There’s something infinitely beautiful about graphics in motion. The poetry of the movement infuses static visuals with new life,  reflecting the culture we live in. Below is a sampling of the best out there in contemporary motion graphics and the visual themes they share.
Theme: 1960s Nostalgia
Echoing a time when Saul Bass was the master of his medium, the 60s inspired opening credits for Mad Men, bring the classic era of title design into contemporary perspective. Creative Directors Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner talk about the process for creating this instant classic for Imaginary Forces.
Kyle Cooper's iconic studio, became legendary after creating the title sequence for the movie Se7en in the late nineties.  Influenced in great part by his teacher and mentor Paul Rand, Cooper’s title sequences continue to inspire wild praise from artist and audiences alike. It was Rand who once said “…a work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable�.  Rand too, was a product of the optimism and adventurous spirit of the 50s and 60s.
Is it the economic climate that makes us long for a bygone era? Or the current digital revolution that makes us nostalgic for the golden age of space travel? Whatever the reason, this throwback style is here to stay.
Theme: Amorphous Liquid
Liquid seems to be a favorite theme of motion designers in recent days, echoing the trend in photography toward the capture of liquid forms, as with water droplet photography.
This piece from Psyop created for Fage Yogurt is a perfect example of this trend and the interplay of art, poetry and brand. The folks at Psyop have the rare ability to play at the intersection of creativity and commerce, creating commercial work with the nuance and fluidity of painting. Their work transcends the limitations of the tool and pushes the industry to new horizons.
 Theme: Illustration and Street Art
Illustration in motion is nothing new, but with an increasing trend toward natural themes and the continued evolution of the medium, there is a push to include the flaws that evidence the artist’s hand in the forms generated by animators and 3D artists alike.
In this vain, Umeric’s work is highly illustrative and imaginative. If street art could jump off the walls and bounce around, this is what it would look like.Â
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Theme: Natural Forms and Alien Organisms
There is something inherently beautiful in natural forms. Think of the nautilus or ivy. So, it’s no surprise that designers draw from these forms to alien proportions in motion design, especially as algorithmic animation techniques continue to allow artists to quickly render organic randomness in animated forms.  The flora and fauna of Avatar’s Pandora may have magnified this trend and while her sanity may be questioned, even Bjork leveraged the beauty of hair in past and recent work. Similarly, technology and nature merge in the work of Ayhan Cebe and others in the above examples of visual yum yum inspired by nature.Â
Singolare operazione di Ballantine’s – un tatuatore e un tatuaggio con un QR Code. Il primo tatuaggio animato, in realtà aumentata. Sicuramente molto geek.
Al di là della trovata creativa, il progetto è parte di un’operazione più ampia,  di partecipazione al mondo di creativi che hanno cose da dire.
Singolare operazione di Ballantine’s – un tatuatore e un tatuaggio con un QR Code. Il primo tatuaggio animato, in realtà aumentata. Sicuramente molto geek.
Al di là della trovata creativa, il progetto è parte di un’operazione più ampia,  di partecipazione al mondo di creativi che hanno cose da dire.
The Max Planck Institute is one of Germany's most successful research organizations, having produced about 17 Nobel laureates and 13,000 yearly academic publications since its foundation in 1948. The Max Planck Research Networks [max-planck-research-networks.net] visualization application in turn is showing off the institution's international collaborations with other organizations in the world.
Developed by Moritz Stefaner and Christopher Warnow, the application runs on a semi-public multi-touch screen, which displays a network graph of the relationships between all relevant organizations, an accompanying world map, plus various bar graphs that reveal other facts and important statistics. The data is gathered from analyzing the co-authorship connections detected in the 94,000 publications that were produced over the last 10 years.
For the network graph, the relative size of an institute's icon represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines reflects the number of jointly published papers between 2 separate institutes.
The Ultimate List of Interactive Tables | Seth Sandler
"The following is a timeline of interactive tables. These tables may involve multi-touch, single-touch, audio, objects, or other unique types of table interactions."
