As you have probably seen by now, the renowned MIT Media Lab has a new identity system designed by Richard The and E Roon Kang. The visual design in this project takes a back seat to the actual system created for it. Richard The explains:

The logo is based on a visual system, an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, for faculty, staff and students. Each person can claim and own an individual shape and can use it on their business card a personal website. The design encompasses all collateral, business cards, letterhead, website, animations, signage etc. A custom web interface was developed to allow each person at the Media Lab to choose and claim an own individual logo for his/her business card, as well as a custom animation software which allows to create custom animations for any video content the lab produces.

As is evident from the image below, the logo takes on a very distinct feel in each of its different realizations, while still staying ultimately consistent..

As soon as I saw this project, I was immediately reminded of the Visit Nordkyn design by Neue. I love the trend of designers creating systems which in turn create systems. From my perspective, the real beauty of the MIT identity is the underlying organization and mechanisms thought up to generate the final product.

via Co.Design

Personas by the Sociable Media Group. via CreativeApplications

About the Theme

This theme was designed specifically for this site’s Tumblr offshoot. The interface is intended for media in particular (such as videos and images), but it is still plenty flexible to handle all other types of Tumblr content. The grid will definitely not appreciate large-copy posts, but it will not break. The theme uses jQuery for just about all of the Javascript and should be very easy to follow. My hope is to continue improving upon the theme when it seems both useful to myself and to the community members using the theme. The most recent version of the theme (that is not customized particularly for myself) will always be at franklinstreet.tumblr.com.

Short Video Run-Through

Basic Features

Here are a few reasons you may like using this theme:

• Fully customizable color scheme using Tumblr’s appearance tab
• Various javascript interactive effects to make the experience a bit more enjoyable
• Images in image posts open up in a lightbox
• Uses Cufón font replacement library for better looking headers
• Handles all Tumblr media formats appropriately, including video (tested with YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr embeds)
• Support for notes (new as of 0.9.1)

Use This Theme

If you have a Tumblr account and want to install this theme, just go ahead and preview, then install the theme through Tumblr’s interface. Otherwise, download the source file and manually paste the source into the custom HTML field under the theme tab.

Last night, Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, an independently-produced album that is available for download for the price of $5. There are 36 songs in this album, so that $5 looks even more reasonable than ever. For those of you into the tangible, CDs can be purchased as well. Additionally, 9 songs are available completely for free – no questions asked. While this is distribution model is new, it is not new – we have seen it with In Rainbows and Niggy Tardust, each with their own little tweaks on it. However, make no mistake, Ghosts is unlike any other album distribution we have seen.

Up till now, the music industry has either fought or ignored the possibilities that the internet has brought to media distribution and consumption. Ghosts represents the largest initiative (that I am aware of) to harness the online potential to its fullest – from promotion to distribution. I want to go through each piece of the puzzle to explain why I think Ghosts could be the beginning of how music is promoted and sold.

Promotion

As far as I am aware, this album was simply released through an update on nin.com, with emphasis on readers to Digg the release. As expected, the article quickly jumped to the front page of Digg as well as Reddit. This immediately sent tens of thousands of people to the site on a Sunday night… That in and of itself is amazing. The initial social bookmarketing buzz has brought a swath across the blogosphere (3,459 results via Google Blog Search as I write this). From the looks of it, there was no traditional press release for this album, rather a concentrated online-only effort all through free, community-driven channels.

I must admit, I was a little surprised to not see any major social-networking initiatives – for instance, the NIN MySpace page has no word of the release.

Outreach

Nine Inch Nails has used PirateBay for small leaks in the past, but the 9 free songs from the album were released to PirateBay officially through NIN. What has been the scourge of the RIAA has become a promotion/distribution tool for Ghosts. Think about it, buzz is created, appetites are whet and bandwidth is saved. Sounds like a smart plan to me.

The notion of buy-before-you-listen is also tackled with being able to listen to the entire album in what seems to be a random order. This is another huge move towards fixing a major problem with online music distribution.

Sales/Distribution

All sales of this album seem to be through internet channels – either directly from the official Ghosts site or through Amazon. There seems to be no brick-and-mortar component to the sale model – everything is through the browser. Because of this, I am assuming overhead is lowered, hence the $10 cost of a 2-CD set. When was the last time you saw a $10 sticker price for a 2-CD album?

For those who chose the download-only version of the album, there is a 40-page PDF to accompany the music. Once again, digital delivery of a previously tangible-only medium. Nine Inch Nails started doing this with With Teeth, but nothing close to this scale.

Copyright

Of all the areas that excited me about this release, copyright is by far the greatest piece. As expected, all music downloaded from this album is 100% DRM-free, hence the nod to Amazon’s DRM-free structure. Most of us knew that would be the case. What blew me away however was that the 9 free songs released were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0. Creative Commons was obviously excited by the move as is evident in their blog post. This license allows anyone to share, distribute, alter or use these 9 songs in any way for non-commercial work with credit given to the artist. That is flat-out groundbreaking.

