emily conrad

I’ve been lucky enough to help with redesigning the new Ice Cream Social website. Ice Cream Social, run by my friends Mary and Jenn, is one of the freshest design shops I’ve seen in a long time. They create all sorts of gorgeously clean letterpress designs, including invitations, logos, and accessories. It’s great to collaborate with creatives who have a strong design sense and unique aesthetic. In turn, I’ve been doing tons of research on custom made stationary and invitations. It’s interesting to me that an art form as old as letterpress still reigns as the true queen. And while embellishments have been popular for a while now, they look so rich impressed on cardstock. This definitely leaves those of us digitally inclined with something to consider.

Stay tuned for the new design of icecreamsocial.com in the coming months, but for now here’s some sampling of their work:

It’s finally here! A few months back I had an idea that might get my three year old to stay in bed in the morning, and to go to bed consistently at night. This idea was prototyped out by myself and the talented Jeff Gray using an Arduino Teensy, RGB LED, an Ikea Fado light, and a prototype desktop application to customize settings. I tried out the light on my own “Early Bird”, and it worked with great success. My family watches the light transition from pink to blue at 8pm every night. So we decided to make the light real and have it prototyped by a factory that specializes in LED lighting. We’ve decided to produce a very limited run of the Early Bird Light, and will be announcing the product very soon. It’s made of solid aluminum and an etched glass globe. The software allows you to customize night time, morning time, and nap time, and your little one can help select the color for each time period. A full RGB spectrum is available to choose from. And the software is super easy to use and very cute. Here’s a sneak peek!

Education Nation went up a few weeks ago, but I was too busy wrapping up other projects to post about it! Education projects are always fun to work not just because I support the cause, but because the goal is to open up the visitor’s natural curiosity to explore. That’s just what these books did; allowed visitor’s to Rockefeller Center to explore the seven different types of learning. As a designer, this was a great project because the start and end time was a matter of weeks, and I was able to then go onsite and observe how people interacted with the books. So much fun.

Here’s a video of Bloomberg talking about the larger mission of Education Nation, which is to reform the education system.

The Energy Lab is up and running! It was great to be part of this project.
Here’s a blurb directly from the National Guard site, where you can also find more information about this very cool initiative.
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Learning is best when it’s a hands-on experience. With this idea in mind, we’ve created The Energy Lab to bring the world of math and science to life for 11th- and 12th-grade students. The Energy Lab will house a 24-seat on-board theater and four cutting-edge experiences—representing the elements of Earth, Water, Wind and Fire—designed to expose students to math and science concepts, using the platform of energy and the environment, and fuel their curiosity through hi-tech, competitive interactions.

Along with using captivating experiences to teach students about math and science, The Energy Lab also reinforces the importance of staying in school and earning a diploma, while demonstrating new career opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related fields. The Energy Lab will act as an innovative resource to schools and teachers nationwide through direct contact with students, an online web portal, and a national math and science contest.

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Happy New Year! As much as I enjoyed 2009, toward the end it began looking like we needed a little bit more love around us. Since it wasn’t known for sure if this need for love was something only I felt or a cultural phenomenon, it only seemed right to track the frequency in which the term “love” is used.  The Love Lights offer an ambient snapshot of how much love is passing through a few corners of the world at any given second. When love is expressed in one five different languages; swedish (kärlek), english (love), indonesian (mencintai), greek (αγάπη), and norwegian (elsker), a light will pulse on. The Love Lights are built off sentiments publicly divulged through Twitter, which has nearly 50 million users worldwide. I’ve been noticing that the lights for the non-english words stagger on as the day goes by, and are most active late at night. English, of course being the dominating language of Twitter, remains fairly consistent.

The Love Lights are made from LEDs, copper tubing, handblown glass bulbs, beeswax, and electronic components. Each bulb is etched with the word kärlek, love, mencintai, αγάπη, or elsker and then dipped in beeswax to give the light a natural quality. 15 x 9 x 21 inches. The only requirements to get the lights up and running are an ethernet (cable) connection and a power source.

The Love Lights are one of four light pieces I’ve created over the past year. Each one is made from similar materials with a different concept, such as the Belief Loop and War Lights. As an artist, it’s important to me that traditional electronic components are not the dictating aesthetic. Electrical parts like LEDs, wire, and pcb board are just a few of the tools needed to create these pieces. What is more important is how they reflect the human sentiments that go into making them work.

Contact me if you have any questions or are just curious about how it works. Many thanks to Jeff Gray for technical support.

