Theo Stråhlén - Digital Media, Hyper Island

Internship: Domani Studios

theo — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:06:37 +0000

Long time no blogging! I’ve been very bad with updating my blog this summer. Hopefully I will get things rolling again as soon as school starts, which is in a week. One big thing has happened this summer though. I got an internship! I’ll be interning as a developer at Domani Studios in New York City. I’ve been looking in to their work for a long time now and I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with them.
I’ll be there from late November until June. I’m looking forward to move to New York, and also to feel how it is to work in the U.S.

Short about Domani Studios from their website:

“Domani Studios is a second-generation advertising agency, one that deeply understands how giving brands a strong digital presence is today’s key to consumer engagement and the gateway to growth.The studio was founded in 2001 with the belief that blending art and technology would yield the most meaningful and enduring interactive experiences. Since day one we have embraced this formula and baked it into our culture.”

I will try to keep the blog more updated from now on!

Roskilde Social Lab

theo — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:32:24 +0000

Check out the site here

Roskilde Festival is one of the worlds biggest music festivals and it’s based in Roskilde, Denmark. Basically it’s a site where people can talk about social innovations. How to improve the cleaning of the festival or maybe how to save as much power as possible? This is just examples of topics that can show up at Roskilde Social Lab. At the festival there is workshops where people can meet and talk about fun but still important things. Not only for Roskilde Festival but for the World.

My role in this project was to develop the website and a mobile version of it. I’m behind both the front-end and the back-end. There is a whole CMS built from scratch for the admins to update cases and challenges on the site. There is also connections to facebook such as comments and twitter feeds. This was a very quick job since we needed the site before the festival started. Around two weeks evening job.

Photos from the Roskilde Social Lab will be added after the festival.

Main site: http://roskildesociallab.dk
Mobile version: http://roskildesociallab.dk/mobile/

FIFA World Cup Twitter Visualization

theo — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:15:56 +0000

I guess there is many of you that already seen this site but I thinks it’s very well done. It’s The Guardian who’s behind it and it shows tweets during every Fifa Worl Cup game. It looks good and it’s a cool idea. Check it out!
Last year I saw this similar visualization from The New York Times, it’s the same thing with reactions from Twitter but mapped out in the U.S. during Super Bowl, Steelers vs. Cardinals. I think it’s fun to have a look at this kind of things and it’s great inspiration. Visualizations from social media is cool!

jQuery OSX Looking Dock

theo — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:55:18 +0000

I am very interested of what jQuery can do and the plugins there is keeps impressing me. I saw the world cup site Twitter did and at the top they were using some kind of dock with the flags of the teams. When I and Henrik Porseland were coding whatisxv.com we wanted a dock with students but the time ran out and we forgot about it.

But now I found jqDock! It’s very easy to use and i will show a very simple example here. You can do both horizontal and vertical dock menus and custom the looks of it very very easy. As I said before I wanted a dock menu with all the students in my class.

Take a look a the Demo I did

This is how I did it:
First of all to use this wonderful plugin you need jQuery v1.2.3 or later. And then you can download the plugin here.

Start with link the files in your tag. Link in the jqDock source (full or compressed) after jQuery itself as in the example below:

Create a div and put an ID or Class on it. Then fill it with images that you want in your dock menu. In my example:


...



...

To convert your HTML into a Dock, simply call the jqDock function.

This code will make the menu expand from the bottom and up and every picture will have a label on it. You can see it in my example.

It’s very easy to style your dock menu as well. Here is the CSS for my menu:

div.jqDockWrap{margin:0 auto;}

div.jqDockLabel {color:#fff;background:#000; font-family:Myriad Pro; padding:4px;
font-size:11px;font-weight:normal;margin-top:-25px!important;white-space:nowrap;}

div.jqDockLabel a, a:hover, a:visited{color:#FFF; text-decoration:none;}

#dockmenu{clear:both;display:block;width:100%;position:absolute;text-align:center;
left:0; bottom:0px;}

#dockmenu img{padding:1px;float:left;display:block;}

Good Luck creating your own dock menu with jqDock!

