(very late) DB 3.1

the two interactive type works I chose for this DB were Spell with Flickr and Typorganism (which is really a collection of several interactive type toys)

Spell with Flickr is a cool app I came across a few years ago, but haven't really revisited until now. Basically, it takes a piece of text you input to it (a few words long) and replaces each character with a photo of a real world instance of that letter. It looks something like this:

The element I like most about this app is the fact that it is really just a framework for purely user-generated content, a good example of what the net is all about. As far as it being effective from a design point of view I'm not so sure. The images it creates are often interesting, and if you don't like one of the letters you get, you can click that letter to refresh it, making it possible to arrive at compositions which are somewhat harmonious. Ultimately though, the results of 'Spell with Flickr' are (almost) always very hard (or impossible) to read. As a tool to find one letter to use as an accent I think this could be very useful, but as a standalone interactive piece it is not really anything more than a fun novelty (not that there's anything wrong with that).

The second piece I chose to look at, Typorganism is, as I said above, a collection of small interactive type pieces. The part of this site I thought worked the best was actually its menu and intro, rather than any of the actual 'content' within the site. The menu looks like
this:


Each menu item has circle in the center to which it corresponds, and these circles dart around their larger circle in a way reminiscent of micro-organisms under a microscope. I actually found this menu quite beautiful. It is very simple, very elegant and quite original as well. As a piece of design and as a piece of typography I think it is very effective. I think I would say the same for the menu as well. It looks like this:




at first all you see is a bunch of letters floating around in space, seemingly without meaning. but when you click they quickly assemble into a word, like this:

I found this part of the site to be really effective as well. At first it is difficult to tell what is going on, the site doesn't really make any sense, but the moment you realize how the site works you feel like you've just got the punch-line to a joke. Again like the main menu of the site, the motion of the letters in space is very organic. They appear to be suspended in liquid, slowly drifting, and then when they are clicked they snap together as if under the influence of some sort of magnetic field. Another dimension is added to this effect when the user varys the speed of their mouse-clicks. With slow clicks the effect is lazy and biological, but with fast clicking, the words appear to explode and recombine constantly, producing a very different, but still good, effect.

As I said, the actual content of the site was somewhat less inspiring. The effects were not all that interesting, and in some cases the actual interactive elements of the site were not really as interactive as the menu and the
intro.

I would not wan to say that either of the pieces I talked about is better than the other, because they are so different. As a tool, 'Spell with Flickr is definitely more useful, but as a piece of design 'Typorganism' is far superior. The one thing I might say that 'Flickr' has that 'Typorganism' does not is re-playability. I can see myself visiting it many times in the future, because it is different every time, whereas 'Typorganism' does not change, once you've seen it once, you've seen everything.