TOKI WOKI. 

“W-Architectures is an archi­tec­ture and urban-planning agency. The firm brings together a highly-qualified team of archi­tects with inter­na­tional expe­ri­ence.” This is how they intro­duce them­selves and I couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself.

I recently pub­lished their brand new web­site, designed by Chris­telle Bon­net and devel­oped by me. It’s been a pretty long process (they are very busy guys) but it’s here and I like it!

I used mostly Word­Press and MooTools to develop it. Every­thing was designed to be light and sub­tle, I think I can safely say that it is.

As a free­lancer I mostly work on AIR apps, but when friends asked me to develop their new web­site I hap­pily jumped aboard!

Le bureau baroque is an archi­tec­ture agency in Bor­deaux; play­ing with art, design and — of course — archi­tec­ture. They’re the ones that set up the Pecha Kucha event in Bor­deaux and who invited me to show off a bit! Of course they work on lots of other great projects so they needed a site to let the world know what’s up.

They wanted a highly visual site that would be easy to update, we con­sid­ered a few options but quickly came to the con­clu­sion that Index­hibit was exactly what we were look­ing for. But one thing that was really bug­ging us is how most (if not all) Index­hibit sites look the same. Indeed they’re a great way to show big images and the nav­i­ga­tion is damn sim­ple, but hey, why not keep these great qual­i­ties but in a more orig­i­nal layout?

Since we’re really keen on hor­i­zon­tal lay­outs we went for this. But some­thing both­ers me with this: you get a hor­i­zon­tal scroll­bar at the bot­tom of the page; which is hard to see, because it sits at the bot­tom of your screen and we — dumb humans — are not really used to it. So I thought: why not have a hor­i­zon­tal lay­out scrolled by a ver­ti­cal scroll­bar? That seemed a bit tricky at first, for two reasons:

1. Is that tech­ni­cally feasible?
2. Isn’t that too weird, for the end-user?

Both ques­tions could not be answered with­out try­ing, so I tried. And it looked cool!

When the pro­to­type was ready I started tak­ing a look at Indexhibit’s guts; and although it looked a bit ugly to me, I real­ized pimp­ing it was no big deal… A few e-mails and burger-meetings after we were happy with the newly cre­ated theme. Chris­telle Bon­net helped out with her great typographic/balance eye and we were ready to go!

Go see the site live, enjoy those nice projects, play with that side-scroll con­cept and tell me what you think!

Some projects become real, oth­ers never see the light of day. This one is more of an abortion.

Six month ago I’ve been con­tacted by an archi­tec­tural firm to pro­vide some con­sult­ing on a project of theirs (I’m not going to name names, you’ll under­stand why). The goal was to find ideas to make a building’s front more inter­est­ing. The build­ing being a place to help and pro­mote Hip-Hop culture.

So I started work­ing on it and came up with ideas and con­cepts. The archi­tect I was in con­tact with seemed pretty happy with it and every­thing was look­ing good.

Until I no longer received any answer to my e-mails… Our last inter­ac­tion is now 5 month old and I think time has come to mourn. What I came up with can be inter­est­ing and since it involves an Open­Source project, here are a few bits about it.

At that time I was dis­cov­er­ing  GML (Graf­fiti Markup Lan­guage) and Evan Roth’s work. Bor­deaux hosted Les Grandes Tra­ver­sées and all of this really inspired me. So I thought of a mash-up between GML’s #000000book (black book, open archive of GML tags), a player of my own (Okr), the build­ing itself and Twit­ter. Here’s the doc­u­ment I pre­sented to explain what I had in mind.

The steps are:

1. Cre­at­ing and send­ing a graffiti;
2. Receiv­ing data;
3. Con­vert­ing it to an image;
4. Pro­ject­ing it on the building’s front;
5. Photo-shooting of the front;
6. Send­ing to Twitter;
7. Online con­sul­ta­tion.

After a few e-mails with Jamie Wilkin­son (heads up!) I started work­ing on the core classes writ­ing GMLPlayer and GML­Cre­ator. The goal was to pro­vide both a way to dis­play tags and to create/upload them. I then built a UI around all that (a Flex one, after notic­ing Min­i­mal Comps didn’t work the way I expected).

iframe: <a href="http://toki-woki.net/p/Okr/">http://toki-woki.net/p/Okr/</a>

Note: you’ll also find the app on its ded­i­cated page. Try search­ing for “dasp” or “hello world” for exam­ple and play with the set­tings (the 3 top sliders).