Ghosts is as much an idea as it is an album

So in review, you have an album which is solely owned by the artist, is promoted seemingly exclusively through online channels, sold and distributed exclusively through online channels (including “illegal” p2p networks), with one quarter of the music both monetarily and copyright free. With the exception of Amazon, the traditional middle-man is completely left in the cold. To say this is ambitious is the understatement of the year. Many of these topics had been address before, but not all at once and not in such an organized manner.

In all honesty, no one knows what the future model for the music industry will be, but everyone knows the status quo will not be it. What Ghosts represents is an artist relying almost completely on the internet as the solutions to what others feel are the problems. Ghosts is not just music, it is an idea of how the entire lifespan of a piece of media could exist. When you see all the pieces come together, it is hard to tell if many ideas were intentionally thought up or just subconsciously come to due to the basic nature of the web. The open-source, free-information model of the internet is spilling over its online boundaries and starting to leave marks on social interaction, politics, and yes, media.

This is why I am so fascinated about this subject. As a design technologist, the web model impacts my thinking and concepting on a daily basis. I have bought into the notion that information is free which is why I release all my code as open-source and free to use. But code is not the only thing that is moving towards and open nature – everything is. From design work to architectural drawings to personal information – I do not see much that will not be covered by this ideological umbrella in the future. This is something we need to be aware of in our work as designers or as developers. Information’s new natural state is openness. We can either fight it, or work with it. Ghosts has definitely put a strong foot in the latter camp.

This ability for rich media experiences to be delivered on the cheap is one more reason that: 1) Flash (or perhaps another future rich media delivery system) is going to become an even more integral part of the web/browser experience, and, 2) The TV, in its current form, is becoming more obsolete by the day. We all saw this coming, I am just utterly blown away at the pace that it is occurring. If you thought the public liked web video before, just wait until the next batch of video players to hit the scene that take advantage of all the features Flash 9/Actionscript 3 have to offer. It will make the current phenomenon look pitiful in comparison.

Via Flex RIA

My wife and I have been long-time fans of this show and wish it the fullest of success on TV. Honestly, I could just as easily see folks swarming to it as I could see people not getting it and quickly moving on. Being so far detached from the culture of television at this point, I am not sure if I understand the medium enough anymore to be able to make a valid prediction. Still, I cannot express how happy I am to see a TV network willing to take a chance on something well worth it. As Ira Glass has made very clear, the radio show is not going away – the two will exist together. My hope is that some of the progressive methods that public radio and This American Life have instituted – free podcasts, audio downloads of programs, etc. – will be brought into the Showtime program as well. I know that one person cannot change a whole industry, and a very established industry at that. Still, my hope is that a little bit of public radio will rub off on this one show. Perhaps TV execs will then notice that fans react well to the attitude public radio fosters – you know, putting the priority of distributing the medium to the wide audience possible over pulling in the highest profit. I guess we will see…

Very few of us enjoy the close-boxed mentality of big media. The whole mindset essentially flies right in the face of how the web works and continues to ignore how society interacts with media. I just ran across an example of how media 2.0 and the internet’s open model has seemed to influence an independent film titled Revoloution.

The premise is quite simple – moviegoers can watch the movie for free and then decide how much they wish to pay after they have finished watching it. We all have gone to movies and have felt quite robbed from the experience. Many people do not frequent theaters as often because it is not worth the gamble to spend a sizable chunk of change on something they may not like. Big-business media will almost assuredly never sign onto something like this for various reasons – one being that their product is, well, bad. Hollywood is already losing money, this would just speed up the process. Nonetheless, this model could be a much more beneficial model for aspiring filmmakers to garner an audience and begin to create buzz on a particular piece of work.

I could see a more hybridized version of this type of payment where less is paid up front and a ‘tip’ is requested after the movie is over. If I only had to pay $4 to $5 to get into a movie, I might just start going to movies again. Additionally, if the movie is decent, I definitely would provide a tip. Of course this model is more risky than the pay-up-front model, but with declining ticket sales, they may want to consider taking a few risks and getting creative. One thing I do know, hiking up the price of tickets is not going to work.

For more details on this experiment, watch the video below:

Much of the media online is free without even the slightest hint of payment. Even for the lucky (and talented) individuals publishing high-quality work exclusively on the web, compensation still is a challenge. However, people are making it and some are doing quite well for themselves. With the rise in popularity of web media with its low overhead and much less profit, big business is going to need to rethink payment models and the content they are willing to spend millions on to produce. (Many) people know crap when they see it – sadly, the majority of all media (internet or not) falls into that category. However, on the web, I do not have to pay $15 or sit through 20 minutes of commercials to see it.

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The topic of how design can make the world a better place is definitely not new – however, more people seem to actually be interested nowadays. For most of its existence, design has been grossly misunderstood. With our generation receiving the torch (whether voluntary or not) from the “Me Generation”, I find it highly hopeful and motivating that topics such as these are gaining more interest.

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