Dirty Mouse // Food For Designers’ Dirty Little Mice

Ooh, this is a pearl of a screensaver from Simon Heys. I’ve had it running for a few days now and it looks the muts nuts on my big screen iMac. Best of all, it’s free!

Link via FormFiftyFive

Jeepers. This is the quirkiest portfolio site I’ve seen in quite some time. If you have a web cam, use it to navigate through the website; it’s chuffing marvellous - best use of Flash I’ve seen in a while. Also, it’s full of work from HRP that’s right on the money. Some of you will be interested in this partial lift from a recent press release regarding the development of the site (thanks to Amy for sending it in)….

“Most significant was the request that the site be controllable by webcam, as well as the traditional mouse. As a result, Clusta and Riney have together produced a high impact website that offers a real window into the future of where website navigation and interactivity is heading.

Using Flash video extensively, with the overall creative theme featuring the gentle motion and fluidity of ink droplets in water, the user can navigate through the site and indulge in unique interactive features through movements detected by their webcam.

The “People” section includes footage of the management team, shot in green screen conditions, where the characters interact with the animation, being thrown off screen as the user navigates left and right.

Rikesh Lal, art director at Riney, explains the creative drive behind the site:

“Having attended a conference that explored some of latest technologies available, including a Flash element that controls your computer with a Wii controller, I started thinking it would be awesome to have an agency website that utilised this facility.

“We started looking around for people that might be able to achieve this for us and had heard about the guys at Clusta. We talked to them about this idea of ink that moves back and forth; your hand gestures would affect that and you could access the work that way. It was something they hadn’t really done before either, so we set to work on how to achieve it in a collaborative process.

Clusta created the fluid ink effect in a custom built glass tank, which was filled with water and filmed from multiple angles while red dye was dropped into it. After Effects was then used to treat and edit the shots, creating a different movement in the ink for each gesture.”

Typetester is a handy little application for web people, which allows users to preview different CSS text styles live on the screen.

It’ll also generate the correcct CSS for the styles you select. Hardcore CSS users won’t find it useful, but when deciding what weight/colour of font to use, we find it a cracking utility.

CSS Type is a similar app but it lacks the same ease-of-use, or clear layout.