ryan sims: just watch the sky.

This is my new favourite thing. Virb’s lead designer Ryan Sims mixes music, discovery, typography, and the inherent poetry of song lyrics into Just Watch The Sky, a sleek, simple, and totally kick-ass site that is one-half beautiful design and one-half music.

The site is one page only, with a small audio player in the corner to play the track and see who you’re listening to. Lyrics from the song are laid out typographically to put the beauty of the lyrics themselves on display as well. There they sit, unmoving and aching, and the site blends a mix of sound and sight into a total experience merging both senses. The visual and sonic compliment and augment each other; audio poetry; visual sound.

Sims’ taste in music is killer, and I’ve discovered a few new artists (Kyle Andrews being one of the them…) from the site. I can’t get enough of it. I want to live here.

ghislain poirier: jusqu’en haut.

Punching is fun. Especially when there are beats involved, and the result is stars and birds and rays of moonshine. Montréal interactive design studio Departement created this interactive video for Ghislain Poirier’s “Jusqu’en Haut”, directed by Thibaut Duverneix. The official version is below, but the real deal is the interactive site – where you can get your punch on creating your own video beat down of Poirier’s face and then email it to friends. Perhaps as a warning.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Via Design You Trust

radiohead: nude re/mix.

Radiohead is cooler than everyone else. That’s just the way it is. With Nude Re/Mix they’re letting people download stems (digital tracks layered into songs – in this case voice, guitar, bass, drums, and strings/fx) of their song “Nude” for a small fee. Then you can remix them in GarageBand or other music programs and then upload back onto their site. The best tracks will get a listen-to by Radiohead themselves. They’ve even got a widget and Facebook app so you can release your mix to the world.

random website friday: word count.

The Western culture ranks things constantly. The top 10 this and the ugliest 5 those and the 100 greatest these of all time and the 7 wonders of the world. Quantifying gives us an equal measure to scale things no matter how ephemeral they may be. #1 is the most whatever and everything subsequent is less… whatever it is. So why not rank language itself?

Word Count tracks the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language and ranks them in order of commonness. Created by the almost frighteningly brilliant Jonathan Harris, it’s source is the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million published writing samples from a variety of sources. Word Count includes any word that shows up in the BNC at least twice.

The 5 most popular words (when I wrote this post) were “the”, “of”, “and”, “to”, and “a”. Nothing shocking there. I’m pleased to report that “fuck” comes in at a healthy #5598. If you’re interested in the rankings of the first 5 words that came to my head (please don’t judge) then we’ve got: “adore” at #22,013, “expunge” at #58,890, “ejaculation” at #54,644, “phosphorus” at #20,611 (who knew that many people were talking about phosphorus?) and “barnacle” at #50,129.

Disappointingly, this means people are talking more about barnacles than ejaculation. WTF?

Word Count even has it’s own site where people can submit suspiciously logical groupings of words. Among the interesting social tidbits I found on Word Count Conspiracy (part of Harris’ website Number27) were #992-995 “america ensure oil opportunity” and #7964-7967 “homosexual loses papal schooling”.