Inspiration blog - by PaperNotes

PlanBig - make your ideas happen

PlanBig is an idea I really like, from Australia. Share your great ideas and ambitious plans and get in touch with people that can help you realize what you want to achieve...

Devo song study

Remember the color study done by Devo, a while ago? Now they also want the public to choose their best 12 songs for an album. It is called the Devo Song Study. Interesting!

99 designs - design crowdsourcing platform

Another crowdsourcing platform, like Crowdspring I wrote about before, is 99designs.com. Already more than 430 projects have been submitted there, proving this model to work yet again...

See 99designs.com for more inspiration or to submit your projects.

Publish your own childrens book

Interesting to see that platforms are popping up that make the publishing of books a lot easier. This is one specifically focussed on childrens books, called StoryJumper.

The platform is meant for kids to make their own books for other children. Am curious to see if high quality books will come out of it! And also if adults will not be using the platform too...

 

Funny thing is you can read the books online as preview:

 

Exciting activity for kids to be active with, but also wonder if other kids (or parents) will actually be buying books. Have the feeling not a lot will be sold through this platform...

Augmented reality mirror enables testing Shiseido makeup

Interesting concept! Already saw things like these before, but not actively used in stores. Isn't this great? As a woman I think this is a very good invention: never walk out of a makeup store looking as a clown anymore ;-)

Found via Springwise.

The Working Proof: selling art for charity

Well... not all the money goes to charity, but about 15% of the earnings. At theworkingproof.com, artists can submit their work and choose their own charity they would like to support.

The Working Proof is an interesting concept, although I'm a bit disappointed they only add new work on a weekly basis. Why not more? Think this could really work well and the platform will probably be an inspiration to others.

Inspiring presentation - Design outside the box - DICE 2010

Spotted at Twitter (via the Dutch @marketingfacts), this is a presentation on game design you must see. Also contains some interesting insights from the speaker on ClubPenguin and Webkinz. Very inspiring and extremely funny (especially at the end), so start watching!

The state of the internet - impressive movie

This impressive movie by Jesse Thomas is both inspiring and give so (too?) much information. Looks very nice, so worthwile to take a look! What the state of the internet is today in numbers:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Via Dutchcowboys.nl.

Chiquita banana viral campaign

Like this funny campaign for Chiquita bananas, by DJ Neff! Includes viral stickers on the bananas themselves, but also video, sticker creator and game... Read everything about it here on DesignBoom.

Found via YoungMarketing.nl.

New way to browse Etsy - PicClick

You know I'm a great fan of Etsy's, can roam around the site for hours and hours...

PicClick, also working with eBay, now introduced a new way to browse through all the handmade items Etsy offers. It is way more visual and less text. You can view all the posted articles, or look trough them by category.

According to PicClick, people can sift through content a lot quicker on the web if you use visuals in stead of text. Totally agree, although looking at a huge amount of pictures also gets boring after a while (but text even more).

The PicClick Etsy looks like this:

 

Can imagine that a lot of other sites are going to be inspired by this new way of browsing. Who needs all the text websites offer us anyway? Ok, for a news oriented website text might be really necessary, although you see even them moving to more image and video content... As far as Etsy goes, it enhances the user experience a lot. Maybe the search results will look like this too in the future.

One disadvantage: there is still a lot of junk items in the overview. What would really be great is if the editors, or specific groups (maybe my own?), would be able to feature stuff up on a tool/page like this...

Spotted articles inspiring me to feature this at Creativity-Online.com and Mashable.com.