Some interesting thoughts from Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy on the future of television, specifically around product placement, advertising and social interaction.

It’s always an honour to be asked to contribute content to magazines, especially to be joined by some of the web industry’s biggest names.

Along with Sir Jeffrey Zeldman, Elliott “The Fro” Jay Stocks and Dan Mall, Creative BloQ asked us what our favourite design apps are for the iPad.

There are many obvious choices such as Keynote and Dropbox so I selectively picked two invaluable tools I use to help make my ideas a reality that others might not be aware of:

iMockups (£4.99)
A great app for quickly creating interactive low-fi wireframes void of detail

Gusto (£6.99)
A really useful code editor with FTP connectivity and basic site management.

You can read more on why I chose iMockups and Gusto along with the other 20 Best iPad Apps for Design.

This suggestion for improving the text editor user interface on iPad is pure genius – using double finger swipes over the keyboard to navigate the cursor or hold Shift to highlight.

Apple need to make this happen.

How text editing on the iPad should be.

http://space.angrybirds.com/launch/

Love this promotional site for Angry Birds Space. As you scroll, the bird directs you around the content using similar motions from the game. It even senses the scroll motion and changes the orientation of the bird accordingly.

The game is fantastic too. Having played it for a month or so, I love the additional game mechanics introduced where you have to take into consideration extra factors.

Available on the App Store.

http://www.projectrebrief.com/

Project Re:Brief is an interesting concept from Google, considering how some of America’s most iconic advertising campaigns could be repurposed for the web, especially with the growing mobile audience and responsive web movement.

With such powerful brands like Coca-Cola, Volva and Avis as case studies, it could be quite interesting to see how this pans out.

http://spiffingcss.com/

If you speak “The Queen’s” English (otherwise known as British), you can type proper spellings of syntax such as colour, centre and transparency then apply the Spiffing CSS pre-processor to convert back to a language browsers understand.

Silly but brilliant. Bravo, Visual Idiot.

http://magazine1.suitupordie.com/

The first edition of Suit Up or Die - an online magazine for male fashion - takes an innovative approach to it’s design with an elegant user experience utilising the “off canvas” design pattern (coined by Luke Wroblewski) with bold photography, typography and grid systems.

I love the direction this has taken. It’s a fantastic use of modern technology and will be interesting to see what uptake will be like on tablets or mobile devices.

http://www.picozu.com/

Picozu is a smart web application for touching up photographs online (akin to the Flickr UI) using modern HTML5, CSS3 and Canvas techniques.

The UI is pretty slick with familiar graphic application tools at your disposal.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re away from your home desktop but want to make some quick image tweaks.

I just received an email from Statigram – a third party Instagram app for presenting user behaviour statistics – to inform me that my profile data will no longer be updated on a daily basis as I haven’t visited the site for a week.

This is a clever approach to incentivising return visitors.

Rather than let the user’s account lapse or even ignore their existence, a subtle reminder to indicate the service has been running for the last week, waiting for your return, suggests the service is not forcing you to do anything. It is, however, bringing to your attention the data won’t be updated as frequently until you do return.

Have you seen similar friendly emails attracting users back to a service?

Recently, I was asked my thoughts on iconic design in sci-fi movies by online magazine, Creative BloQ, specifically about the user interface from Minority Report:

The user interface from Minority Report was scarily close to what is now possible, hence why it’s been such an iconic design in film. The motion gestures on a projected screen seemed so far-fetched in 2002 but, less than ten years later, Microsoft had mass-produced the Xbox Kinect device simulating exactly the same concept. Who knew?

Read the full article for 19 other interesting thoughts on the topic.

As part of the process, I also considered a number of other iconic designs from sci-fi movies;

How can you talk about design in sci-fi without referencing The Matrix (1999)? The “bullet time” camera effect introduced by the Wachowski brothers inspired many following movies to adopt the same technique. The vertically scrolling matrix user interface also touched a nerve for many geeks and will always be considered the ultimate computer interface.

Flight of the Navigator (1986) left a lasting impression for me with the friendly, robotic eye of Max – an alternative alien concept with a friendly character, relatively unheard of up to then – and the streamline, curved shape of the spaceship where most UFO designs up to this time went with the traditional disc shape. The controls for flying the ship could also be considered to inspire some of the gaming controls we’re now familiar with today.

Can you think of any other iconic designs from sci-fi?