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As you may know by now, our team lacks a designer. For that we asked the help of art director Roxanne Allard (Ontherockz Concept & Creatie). The past few weeks she’s been working on our overall style (logo, blog banner, festival banners, clothing, flyers) and the visuals for the LED screen and mobile web application. Emile van de Coevering (Escapation) was brought on board to animate the LED screen and make it attractive enough for our festival crowd to pass on the music for a while and play with our installation instead. More on that later when we got some nice sneak peeks for you.

Curious to see what our current designs look like? Read along for pics!

When we first started, our logo and blog banner were created fairly quickly. Later on we decided to adapt the entire project to a ‘Delfts Blauw’ style. Roxanne created everything along those lines and adjusted our logo to look cool in blue (see above). For the LED screen we chose to use an old school TV to emphasize the philosophy of old versus new, cultural heritage in a contemporary setting. The web app should be as light and easy as possible, so it’s pretty basic but matches our overall style. We chose white hoodies with blue printing as our festival gear and the flyers incorporate our blog banner in a vintage, Delfts Blauw look. The festival banners are going to be placed around the screen, on the fences. We ordered 5 of them in total; all include a QR code to the website. It was a conscious decision not to put these QR codes on the flyers as this may result in too many curious people crashing our internet while not standing in front of the screen.

We’re extremely pleased with how everything looks. Big thanks to Roxanne for her hard work! Below is a gallery of the designs. Click on the thumbnails to view the pictures in their entirety.

Last Wednesday we had our second testing day at Den Haag Central Station. We could test ‘Galgje’ and the memory game on the Dropstuff screen by playing a couple of rounds. Was funny!

What changed compared to the first testing day? Well, our designer Roxanne delivered the layout of the screen and the web application. It was pretty nice! Finally, we could see the results. It is way better to play our games in colour than black and white.

We encountered only one small problem during this testing day: the size of the screen in Den Haag was not the same as the one we are going to use at Festival Mundial. So the content wasn’t fitting perfectly on this screen. But the main things we wanted to check were the design and the colors, which we could check on a different resolution as well. We decided to change some colours here and there and adjust the style of the visuals to become a bit more realistic.

This week, we are trying to plan another testing day. This time in Utrecht because the screen that we are going to use at Festival Mundial will be there. Then we can have a clear idea about what the final result will look like.

Today Emile, our animation guy from Escapation, will be here to work on the animations. We can’t wait to see the cool results!

In brief; Everything is going well. Follow our Blog/Twitter/Facebook to have the latest news! Here, you can find some pictures of this testing day:

(click to enlarge)

This week is all about design and PR. Today Roxanne came in to present us her first designs for the screen and the mobile web app. It’s all looking very cool and we’re sure the end results are going to be slick. We decided to go with a Delfts Blauw theme, with a welcome screen that is shown inside an old TV. This way we incorporate both the ‘old Dutch TV’ from the Open Images videos and the general old Dutch theme of the project. Emile will make sure everything is animated in a nice fashion. He will create our ‘hangman’ and animate a nice ‘come here and join’-video to show inside the old TV for the first screen. Deadline for the final design is next week so we can start testing the week after that. Stay tuned!

PR is also something we’re working on at the moment. How to increase buzz around our project? How to reach the Mundial audience before the festival starts? We’ve met with someone from PR @ Sound & Vision and someone from the HvA. Both can help a lot with spreading our message. We’ve been typing press releases and website / app / programme book / newsletter -texts and they will send these out for us to important connections. Mundial will put us in their programme books and on their website. Besides that we will increase our presence in the social media and tweet more often.

Though it’s not in black and white yet, we can proudly state with 99% certainty that Led It Up will be launching the project on Mundial Festival 2011 in Tilburg! The ‘world’ character of the festival suits our typical Dutch theme like a glove. We will be allowing the festival public to play with their cultural heritage, to explore their roots, in a contemporary -and most of all fun- setting. Some world class artists that have been confirmed: Moby, Selah Sue, Paolo Nutini, de Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Los de Abajo and Goldfish.

Come and see us on 18 and 19 June!

