today and tomorrow

Every single season, adidas Y-3, adidas’ coopertation with Yohji Yamamoto, releases a new website. This seasons one has this digital error atmosphere, the sound and the visual effects are a prefect match. The navigation isn’t anything for people who are in a hurry, but the love for details makes up for it. I really liked the FW 2006 website and some even older ones. They actually should put up an archive!
Let’s see what Fall Winter 2008 2009 brings.

EDIT:
Of course there is an archive. Neue Digitale, the agency responsible for all those websites, has them archived:
adidas Y-3 2003
adidas Y-3 FW 2004
adidas Y-3 SS 2005
adidas Y-3 FW 2005
adidas Y-3 SS 2006
adidas Y-3 FW 2006
adidas Y-3 SS 2007
adidas Y-3 FW 2007

For those of you who want to come and visit Berlin there is this new website called berlin.unlike. You can find addresses of bars, shops, clubs, … etc, but also events; it’s an ongoing collection of course. You can add all this info to your own tour. It’s dead simple, you don’t have to register, you can start right away with adding the things you want to visit.  Your tour will get it’s own unique id, you may not forget to bookmark it when you want to add anything later (go to your tour and click on settings on the right). You can share your tour with anyone and browse it on your mobile phone, hé it’s hooked up with google maps. Here is mine. Very neat!

‘Hello, World!‘ is a brand website for the Japanese telecom company SoftBank. Again, I can’t understand anything, just nod my head to the music. Mesmerising!
Made by tha inc.

I know, I’m a little late to this Muxtape party. The tag line explains it all: a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes. You can upload up to 12 mp3’s to this service and share the mixtape with your friends and the world. The interface is soo simple and perfect.
On the technical side, all files are hosted on the Amazon S3 servers (one of Amazons Web Services). I really would like to see some stats and the bill on the end of the month.

The Web Trend Map 2008 is finally out of beta, get your copy now! It definitely looks clearer as last years one, now let’s compare them.

Vinyl Remarks is a website where you can find and submit text, which you sometimes find between the run-out groove and the record label . I really like this idea and the look and feel of it.

‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ is an exhibition at MoMA, New York, about the relation between science and design. I think this is one of the most exciting subjects these days and I would love to go and check out that exhibition. Fortunately, tha ltd. build this website where you can find over 300 projects. The navigation may seem a little awkward at first, but once you get the hang of it …

Swisstrains.ch is an impressive Google Maps application, you can follow every single train in Switzerland. It’s not GPS based, but on the punctual timetable, hé it’s Switzerland. You can click on a station to see which trains are leaving soon, but you can also click on a train, a small popup appears where you can click ‘Follow’. Now you’re a virtual bird’s eye view trainride through Switzerland.

‘Absolut Machines‘ is quite an amazing project by Absolut Vodka. Basically, Absolut commissioned 2 interactive sound sculptures, which you can control through the website, you’ll have to wait in line though.
‘Absolut Quartet’ is a robotic mechanical orchestra, by playing the piano you can inspire the 3 robotic ‘musicians’. You can find some making of pictures in this Flickr set. The other one, ‘Absolut Choir’ is a machine consisting of 22 choir members, by typing in words and sentences you inspire them to sing. Both are just amazing!
On the website you can choose from different camera angles, see some documentation, download your composition as a video etc. It’s just a pain to use it. I think it’s a shame that the website doesn’t match the quality of the installations.
Here is a tip, just go to the press website if you want to get straight to the info.

A few weeks ago, Nike launched the Jordan XX3, the last signature Micheal Jordan sneaker ever (ok we’ll see about that). Ofcourse they made a website to go along with it: XX3. Blast Radius did an excellent job there!
You arrive in some sort of hall from where you can enter 4 diffentent rooms. And when I say rooms, I mean 3D rooms where you can ‘walk’ around thanks to a nice interface. For those of you who don’t like this kind of explorative browsing, there’s a nice and clean alternative navigation at top of the page.
I think this is one of the best implementations of 3D Flash I’ve seen since a long time. It looks like Papervision3D, an open source 3D flash engine, is getting some real momentum here.
And as a bonus: the Nike M4 website, a few months old but definitely worth checking out too.