Love it:

This is a working particle accelerator built using LEGO bricks. I call it the LBC (Large Brick Collider). It can accelerate a LEGO soccer ball to just over 12.5 kilometers per hour.

I’m even more enamored of this one:

[A] kinetic sculpture of a human head. As the top of the head opens it reveals a wonderful world of pure imagination built using LEGO bricks.

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Great news from Scott Kelby & co.: 

The entire Nik Collection (it’s usually $149 by itself) included with your membership bundle, and our membership prices are the lowest ever!

The collection includes: Silver Efex Pro (the ultimate B&W conversion plug-in) Color Efex Pro (my personal favorite plug-in of all time); Nik Sharpener Pro; Nik Define; the brand new Nik Analog Efex; HDR Efex Pro and Viveza! You get it all!

Here’s the link to our Cyber Weekend Deals! (go there right now. There’s lots of great stuff to choose from).

[YouTube]

Google & Adobe have been collaborating to enable Photoshop to stream to Chrome OS, and it works as well as you’d hope—and probably better. PetaPixel writes,

Essentially, this version would run off of a server, allowing you to use as weak of a machine as you like, since the program isn’t relying at all on your computer’s processing power.

The long and short of it is that, as Ars Technica puts it, “Streaming Photoshop looked like… Photoshop. That’s probably the best praise you can give it.”

That was my experience using it for a bit back at Adobe: surprisingly good.

Check out Schnellebuntebilder studio’s eye-popping (and eye-quantizing/disintegrating) art:

writes

Using custom software, they captured a live action actor with a Kinect 2, and convert him into a series of swirling cube particles and light rays, all in real time (see below). The team doesn’t explain how it works, but it looks like they modeled the actor beforehand and then mapped his particle-effect avatar onto the live action video.

Here’s a peek behind the scenes:

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Frédéric Bonpapa has rendered a beautiful, albeit baffling, world:

Light Motif is conceived as a synaesthetic experience based on a visual transposition of Music for 18 Musicians – Section II, by the American composer Steve Reich. The ambition of the film is to cinematically capture the extraordinary life force that animates this essential work of contemporary music by offering a truly hypnotic experience where music can be “seen”.

I’m reminded of the Micronaxx exploring the works of Richard Serra.

[Vimeo] [Via Bridgette Wiley]

Hmm—this looks interesting:

The Moleskine Smart Notebook, Creative Cloud connected takes your ideas from paper to vector in an instant.

Draw by hand, use the Companion App to sync your files to the Creative Cloud and immediately open your image in Photoshop or Illustrator for refinement.

This way, you can focus on the idea when you’re offline, then elaborate it when you’re back at your workplace.

[YouTube] [Via]

I know it’ll sound like I’m shilling for The Man, but I’ve been using the new Google Calendar app for a while & think you’ll dig it. The Android version is available now & an iPhone version in the works.

[YouTube]

How great is this? Working together with the Raw Art Works Real to Reel Filmschool, a bunch of middle schoolers produced a shot-for-shot remake of the Ghostbusters trailer.

Check out the side-by-side comparison here:

[Vimeo 1 & 2] [Via]

This new design/hosting service promises a ton of goodness & has me intrigued.

This is not another do-it-yourself website builder. The Grid harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to take everything you throw at it – videos, images, text, urls and more – and automatically shape them into a custom website unique to you. As your needs grow, it evolves with you, effortlessly adapting to your needs.

[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]

“They may take our Flash,” a blue-faced Mel Gibson is bellowing somewhere, “but they’ll never take… our panels!!”

I’m delighted that longtime friend to Photoshop-based painters Anastasiy Safari has released a new, HTML5-based version of his MagicPicker panel for Photoshop & Illustrator. Check out the new goodness:

MagicPicker Color Wheel/Picker 4.0:

• Finally brings full CC 2014 support (Photoshop and Illustrator)
• Introduces Color Temperature Wheel that lets artist separate warm color palette from cold color palette
• Improves Tone Lock: Lock tone of color when changing its hue or saturation
• Brings Big Color Swatches that improves perception of colors
• Supports all major versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (Adobe Creative Suite and Creative Cloud): CC2014, CC, CS6, CS5.5, CS5, CS4, CS3
• Introduces new color wheel engine and more features and improvements

It’s a shame that after 7+ years, 3D in Photoshop remains, to the best of my knowledge, a very sparsely used area, and it has yet to yield the wide range of advances we envisioned at the start. Maybe, though, quick & practical tips like these from Paul Trani will help nudge the needle: 

[YouTube]

As my wife told me, “You. Are. Welcome.”