You’ve read the inspirational posts on Hacker News. You’ve purchased the recommended books. You’ve bookmarked the online tutorials. You even plopped down $80 on a set of instructional videos, promising yourself that the investment would only make you more motivated. And for some reason, you still don’t know how to program.
Codecademy, a new site that went live earlier this evening, might just be the answer.
It’s a web-based, interactive programming tutorial that holds your hand and walks you through the basics of JavaScript. At this point it’s just getting started — the lessons only go as far as ‘While’ loops — but it clearly has loads of potential for one key reason: it actually feels fun.
Codecademy’s initial signup process is very clever: there isn’t one, at least at first. As soon as you land on Codecademy.com you’ll be prompted to complete the first lesson, which involves printing out and finding the length (in letters) of your name. It isn’t until you’ve made it through a few lessons that the site prompts you to create a user account, when it reminds you that if you don’t register, all of your progress will be lost. At which point you’ll probably register.
The lessons themselves are pretty straightforward. A sidebar on the left hand side of the screen will instruct you to complete a task, like, say, create a new variable called ‘myName’. You edit code using the web-based terminal, hit return, and your code is executed. The site hits a good balance between telling you exactly what to do, and prompting you to reuse something you learned in a previous lesson, so it doesn’t feel frustratingly difficult or boring.
As you progress through the lessons, you’ll rack up points and trophies, which are displayed on your profile. Friends can check out your profile to see how you’re progressing, and it isn’t hard to imagine the site building out additional social features, like leaderboards and competitions.
The application still has some bugs, which isn’t all that surprising — the company’s cofounders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski say that they started working on the app only a week and a half ago. In fact, they weren’t ready for the site to get so much attention so quickly (they posted it on Hacker News hoping for some initial feedback, and had 1,000 concurrent users within a few hours).
And there are still plenty of questions. The founders aren’t sure if they’re going to let the community create new lessons, and their monetization plans aren’t set in stone (though they do plan to make money). But they’re off to a solid start.
I just wish the first lesson included the words ‘Hello World’.
Flexible circuit pioneer John Rogers and his team are at it again. This time he's developing a wearable, ultra-thin circuit that attaches to your skin just like a temporary tattoo. The Epidermal Electronic System (EES) consists of circuits which could contain electrodes capable of measuring brain, heart and muscle activity in the same way an EEG does now, transmitting this data wirelessly to your doctor. Because it's flexible and bonds to the skin, it can be worn for extended periods, unlike traditional diagnostic pads used in hospitals today. In the lab, the devices were solar-powered with embedded photovoltaic cells -- heavier duty circuits would require inductive charging to be practical. Rogers' team also looked into the tech acting as a game controller (they wired it up to someone's throat and played Sokoban with voice commands, still managing to yield a 90 percent accuracy rate), but it's some way off from replacing your SIXAXIS. One of the problems encountered concerned RF communication -- perhaps they should get on the horn to their friends in Oregon and build those fashionable diagnostic pants we're eagerly waiting for.
Flexible circuit pioneer John Rogers and his team are at it again. This time he's developing a wearable, ultra-thin circuit that attaches to your skin just like a temporary tattoo. The Epidermal Electronic System (EES) consists of circuits which could contain electrodes capable of measuring brain, heart and muscle activity in the same way an EEG does now, transmitting this data wirelessly to your doctor. Because it's flexible and bonds to the skin, it can be worn for extended periods, unlike traditional diagnostic pads used in hospitals today. In the lab, the devices were solar-powered with embedded photovoltaic cells -- heavier duty circuits would require inductive charging to be practical. Rogers' team also looked into the tech acting as a game controller (they wired it up to someone's throat and played Sokoban with voice commands, still managing to yield a 90 percent accuracy rate), but it's some way off from replacing your SIXAXIS. One of the problems encountered concerned RF communication -- perhaps they should get on the horn to their friends in Oregon and build those fashionable diagnostic pants we're eagerly waiting for.
“Envisioning technology� is a speculative and subjective overview of potential future technologies. Based on personal research and observations, this map is intended to facilitate predictions of where tech is going, as well as provoke thought and stimulate debate.
