Bluecadet Interactive

We've been busy! In the space of a month we've completed and launched four new, large websites.

The Wistar Institute's new homepage

Bluecadet-designed Counterspill, the world's first site to aggregate the history and impact of all major natural energy disasters around the world, has won two Interactive Media Awards! The site won "Best in Class" in the "Energy" category and in the "Natural Environment / Green" category with impressive scores of 481 and 485, respectively.

The Philly Museums and Tech Meetup gathered in an intimate group at the Athenaeum on Thursday night to get a tour. It was a chance to see the ways an institution can capture its visitors' interest and allow them to interact. Here's a hint, it's not necessarily through the latest touch screen technology.

We recently relaunched starvedforattention.org, with a fluid scrolling redesign and some fun HTML/jquery flairs. An initiative of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and VII Photo, “Starved for Attention,” is a multimedia campaign exposing the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition.

The prestigious design publication Communication Arts featured Bluecadet in a glowing eight-page studio profile. Bluecadet is one of only nine interactive studios to ever be featured in the design magazine, and we're alongside some incredibly well-respected firms like R/GA, Barbarian Group, Big Spaceship, and Firstborn.

We’re excited to welcome Aaron Miller, our new Producer and Interactive Technology Specialist, to Bluecadet. He boasts an impressive interactive background, and real project management chops. How he got to Bluecadet is a multimedia-studded road. Check out his artwork, installations and interactives.

We took the opportunity this summer to grab a talented Tyler student and force him to draw things for us. See a showcase of his impressive work.

As designers, we are constantly seeing the work of others—in magazines, blogs, television, advertisements—design is everywhere. Designers are delighted by, and struggle with, this bombardment of images every day. We get inspired, but it becomes a challenge to create something new or unique.

We learned about the planning stages of installing an interactive installation in Part 1 of the series. Now it’s time to get to the meat. Choosing the right touchscreen is a fraught and complex process. There are a plethora of touch technologies, and if the available hardware doesn’t fit your needs, you can always just build your own; the possibilities are endless.

It is no great secret that the best sources of inspiration for digital work can often be found offline. Recently I took a trip to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and got inspired. Here is Multiverse, Leo Villareal’s 2008 instllation, shoved into the rubric of interactive design.