What do you get if you try a little videogame alchemy? Combine rhythm-action poster child Guitar Hero, add retro arcade puzzler Klax, and throw in a dash of futuristic racer Wipeout and you get Audiosurf.

Audiosurf takes an audio track and turns it into a race track. Beats, pitch and tempo all control the path of the course, and your craft must fly along it, dodging or collecting blocks of various colours according to the structure of the music. It’s absorbing stuff and great fun.

The best part? Audiosurf uses your own MP3 collection for the gameplay, it even compiles charts of the most played tracks, compares other players’ performance to the same songs, and scrobbles to last.fm too.

The worst part? It’s a dirty PC only game, which is made a little better by being pretty cheap and available on the excellent Steam platform, but only just. You’re alright if you can take a break from your PowerPoint presentation on your PC, or Halo on your xBox, but if you are a PS3 and Mac man like me your options are limited. For the PlayStation, may I suggest Vib Ribbon…

I can happily report however, that if you have an Intel Mac, you can play it perfectly using Boot Camp and there is also a free demo to try it out first. Still, a PlayStation Network release would be great, and it would go down a treat with all the audiovisual Mac users out there…

…pretty please?

In the words of Ian and Alex who run The Art of the Title Sequence website: “Remember when your heart sank just a little when you realized the Pink Panther movie wasn’t a cartoon?” Check out their site for examples of great typographic, illustrative and imaginatively composed film and television title sequences. You can watch them in good quality too and then stick around to discuss in a suitably highbrow fashion…

In the meantime here are some of my favourites from the site…

…the obligatory Hitchcock, this time it’s Vertigo:

The haunting typographic treat which is Alien:

Read the rest of this entry…

Clever advert for the iPod on Yahoo’s website…

Finally, there is now a half decent chance of being able to find something again that you added on Ffffound in the past. I was only wondering the other week if there was any way to actually get at your Ffffound collection, well now you can.

For years I kept a ‘nice things’ folder on my machine, where I put anything cool I came across online. Since I started using Ffffound though, the nice things folder has become a little neglected and as soon as something is ffffound, it is almost as quickly llllost.

Check out Ddddownload, you can download your Ffffound collection (or anyone else’s for that matter). Just type the username in and give your email address and a ZIP file is emailed to you. It takes a while if you have a lot of stuff (mine took 20 minutes and weighed in at 145Mb for 1500 items) but after it arrives it unzips everything intact.

Nice, now can someone email me a link to where all my odd socks have gone?

A few of us from the Brand Union went along to the Design Week Benchmark Awards this week for a bit of branding malarky and some swanky food. We were on the shortlist, and and we were chuffed to bits to get a Commendation for our Vodafone Music project.

If you don’t believe me, here it is:

I think it’s supposed to be a big acrylic letter b.

Anyway, there were some nice things entered by other people, I particularly liked the Scottish National Opera logo by Hat-Trick Design…

…Office Games by The Partners…

…and Water Branding (the image doesn’t do it justice) by Williams Murray Hamm even if it was a bit reminiscent of some things Bryan showed us the other week.

And of course there was Mouse, by Johnson Banks, which we just heard today is going up against Mito in the logos and letterheads category of next year’s Design Week Awards.



I’ll start practising my good loser face.

The best in show went to SOS (Sumatran Orangutan Society) by Hat-Trick again, who did so well overall they should have put their table up on the stage to save time on all that to-ing and fro-ing.

I think I’ve pretty much encapsulated the evening there, for the sake of completeness, the main course was venison, the music was strangely techno, and Rhod Gilbert did the hosting. I’m not sure he was everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed his duvet transaction trauma and his torch with the power of a million candles.

Oh, and our Vodafone work also won a bronze last night at the Eurobest Awards in Stockholm, and the Mito went up on the cool wall on Top Gear (obviously due to the logo). Not a bad week really…

Appawently…