How much does making a movie cost?

From The Smoking Gun:

$71,682,975 was the budget for "The Village," (working title was "The Woods") Shyamalan's last movie, a 2004 thriller that recorded an opening weekend of $50 million. Here's the film's soup-to-nuts budget, from Shyamalan's writing/directing payday of $10.7 million to taxi cab fares. (79 pages)

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/hollywood/hollywoodsides/0228061woods1.html

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

Great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde.

Fight the Power! Replace ads with art...

From the Add-Art site:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

Spearheaded by Anti-Advertiser Steve Lambert, this open source project is being developed by Eyebeam. It works with AdBlockPlus, a Firefox extension that replaces online ads with blank space. This extension turns that blank space into art. Shows rotate every two weeks.

Tag Galaxy

Cool site out of Germany. Let's you navigate Flicker tags as if you were exploring different planetary systems. It's fun to play with. Not sure how useful it is. But not a bad waste of time...

What exactly is UX? Holger's got a pretty good idea...

Great article on Boxes and Arrows from Holger Maassen that tackles UX process, planning, teams, and project structure.

It's very well thought out, and full of great diagrams (some old, some new). Definitely worth a read.

Mind Meister

Been playing with http://www.mindmeister.com/ a collaborative mind mapping program to brainstorm some ideas with the team here at HUGE.

It's been such a fun exercise. You start out by creating a mind map, and then inviting others to join in. The best part is sitting back and watching it get updated right before your eyes.

Games with a purpose

GWAP- Games with a purpose. A fantastic concept. Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, has come up with a brilliant way to make computers smarter--have us humans teach them by playing games.

Here's Luis discussing the idea at a recent Google talk:

Branding for Actors

A while back (feels like a million years ago, but it was probably only 4 or 5) I created a little deck for my actor friends about creating an actor brand using some of the techniques I've learned over the years doing corporate design.

It's been gathering dust on a hard drive somewhere, but I thought it might be fun to dig it out, and see if it still offered any value.

So, here it is:
Branding 101 for 20Actors.pdf

Take a read. Let me know what you think.

Information Design Patterns

What a great resource! Similar to Yahoo's design pattern library, this is a pattern library for information design. It's part of the written thesis in Interface Design from Christian Behrens, a freelance interface designer in Berlin.

The search interface is fantastic:

Blackout poetry

Austin writer, cartoonist, and designer Austin Kleon creates these amazing poems with newspaper articles and a sharpie.

Beautiful & uncanny time lapse photos

From Kottke:

Wonderful timelapse photos by Alexey Titarenko of "shadow" people in St. Petersburg just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

These photos are amazing. Like seeing humanity as a single organism, or as a natural phenomenon rather than a collection of individuals. I love the way we flow up and around obstacles. Beautiful.