On the video’s site you can choreograph your own version & learn about the wacky Honda UNI-CUB vehicle that co-stars.

[YouTube]

168 steps, man. 168 steps.

That’s how much effort it took to import a single 20-layer Photoshop file into Flash Professional when I was a designer & get the layers ready to animate.

Then Adobe shipped LiveMotion, and 168 steps fell to two (import, convert to layers). Years later we added the same support to Flash itself & other tools, and it always made a huge positive difference.

Now you can do the same with Adobe’s coding tool, Brackets:

Brackets is now 1.0 and even has the ability to open PSD files in it to extract images, CSS, text and other content.

Check it out:

[YouTube]

Newly minted Googler & interface expert Luke Wroblewski here provides an interesting 5-minute tour of what works & what doesn’t in mobile interface design. In emphasizing the need to get people to the good stuff fast, he includes a great quote from Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger: mobile apps fill potholes of boredom, and “People don’t like to wait while they wait.” The whole thing is worth a watch:

[YouTube]

Hat (and skin?) off Jude Redfield, a weatherman for WDRB in Louisville, KY, for some inspired use of old-school technologies.

Man, some people are so lucky: sugar never sticks to their ribs…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iu5vJgdsJQ

[YouTube] [Via]

Check out this novel bit of storytelling from Honda (not embeddable, but understandably): Two films play simultaneously, and you hold down the R key (playing on the Civic Type R branding) to toggle between them. I’ll let you see the rest for yourself.

[Via Alex Powell]

Strangest beatboxing I’ve seen all morning. 

[Vimeo] [Via]

Here’s a neat Halloween idea from my Photoshop pals:

Professor Photoheim’s been murdered at his Halloween party. There are three suspects. To solve the crime you must say who did it, how he or she did it, and post a screen grab of your evidence to our Facebook page.

Here’s your first—and largest—source of evidence: the PSD of the scene of the crime. Download the PSD from Creative Cloud or directly here. Wednesday at 10AM PST we’ll release more clues needed to solve the #PsMystery.

More fun stuff is on its way, so stay tuned via Facebook and Twitter.

Nice coverage of the Stories feature we launched a few months back: 

“In an ideal world, you could have a little personal historian following you around and just keeping track of everything you did,” said Smarr, leaning forward eagerly in his chair. “Maybe in certain circles there are the rich families that just have the family photographer who takes notes and makes beautiful albums of trips and stuff, but most people don’t. We thought, ‘Maybe someday everyone can have his or her own personal historian.’”

Popeye Tool & Beastmaster Filter FTW!

[YouTube] [Via Bridgette W]

Thanks for the nightmares, David Lewandowski!

[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]

Bonus from a couple of years back: Horse Takes It To The Limit

[YouTube]

Wanna see the inside of my brain? It’s a lot like ClipDis, an app that pairs just about anything said (written) with a visual movie quote. Check it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVODznjN8UQ

[YouTube] [Via Ying Ying Liu]

…and you had no choice but to part with one technology item, which would you miss the least?

• Smartphone
• Computer
• TV
• DVR
• Tablet

I’m guessing that for most people, the tablet gets shoved into the bad dude’s mitts first. They’re nice-to-have tweener devices, but if pressed you could do almost everything elsewhere. That’s likely why tablet sales growth has cooled off: most people don’t really need a tablet, and if you use one for basic consumption tasks (watching videos, browsing the Web), there are few reasons to upgrade.

Anyhow, let’s see what Apple has up its sleeve for Thursday, and what other vendors might have cooking.

