Make Seriously | Design and Life

You Website Will Be Assimilated

As is fairly typical during my day, I checked UnderConsideration’s Quips. It’s basically a wall where Armin Vit posts cool design-related things on the left, and visitors do likewise on the right. Sometimes it’s just normal stuff, sometimes it’s cool stuff. And sometimes, just sometimes, there is something so amazing it blows my mind. It’s no secret that YouTube has been getting revamped by people wanting to use it in new ways. Many will already be familiar with Nintendo’s very cool advertisement for WarioLand: Shake It. If you’ve been a loyal reader here, you may also be familiar with YouTube Street Fighter.

Well, BooneOakley just blew my mind. Think about the video below that you’re about to watch. That is their website. Yes, that’s correct. Their website is embedded in my website as a fully-functioning, fractal-style, mind-blowingly creative concept:

That this can happen, period, is incredible. You can even try going to their home domain: www.booneoakley.com. Guess what you’ll be redirected to? Yep. Not only do they not need to design or host ANY content, they can have any other company (or design blog, a lá MakeSeriously) HOST their website by embedding the YouTube video. It helps that they’re creative and have cool work anyway, but the concept itself is just amazing.

The only costs for their entire web promotional efforts are to purchase a domain name. No hosting required. No site-building. No broken links to worry about. No one to maintain content. No bandwidth restrictions (thank you third-party hosting!) All of those costs slashed, with SO much value added by taking advantage of a free, universally known video hosting website. They can have their whole website hosted anywhere that a video can be embedded. They can upload and easily change content and “linking” at any time. It’s just so cool to see companies to look at new forms of “media” and take such great leaps to make them awesome.

Ever Wonder What My Desk Looks Like?

Just keep in mind that I’m part of a creative staff, and I have a long history of placing large, imposing images of myself on random walls. I was also put up to this, so it probably stands as the first time I was encouraged to something like this. Usually it’s the ol’ ask for forgiveness rather than permission routine, but getting fired over being… strange?… isn’t high on my list right now, so it came as a great relief when I was encouraged to go through with it. A few colleagues and I put it up mostly to annoy a certain art director who has no similar wall space which to defile, making him incredibly jealous. The best part was printing and getting it up there while he held a meeting no more than twenty feet away and still had no idea about it until he turned around. We have a courtyard in the middle of our office building, so the rest of the staff enjoyed a good laugh through the windows when we saw him get up and turn around to find my enormous face staring at him. There’s a video too. Hopefully that can find it’s way up here some time.