The effect of positive feedback

We tend to forget the importance of giving each other positive feedback. Good feedback gives confidence and when we have a good confidence and believe in ourselves, we also become better at doing everything else, as a positive side effect.

Written by

Andreas Johansson

When

11:01, December 27–2010

Labeled with

feedback, hyper island

Currently, as some of you might know, I'm attending Hyper Island, a digital media school educating the future digital natives for the industry. But what differs Hyper Island from other schools is in the way they educate the students in group dynamics. We talk a lot about feedback, both giving and receiving.

A couple of weeks ago I spent three hours together with my working group and we were focusing on conflicts within the group and talking about the positive qualities in each of us. This was a great tool to and somewhat of an unusual approach, because we as humans tend to only focus on what we need to improve instead of talking about what we are really good at.

When you give positive feedback to someone you help that someone feeling good about themselves and with that positive feeling the beneficial side effect is that you will get better at everything else you do. It's all about confidence. And it's so easy to forget.

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Social galore

This is a digital trend observation made for a panel debate at Hyper Island in september 2010, during the module "The Future Digital Industry".

Written by

Andreas Johansson

When

21:59, December 8–2010

Labeled with

hyper island, digital trends, social networks

This article is written as a base for disscussions, so there is a lot of questions and hardly any conclusions or answers, it's merely reflections from a student.

Description

A big trend online is social networks. New social start ups sees the light of the day everywhere and all the time. More and more social networks are going mobile, following you in your pocket everywhere you go. Among all these social networks there is also a lot of new niche social networks. What and who will survive? How will they keep on making money and survive? With more social networks it means more identities to keep track on, more followers and more friends to stay in touch with. If we are adding location based social networks into the mix, when will we ever be private and how can companies misuse this information?

Example from reality

Facebook is currently the biggest player, with over 500 million active users (July 2010) . But we can see more niched social services like Yammer, a Twitter-like service for organisations and companies. Flickr is a social network for photographers and in one way Facebook competes with Flickr, but Facebooks photo sharing is m…

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The Rotesq font

As a one day assignment, during the design week at Interactive Art Director, each student designed his or her own font. This is my font; Rotesq.

Written by

Andreas Johansson

When

15:49, December 5–2010

Labeled with

hyper island, font

The basic concept of Rotesq was born in the idea of combining a serif with a sans serif. During the creation the font became more decorative and ended up as a decorative display font. Making the font was a great fun experience and the letters I had most trouble doing was the S and Q characters. Still not pleased with some of the characters, but hey, it's ok.

You can download the Rotesq font as an SVG-file and use in any way you want to. If you do use it in any way, please tell me.

Download Rotesq

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Depth scrolling effect

A small jQuery plugin for making a background image move slower than the foreground, creating the illusion of depth when user scrolls vertically.

Written by

Andreas Johansson

When

12:49, November 28–2010

Labeled with

jquery, plugin

This plugin was born partly with my upcoming portfolio and because I generally hate those fixed backgrounds. Moving it just slightly would make it so much nicer, but also adding depth to the design. My example down below is very basic, I'd love to see someone adding more levels of depth while user is scrolling. I'd actually might do that myself…

How to use it

It's fairly easy to use, with one parameter you can set. And remember, it's currently only working for horizontal scroll, but it should be fairly easy to add or change for a vertical scroll as well. Maybe in the next version. This is how you implement it

// with value
$(document).scrollDepth({delay:.5});

// without value (default delay; 0.1)
$(document).scrollDepth();

With the parameter "delay" you set a value from 1 to 0. Default value is 0.1, meaning the background will move one tenth of the foreground. The higher value, the faster it will go.

Demo of depthScroll.js
Download depthScroll.js

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Balloon Hunt

As a short one day assignment at Hyper Island we were supposed to make a game in Actionscript 3. Say hello to Balloon Hunt; my first AS3 project.

Written by

Andreas Johansson

When

23:50, November 23–2010

Labeled with

actionscript, flash, hyper island

A couple of years ago—to be more specific I would say four years—I had plans becoming a flash developer. It was the perfect combination of both code and visual freedom but this was back in the days of Actionscript 2 and when version 3 of Actionscript entered into the arena, I was long gone.

Not working with Actionscript in these four years made it into quite a hurdle to start, but I enjoyed it very much. Although this won't make me start with AS3 for real. I'm still more towards Javascript, but you never know. And that discussion, Javascript or Actionscript, is for another day and so many as already covered the topic…

Please enjoy Balloon Hunt!

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