Who knew? Julieanne Kost did:

This new feature is designed to render realistic flames on user-defined paths. You need to create your path first (using the pen tool or any of the shape tools), then choose  Filter > Render > Flames. (Note: you need to have a pixel layer targeted in the Layers panel as a landing place for the flame to be created, not a Shape, Type, or Smart Object layer. You can however convert type to paths or use the Type Mask tool to render paths for letter forms).

Check out the rest of her post for more tips & examples.

Wanna feel old? Check out Casey Neistat’s charming glimpse into how kids these days are creating disposable—er, ephemeral—stories via Snapchat. Then get off my lawn.

[YouTube]

And so does Illustrator!

My God, I thought this day might never come, but I’m thrilled: You can now drag objects into a library, then use them across projects, apps, and even machines (as it’s all cloud-synced). Check it out (along with smarter smart guides & more) in this demo from Paul Trani:

What a long & winding road it was to get here. This sort of workflow was what we always had in mind when developing Smart Objects & Bridge 10 (!!) years ago. It’s why Bridge originally offered a micro mode that could float over other apps, and it’s a big part of why I pushed the development of Mini Bridge & consistent panel extensibility across the Adobe suite. It was frustrating to never quite get to this point, so hats off to everyone who’s now made it happen!

[YouTube]

Last year I visited longtime Hallmark technologist Ron Green & the University of Missouri to learn about the great work they’re doing to teach next-generation storytelling techniques. Now they’ve assembled digiSTORY 2014, a conference happening on Oct. 22nd in Kansas City.

Knowing how to tell stories using digital technology is no longer an option if you want to communicate in the emerging world.

At digiSTORY2014, leaders in social media, technology trends, entertainment and media production will talk about their own experiences and equip you as a digital storyteller. We’ve lined up four industry pacesetters as conference keynoters.

Check out the site for details, and when you register you can save $100 by entering code “partner100.”

Chris Jones notes, “Work in progress made with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, composited with Davinci Resolve Lite. Music by me.”

[YouTube] [Via]

Check out Jeff Goldblum’s gloriously weird fake infomercial for the GE Link lighting solutions & “Kiss your horribly lit, non-successful life goodbye.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egIY7ushchU

Now excuse me while I improve my attack speeds in my home dojo.

[Via]

The Verge reports,

In the red corner, there was @pixelsorter, designed to create relaxed, fuzzy remixes of photos, like the one above. In the blue corner, @badpng was running every image through a broken PNG encoding algorithm, resulting in harsh compression and jarring color shifts. Pixelsorter’s creator, Way Spurr-Chen, sent the same photo to both bots, locking them in a potentially endless back-and-forth, chewing on the same image over and over until it disintegrated into a mess of pixels.

Click through to see the full weird progression/disintegration.

[Via Steven Johnson]

Ebony & i-vor-y: I love it when my peeps work together. Chrome PM Stephen Konig writes,

This streaming version of Photoshop is designed to run straight from the cloud to your Chromebook. It’s always up-to-date and fully integrated with Google Drive, so there’s no need to download and re-upload files—just save your art directly from Photoshop to the cloud.

I got to kick the tires before I left Adobe, and performance (at least over a fast network connection) was strikingly good even on a $200 Chromebook. The only limitation I noticed was the lack of GPU-powered features (canvas rotation, a soft-edged cursor for brush resizing, etc.).

Check out Adobe’s site for an FAQ & to apply for program access.  [Via]

This is pretty delightful:

Colossal explains,

The team built a nearby dancing booth rigged with cameras that translates the dance moves of real passersby into a pixelated ‘don’t walk’ silhouette inside a crosswalk light. The video claims the installation resulted in 81% more people stopping at the light instead of walking out into the street.

[YouTube]

The NYT has posted a rather hypnotic visualization of all the swings Derek Jeter has taken in his professional baseball career. As you scroll down, a single looping video instance multiples & shrinks. Even if you don’t care about baseball or dataviz, it’s worth a look just in terms of Web-tech cleverness. (Can anyone tell me exactly how they’re doing this, btw?)

