Designing for the digital grapevine

digital grapevine social web 2.0

Web 2.0 in design and marketing

This is an image I made to try to explain the digital grapevine: A network of users that interact to answer questions, solve problems and have fun or the trend in the use of the internet and web design that enhances creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users that has been referred to as “Web 2.0″. The best description of this that I have read is from Stephen Fry:

… an idea in people’s heads rather than a reality … an idea that the reciprocity between user and provider is what’s emphasised. In other words, genuine interactivity, if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download.

The internet is now a teenager – it’s been 14 years since Marc Andreessen’s release of the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994. Now the technology has evolved to web-based communities such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs.

I intend to harness the benefit of this trend both for myself and my clients as I see it as an important approach to both design and marketing at the moment.

How I made the image

I was very suprised I couldn’t find a sample series of binary numbers on the net quickly, so here are mine.

001001010111010101101001010011010100110010001100100001 011010011000010001100100010101001100110000100101011101 101011011001100001100100010110010010011001101101001100 010100100000110110101101101101110111001000110100101001 011011101011101110101000100101100000011000110111011101 110100000100010000011101011011110100101010100101011110 110110101010010001100100011001000110001111011011101001 0001000100000110101101010111010111100

These numbers were put in the OCR-A font. This font is used for a variety of purposes including the ISBN labels on books. After scrolling through Blend Modes in the Layers palette in Photoshop, I hit upon Soft Light and Overlay as ones that seemed to work.

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Design, Internet, Marketing, Photoshop.
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8 Responses to “Designing for the digital grapevine”

Fedela, on June 11th, 2008 at 8:32 pm, said:

I figure out what you’ve done. Creative!
Siward, on June 15th, 2008 at 7:54 am, said:

Creative use of some binary text
sara, on July 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pm, said:

It is very creative and challenging. Perhaps good ideas and creation don’t come in mind so easily but a creative mind can do all magics.
Rob Cubbon, on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 pm, said:

Thanks, guys, for your kind words
Roger Hamilton, on November 17th, 2008 at 2:30 pm, said:

Creativity has no limits and what you have done is something really interesting! Great use of binary text!
Rob Cubbon, on January 19th, 2009 at 5:04 pm, said:

Thank you Roger for your kind words.
Lynette Erasmus-Butler, on November 20th, 2009 at 5:13 pm, said:

Hi Rob
We’re currently in search for a suitable pic to use on our intranet.
Can you please confirm if this pic is copyrighted?
Cheers!
Lynne
Rob Cubbon, on November 21st, 2009 at 1:30 pm, said:

Hello Lynne, you can use the image on your intranet but please credit Rob Cubbon with a link back to this site. Thank you.

Graphic and Web Designer London UK