This September the New York Public Library is celebrating the New York Harbor Quadricentennial (400 years!) with an exhibit of rarely seen maps, atlases, and cartographical delights of all kinds. Including an animated overlay of the shoreline in Google Earth. The exhibit Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009 opens September 25th.

Where: D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall (First Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788

“September 2009 marks 400 years since Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor and up the Hudson River, almost to what is now Albany, performing detailed reconnaissance of the Hudson Valley region. Other explorers passed by the outwardly hidden harbor, but did not linger long enough to fully realize the commercial, nautical, strategic, or colonial value of the region. Once the explorers returned to Europe, their strategic information was passed on to authorities. Some data was kept secret, but much was handed over to map makers, engraved on copper, printed on handmade paper, distributed to individuals and coffee-houses (the news centers of the day), and pored over by dreamers, investors, and potential settlers in the “new land.””

Maybe it’s because this is the summer that isn’t in NYC, but I’ve had vacationing in serenity on my mind since April. And I finally found what the perfect vacation looks like- Floating Camping. Could it get any better? Off Almere Beach (near Amsterdam), this floating island is from the University of Amsterdam, apparently built by students participating in the course ‘Social Engineering in the Amsterdam Metropolis’. And it’s brilliant. Another project is the ‘floating market‘, an outdoor market built on foam blocks covered in sod where organic and local produce is sold. These structures have proven to be very stable and word is the creators want to take it commercial. To this idea Pop-Up City says it best-’I wonder if they will succeed, as it doesn’t look to be their style.’

Whatever the case, I wish them all the luck and hope they bring this whimsical but practical idea to the island of Manhattan.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but Schematic (a company I worked for during 2007 & 2008) is developing a muultitouch screen for the Cannes film festival (I’m guessing 2010 since the 2009 festival has passed). The video is impressive, particularly in demonstrating the use of multitouch and RFID. They are calling it a “Touchwall” and my guess is that the interactivity is intended to be used by more than one or two people at once. The video shows two people, pretty much working together, so I wonder how this would behave with two or more people working (or playing) independently? Schematic is known for their great UX, so I’m sure this was thought through, but it’s still tough to deploy.

This is also on of those hyper-rational projects that just makes sense. Of course we’ll have huge multitouch screens in the future. And I like that this is one of the first iterations. It will undoubtedly be a paradigm shift, but perhaps unlikely, to use a multitouch wall instead of a paper subway map pasted to a wall in the station. Some may argue we have access to the same information on our phones, in a decentralized, accessible place. It’ll be interesting to see which paradigm is stronger, the experiential or the practical. Both have their own advantages, but this is one decision designers can’t make.

I thought this was impressive- reMap (bestario.org) displays and organizes the entire encyclopedia of visualizations from visualcomplexity.com.

What’s so great about this site is the filtering behavior initiated from the tag nav at the bottom of the page. No tag cloud! Great solution. But you have to point your mouse to the bottom in order to trigger this function. Also, points for having each step it’s own URL, easy to backtrack and email a specific link. Well done.

By the by,infosthetics reports that, VisualComplexity is so impressive, that its author, Manuel Lima, is nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009″, while he also was chosen as a speaker at TEDGlobal2009.

My daughter is not one to typically sit down and watch a show for twenty minutes, nor am I one to encourage it. So when we were at Sea World San Diego last week and the in-laws wanted to see the Shamu show (sentimentally titled Believe!), I was a little skeptical. We went in and sat down as a video began to play on four screens above the whale pool. By now it was noon and a bright sunny day. I couldn’t believe how great the LED screens looked! Especially since I was always told LED screens are generally no good, and nothing works in direct sunlight. The assumptions were all wrong.

The show went on, and my daughter was singing and clapping without abandon. I watched the screens, and when they tilted it was a cue that something cute was going to happen, and when they dropped completely to the side, it gave room for the killer whales to jump from the backstage to frontstage. And it all worked really well together. And when I panned across the audience, everyone was so excited. Of course the whales are the center of the show, but the technology they used help to tell the story better, and create much more of an emotional impact. (Photos by Brian Bennett, as I kept my camera dry).

When I came back to NYC I researched the screens a little bit and found out a company called Act One Communications had made the screens. They have a quick little video on their site that somewhat explains their “Virtual Pixel Technology”. Which is essentially offering RGB pixels in a grid as instead of clustering them. The former offers a smoother image contour instead of pixelation that is common in LED screens, as shown here:

If it really is as simple as it sounds, it makes me think there’s so many more advancements we can make with LED screen, especially if we add Z-space and start showing video in 3-D.