Old news this, it’s on TV every 5 minutes but I couldn’t let it go. Lovely new ad for the Audi Q5. The music makes it too, it’s Woody Guthrie “Car Song”.

From BBH London. “When the world zigs, zag.” Apparently. They’re also the people behind the Barclaycard water slide ad which everyone on Facebook seems to think is real…

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?

Well, after creating their lovely new global music identity for them, Vodafone coughed up some freebies and sent a few of us from the studio to this year’s music awards, which were the first to use the new identity.

It was a great night, not sure who won what, not sure it matters, and it turns out ‘golden tickets’ are ten a penny, it’s the platinum ones you want. The only fly in the ointment apart from Steve Jones was the fact that our icons and identity could have been implemented with a bit more imagination, but the system is new and I guess we’ll see them develop their bravery over time once it’s more recogniseable to people. It did all look lovely…

There are more photos here, and if you fancy watching the show, it’s on Channel 4 tonight at 11:25pm. I’ll be watching to see if I can spot myself…

When the worlds of Back to the Future and Graphic Design mix, you can be sure I’m all over it like a rash.

Neon Neon, Boom Bip’s collaboration with Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals has resulted in the album ‘Stainless Style’ with accompanying picture disc singles following the theme. Stainless steel, diagonal lines and lovely ladies. I’m off to their site for a listen…

Read the rest of this entry…

I read yesterday on the Creative Review blog about the Flickr CD cover meme, the graphic design equivalent of one of those ‘what’s your porn star name?’ things. As someone who used to do a lot of CD covers in a commercial context, it made me smile.

The idea is simple, you take the first article title from this page as your band name…

Then you use the last four words in the last quote from this page as your album title…

And finally, you use the third picture from here, no matter what it is.

My result is above, as you can see I lucked out on the picture, but I really like the band name now too. I imagine they have a wicked PowerPoint presentation in their stage show…

You can see the rest of the Flickr pool here.

I’d love one of these iPod cases. As usual, you can’t buy them, but it can’t be too hard to make one – first stop eBay. Shame to break such a lovely retro Walkman though…

Via ffffound, which came via ipodhacks, which came from apple-touch, which came from gearfuse, which came from dvice, which came from gadgetvenue, which seems to have come from sirljohn’s flickr stream. Thought I’d post all the links, I had to follow the trail to the end, kind of like finding one end of a piece of string…