[Via]

The wonderful videos that DreamWorks animator Daniel Hashimoto makes with his son…

…have landed him a deal with Toys R Us, resulting in a whole set of new commercials:

http://youtu.be/IiwJmR94_wg

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Alex Powell]

Yay!

Friday is Opening Day, we’ll start with an Around the World Exhibition in which ten designers pass a file around the globe. The Main Event is Jon Contino vs. Dan Cassaro, with Rosecrans Baldwin providing the play-by-play commentary.

And this season, you can play, too:

Anyone who’s interested in playing can show us their chops by posting a sample match (play with a pal!) to their Online Portfolio at Behance… Make sure you tag your samples with “LayerTennisQualifier” so we can check them out easily.

I had no idea! But, yep, there it is. You can start in simple mode, then optionally jump into an advanced editor (controlling precise sequence, timing, etc.).

Does this kind of visual summarization tool (something making it easier to package up & share a series of moments) strike you as something you’d use? And if so but not in its current form, what would need to change? TIA.

I’m thrilled for my wife, her teammates, and most importantly their customers as they unveil an enormous number of new enhancements in the Creative Cloud video tools. Apropos of her product in particular,

Adobe Anywhere for video adds robust collaboration support for After Effects CC users and brings refinements to the Adobe Anywhere app for iPad, including new scrubbing gestures and sorting options. A new streaming API allows facilities and broadcasters to integrate content from Adobe Anywhere into a variety of user experiences on the web or mobile devices.

Check out their blog post for tons more detail, and please drop by to say hi if you’ll be at IBC in Amsterdam. (And if during that time I go out like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, well, that’s what happens when she leaves me alone with the Micronaxx.)

When you automatically back up your iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows videos using Google+, you’ll be able to share them on YouTube simply by going to youtube.com/upload and clicking “Import your videos from Google+.” My raw/video backup strategy now consists of “Plug in SD card; the end,” and this change eliminates the need to upload clips piecemeal for sharing. Congrats to my teammates who made it happen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFl3duPPG0w

[YouTube]

Check out what Googler Steve Seitz & UW collaborators have been up to—and just think of all the face painting we could do with this! 😉

[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]

You can play with this pair of renderers right inside your (modern) browser:

• The team at Floored (which “creates interactive, online 3d models for real estate”) has devised cool sketch-style rendering technology.

 

• Evan Wallace has created a neat fluid simulation using WebGL (WetGL? ba-dum, tssh!). Make sure to click the water & drag around the sphere.

[Via Steven Johnson & Ivan Neulander]

Pitch-perfect sketch from Portlandia on the appeal—and perils—of running away from social media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz-7d3HZE7o

[YouTube]

As Martin Lawrence might say in a signature spinning camera shot, Pix just got real…

[YouTube] [Via Aharon Rabinowitz]

“[T]hereby bringing the coming robot apocalypse that much closer,” TechCrunch duly notes, so thanks for that, Harvard:

The robots “can achieve complex global behavior from the cooperation of many limited & noisy individuals”—which sounds like just about every human company, ever.

[YouTube]

Nobumichi Asai has produced fascinating real-time, real-world face painting. According to Gizmodo, “Asai used Omote, a combination of real-time face tracking and projection mapping to transform a model’s face into mesmerizing patterns.”

[Vimeo] [Via]

Clever. TechCrunch writes,

Here’s a handy, easy to remember trick: just add “GIF” to the beginning of the URL. After “www.” and before “youtube.com.”

So, for example, you’d turn www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ into www.gifyoutube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and hit enter. Tada!

I remember fondly when Illustrator added Smart Guides, and now Photoshop has gotten into the action. Here’s a quick how-to demo from Sebastian Bleak:

[YouTube] [Via]

Why? Eh, I don’t know—but it’s still rather cool that one can create what appear to be unspinnable asymmetrical objects. (Bear this in mind next time Leonardo DiCaprio tries to incept you.)

[YouTube] [Via]

Neat new stuff from a bunch of ex-Adobe/Macromedia folks. (Make sure your endure the jaunty saxophone until just after the 1-minute mark—or simply hop there to see the CSS 3D stuff in brief.)

You can download it here.

[YouTube]