My Sky Status

theo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:17:01 +0000

Visit the site: http://myskystatus.com

This is a pretty good example of how to market yourself through inviting other companies. Lufthansa wants you to be able to tweet our update your facebook status while you’re in the air. With MySkyStatus that’s possible. It tracks your flight number and creates a tweet about how far above the sea you are and where and when you landed etc.
I think it’s a cool concept and it looks pretty good too!

Agency: Profero, New York

Invite site for XV

theo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:51:37 +0000

Visit site: http://invite.whatisxv.com

For our class website we wanted to create a hype around it. We did secret sendouts to people in the digital industry with actual letters. It was a big secret and we wanted people to start talk about it. I wouldn’t say it was a huge success but people started talking.

In the third letter it was a link to our website and a password. When the user logged in with their personal password the logo of their company lighted up. You could also see other agencies that visited our site since their logo was lighted up.

My role
This was a part of the Marketing and promotion module so the whole class was idea developing. Me and a small group finalized then the idea. I was then one of the two developers of the site. Me and Henrik Porseland did all the Flash and I did all the back-end for it. John Karlsson and Alexander Gårdenberg was the designers for this site as well. This site was online for a month and the 15th of May we released our student directory with a great party at Sid Lee in Amsterdam.

Check out the invite site here

SpotifyAlarm

theo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:08:01 +0000

SpotifyAlarm is a small project me and my friend John did.

It started with me working late one night and a dead phone and no alarm clock. I decided to make an own. There is already a bunch of alarm clocks working with iTunes but since I have all my music on Spotify it would be great with a SpotifyAlarm! It’s coded in Actionscript 3 and then exported as a AIR application. John Karlsson did a new design for it the next day and I did some bug fixes. Turned out pretty cool!

We got a lot of publicity for our two night job. We went from 250 hits to 7500 hits on google on the search SpotifyAlarm. We were also featured on many tech-blogs and newspapers. It was a very fun project.

You can read more and download SpotifyAlarm on LVL3.se (Our common site).

What is XV

theo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:00:44 +0000

Visit Site: http://whatisxv.com

This is our student directory from my class at Hyper Island, Karlskrona. We did this site during the Marketing and promotion module and the purpose of it is to promote us as students and learn how to work with the whole group of 36 students.

What is XV?
XV means 15 in roman letters.

Three years ago Hyper Island went from the numbered crew concept to labeling classes with abbreviations, ordered by completion year and location. This ended a fine tradition. A tradition in which we would have been the 15th crew, instead of our current label DM11KNA, Digital Media 11 Karlskrona.
We felt that the crew tradition carried a great brand value and we wanted to rebrand the crew concept and salvage some of the value, so we created the secret Hyper Island Order and the 15th Chapter.

Process
This project was a huge one with 36 guys involved, many ideas and thoughts at the same time, do’s and dont’s & pros and cons.
The whole class become later divided in to different groups.

- Documentation
- Invite letters
- Invite video
- Finance
- Photo
- Web production

My role
My role in the XV project was developer.
I was involved in the whole idea development phase as well. Me and a small group of people finalized the idea of the website.
In production we were only four guys working on the website. The designers; Alexander Gårdenberg and John Karlsson and the developers, me and Henrik Porseland. We did it all in Flash first, but since all the hype around the iPad I decided to create a HTML/Javascript version of it as well. I was also responsible for the back-end of the site. I did a small CMS for the site and connected it to the flash and html version.

I’m happy with the final result and I learnt a lot during this module. A lot of AS3, Javascript and of course group dynamics.

Hope you enjoy the site!

Link to HTML version

Link to Flash version

The site is live!

theo — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:10:56 +0000

Yes! It’s live! This is the first blog i run so I will try very hard to maintain it. This site will also work as my portfolio so at the work page you can see my actual works. In the blog I will post some code examples that I’m trying out and also a lot of nice inspiration. It looks very empty here on the site right now. I will start to post all my work soon.

For those of you who doesn’t know me. My name is Theo Stråhlén and I’m a student at Hyper Island in Karlskrona. I’m a developer in both Flash and HTML. So that’s what I will post here. Flash examples, javascript examples etc.

Hope you will enjoy my blog! And yeah, my domain is pretty bad. I had it since I was around 15 and I’m not a designer anymore.