Unfor­tu­nately it is only after cre­at­ing all this that I real­ized the project would never become real… So I sim­ply stopped work­ing on it. I am well aware that some parts of the code is a bit raw and could be opti­mized and I haven’t built the creation/upload fea­ture into the UI yet. Don’t know if I will, but the project is Open­Source so feel free to give it a spin! I also share my ini­tial attempt and a pixel ver­sion in case you’re interested.

Pretty happy that — even if not fea­ture com­plete — Okr made it to the GML project gallery, yay!

And just because a project will never see the light of day doesn’t mean it doesn’t need a proper logo, right?

Yep, we cooked some!

I got lucky.

Yummy, we cooked pixels!

C’était hier soir, c’était à Bor­deaux, y’avait du monde… Et j’avais bien fait de m’entrainer un peu avant !

Le son n’est pas extra, l’image est un peu moyenne mais l’ambiance est là ! Merci aux organ­isa­teurs d’avoir pensé à moi, merci aux gens qui sont venus me voir après pour par­ler ornitho­rynque, merci à Céline pour avoir appuyé sur le bou­ton aux bons moments (et pour l’encodage !), merci à Renaud, à ma man­ageuse, aux tick­ets bois­son, au tram qui n’a pas accepté de nous pren­dre… Je m’arrête là, de toute façon per­sonne ne sait de quoi je parle !

Voilà donc ma ses­sion de cette 4è Pecha Kucha, hop.

Mise à jour (08/05/2010) ! Une photo et la liste des slides, avec quelques liens…

1. No Online Friends
2. Cahier d’enfant — Icônes
3. Mon bureau - Play Sta­tion
4. L’ornitho­rynque
5. Scroll Clock
6. Scroll Effect
7. dribb­ble
8. Kwot
9. Kid Acne
10. FFFFOUND Desk­top
11. Erosie
12. Buck 65/20th
13. Eltono+Nuria
14. Les sites morbides…
15. Alope­cia+Alope­cia
16. Boks
17. Les Gens
18. Jan Vor­mann+truth
19. Paper
20. No Requests

Boo­gie down!

Eng­lish read­ers: jump straight to the end, and excuse my french!

Jeudi prochain (le 6 mai) je vais par­ticiper à la 4ème Pecha Kucha de Bor­deaux, parmi une quin­zaine d’autres inter­venants. Pour ceux qui ne con­nais­sent pas le con­cept, c’est assez sim­ple : une présen­ta­tion (à la Pow­er­point) avec 20 images et 20 sec­on­des pour cha­cune. Un peu plus de 6 min­utes pour présen­ter ses travaux et ses sources d’inspiration ; ça va vite, ça passe du coq à l’âne (“comme dans une par­touze à la ferme”, comme dirait Fuzati) et y’a des gens intéressants !

Je ne peux pas dire grand chose sur ma pro­pre présen­ta­tion parce que le sus­pense c’est sympa, et puis que je suis encore en train de préparer…

Bref, venez me jeter des pier­res à la gueule ! En plus, parce que vous êtes des gens bien, j’ai invité mon poto Alain Juppé à venir aussi poser son slam ; coup-de-pouce style. Toutes les infos sont sur le site offi­ciel et sur Face­book, fas­toche.

Fais gaffe, la suite du bil­let est en Anglais, retour à la nor­male quoi !

On thurs­day (May 6) I’ll take part in Bordeaux’s fourth Pecha Kucha (France)! If you don’t know what a Pecha Kucha is yet, the PK guys have set up a page for you.

Now I can’t tell you much about what I’ll talk about and what I’ll show because I need to keep up the sus­pense… And even though my slides are set and sent I’m still prac­tic­ing and decid­ing what I’m really going to make out of these 20×20 seconds!

Fun fact? One of the other pre­sen­ters is Bordeaux’s cur­rent mayor!

Just got me a Canon 7D, went out and played with it a bit (no Pho­to­shop trick, except for the text, obviously).

Since it also records videos it will allow me to shoot a new Beat Bat­tle soon (remem­ber?), with bet­ter image qual­ity… Cool, huh?

I finally got a fff­found invite! If you don’t know this image book­mark­ing site, go and have a look, it’s wonderful!

I was brows­ing it, lis­ten­ing to Pauline Croze’s “Quand je suis ivre” song and stum­bled upon this image.

So I did that:

I think it could be a nice CD cover.