Promo clip of Mundial 2011:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On Tuesday we went to Den Haag central station to test our first prototype, hangman. Gijs from Dropstuff and Emile, our animation guy, went with us to play a couple of rounds on the Dropstuff screen that’s placed in the central station hall. Everything went better than expected. Of course some bugs appeared but no major ones. We tested the visuals and it seems the videos from Open Images work pretty well on the LED screen. We were a bit afraid that the videos would show up as white ‘stains’ on the black, but they were very visible. Pleasant surprise! We also noticed that some visual styles (coloured, moving lines) work better than others (white background is a no-go, black is best). Maarten from Sound & Vision joined us for the last hour and seemed very pleased with the progress.

We brought a camera and Helene and Daan created this short clip to give you an impression of the day:

Click here to view the embedded video.

All in all, Den Haag was a fruitful adventure. We’ve got plenty of bugs to fix and design elements to work out. The design part will be in the hands of Emile and Roxanne. Next week we’ll be meeting up with them to discuss progress. As soon as we’ve got some first visuals we’ll post them on the blog.

Our business cards are here! Very big thanks to Milly from Pantheon drukkers and of course our designer Roxanne. We needed cards that had all of our individual info on them, so we wouldn’t have to create 5 different cards. Worked out well! As you can see, we’re very happy with them.

Today, Team Led It Up has been to Tilburg to meet the team of Mundial Festival!

Actually it is our second appointment with Niki and her crew. They were interested in our project and would be glad if we can be present during the two-days festival…So do we!
During this meeting, we talked about the location of the screen on the festival. In which part of the Leijpark are we going to be? Well, as we wished, we are going to be in the relaxing area of the festival, not so far away from the main stage! Our public can just lay and play our games…
We get into all the topics to make everything clear.

After the meeting, Team Led It Up has been to the Leijpark where the Festival Mundial will take place, the 18th and 19th of June. It is a really nice area, the only problem is that the internet connection is quite slow. But we will find a solution!

So now we have a cool location. The next step is for Wilco and Jorian to keep programming the games and for Daan, Lotte and Hélène to research more content and keep in touch with the team of Mundial for all the preparation.

In one word, the team will be busy! See you on Mundial Festival, go to book your tickets!

After a couple of days programming we are pleased to announce that the first version is working. Through the mobile phone you can connect with facebook and the screen will select a movie and a word to play. If the user chooses to join the game he can start to guess the word. Meanwhile he can see his facebook image on the screen and just below he will see his hangman forming after each mistake. After three minutes of playing the round will end and every player will get his points. The screen will show the new highscore list and within 30 seconds a new round of hangman will start.

The design of the prototype is just like the wireframes so it still looks a bit basic. In the next version the design should be implemented and also a new game like: “What is Missing?”. This week we will bugfix any errors we can find and next week we will be doing some user testing on wednesday! This was all for now, stay tuned and we will keep you informed on any new upgrades!

Howdy folks! Because of Easter and Good Friday, today will be our last day at the Lab until Tuesday. A well deserved break to enjoy the sun and an unhealthy amount of chocolate; here’s why:

• Last week we had a promising meeting with Maarten, Gijs and Evelien @Sound & Vision. Everyone was pretty happy with our final concept and the design document. We decided to go with an overall theme of ‘typical Dutch’, as this fits best with the Open Images database and the old school games we chose.
• Besides that, the theme is also a great fit with the festival we’re talking to: Mundial Festival. Their tagline says it all: ‘The World on Stage’. By placing an interactive Dutch screen there, the 2 themes are in a pretty sweet contrast with each other. We’re still in talks with the Festival about our possible presence there – more on that when we reach an agreement.
• Our team manager Daan has graduated! Bachelor degree in the pocket. Time to celebrate.
• Daan, Lotte & Helene are busy with their thesis. Time for some brain-relaxation.
• Wilco and Jorian have been programming a lot lately and deserve some time away from their screens. In the sun.
• Our videos from the Video Vortex 6 workshop have been uploaded to the Open Images website. Time to grab our moment of fame.

So what’s next?

• Finalize festival agreements
• Continue technical development
• Start designing the screen and mobile
• Continue searching for content for the games
• Work on thesis

Plenty was done, plenty still to do. Time for a well deserved break so we can get back on that horse next week!