As you may have noticed, Spoiled Milk has been undergoing quite a radical growth in the last six months. We have tripled our team size and opened an office in Switzerland. Things have been moving so fast that despite everyone working together daily using fantastic tools such as Basecamp, Campfire, Skype and Beanstalk - there were still many team members who hadn’t met face to face or seen our Copenhagen headquarters

So, we gathered up all the people from the Swiss office and flew to Copenhagen for our first group meetup. We spent the morning and early afternoon in workshops designed to discuss the problems we’ll face as an organisation in the coming year. The feedback and energy was fantastic and after much debate we retired to a local bowling centre to relax, then grabbed some excellent sushi before continuing the evening in some of Copenhagen’s hyggeligt bars.

Just getting to see everybody in one place and hear about the different backgrounds and cultures made us all realise how special our team is right now. It was a great, productive and fun day and something we will no doubt be repeating again soon. Thanks a lot everyone!

For more photos, check our Flickr page.

The Motion department has hired its first intern, Jacob Klintrup.

Jacob joins our team to help us with the management of projects, customer contact, idea and concept development, branding and much more.

Jacob is on his last year of the KaosPilot education in Århus, where he has specialized in project management, processes and branding. Jacob has lots of experience, working with and for several big European companies, which makes him a very capable addition to the Motion Department. So please give a big warm welcome to Jacob!

Niklas just made me aware of this tutorial and showreel of a new feature that is created for the new Adobe Creative Suite 4 Photoshop. I was waiting for something good when no. 3 came out, but this time around they’ve really thought outside the box. This tool will be amazing for almost all kinds of designers and clients, novice or professional level.

Video link here: Adobe Configurator 1.0 / (courtesy of Russell Brown).

iPhones are the bee’s knees and now you can decorate yours (or your iPod Touch) with a lovely Spoiled Milk wallpaper.

Pick from these three designs:

Then download here:

Spoiled Milk logo

Spoiled Milk poster

Spoiled Milk cartons

Enjoy!

I was invited to the first in a series of lectures being run by the new CIID course at the Danish Design School here in Copenhagen.

This specific lecture was about computational design and the speakers were The Product from Berlin. They held a very interesting talk about how they have used visualisation of datasets in their work. In was explained that instead of relying on a designer’s set of skills to develop an installation or art-piece, they let the data do the visualisation by enabling various home-made software programs to do the job.

We have dealt with this type of design before, but only very briefly and to do entire installations and have the whole concept evolve around this one unique process, creates quite extraordinary results as was shown on the projector.

They went on to show some examples of other people’s work, which I would like to reference as well, as I thought they were interesting mostly from a designer’s perspective, but also from someone who deals with applications and software in their daily worklife.

I will write an update when CIID post a specific website or any updates on new lectures. Word is that there’s going to be two next week.

Boris Müller: Poetry On The Road

“The basic idea behind the designs for Poetry 03 was to use a computer program that enables a text to layout itself. Following this idea, each text carrys its form in itself, so the form of the visuals is directly linked to the inner structure of the text. The aim was to visualise the nature and texture of poems. In order to achive this end, I developed a computer program that performs this transformation according to pre-defined rules.” - Boris Müller

Read more at http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry03/

Casual Data: News Knitter

“News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.

The production of knitted garments is a highly complex process which involves computer support at various steps starting with the designs of both the fabric and the shape of garments until they are ready-to-wear. In recent years, technical innovations in machine knitting have especially focused on the patterning facilities. The patterns are designed by individuals generally depending on the current trends of fashion and the intended target markets and multiplied through mass production. News Knitter translates this individual design process into a world-wide collaboration by utilizing live data streams as a base for pattern generation. Due to the dynamic nature of live data streams, the system generates patterns with unpredictable visuality.” - News Knitter

Read more at http://casualdata.com/newsknitter/

Big up to Kevin Cannon for letting me know about this event.

Today we’re launching the fully-fledged version of our Spoiled Milk Motion department. We now have four case studies that we’re very proud of and want to share with you! These recent projects have been completed for Greenpeace, Tadaah TV, Copydan and M-Cnatet and you can discover the background of each one and see the final results, on the individual case pages.

Do you have a motion-related project for us? We cover all parts of the process from strategy, thru shooting and post-production to the final deployment of web-based brand channels. Please contact Martin Jacobsen for more information at martin@spoiledmilk.dk or +45 22 29 54 48.

Spoiled Milk is delighted to be able to announce the addition of David, Gustavo and Christian to our Switzerland branch. This team expansion will add a wealth of web development, design and managerial experience to our group as a whole, as well as igniting our local Swiss knowledge and network. Needless to say we are all very excited to start working together (and not just because we can add Swiss and Argentinian to our collection of nationalities that already includes: British, Chinese, Danish, French, German and Swedish)!

David Luisi - Swiss Branch Director

David was born in 1973 in Zürich to an Italian father and an American mother. After completing school in Switzerland, he studied Fine Arts in Los Angeles and then Computer Graphics in Rome, before returning to his homeland in 1996 to set up Netvertising; one of the first Swiss web companies. He stayed with the firm for 8 years building it up to over 20 people and working with clients such as Credit Suisse, Omega, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sony, Swisscom, Walt Disney and Warner Music.

In 2004 David decided to sell his shares and move to Costa Rica with his family to take some time out and learn to surf. Now back in Zürich and ready for a new challenge, David joins us in a Branch Director role where he will focus on growing the Swiss division as well as applying his experience to the Spoiled Milk group as a whole.

Gustavo Salami - Strategic Planner

Born in Santa Fe, Argentina in 1974, but relocated to Switzerland in 1976 with his family due to the increasing military violence. After attending the Rudolf Steiner school in Zürich for 12 years, he tried art school, toured the world as a technician with a performing arts group, acted in a movie and then joined David for the early years at Netvertising. Since then Gustavo has taken a series of consulting positions and more recently worked at Publicis advertising group for four years. Blessed with a broad knowledge of startup strategy, project management and a finely-tuned contact network, Gustavo will be handling our strategic planning in Switzerland. He also likes watermelon.

Christian Vollenweider - Developer

Christian was born in 1978 in Zürich. After finishing Gymnasium school he met David and also became wrapped up in the birth of Netvertising, where he remained part of the core team for the next five years - primarily developing cutting-edge websites in Flash. He then tried his hand at a degree in chemistry, before quitting to join the Art school and a new media course. During his studies and a 9 month internship in Barcelona, he started to build up his own freelance business that he continued to run after finishing his education. Now reunited at Spoiled Milk with the rest of his early-web cohorts, Christian will be dazzling us with his Flash and Ruby on Rails prowess.

A warm welcome to a new member of the Copenhagen office and our newly established Motion department. Martin Jacobsen will be dealing with strategic project management and making sure that our motion-related projects run as smoothly as possible.

Martin has just graduated with a Master’s degree in Strategic Business Communication from the Århus School of Business and has been closely following the progress of Spoiled Milk right from the early days. He also has previous commercial experience in film and video production, so is the perfect fit for our team!

Working too on 12seconds.tv

A whole new form of twittering has been born! 12seconds.tv records 12 seconds of webcam feed and then posts it to Twitter. It’s a nice evolution for micro-blogging and great for peeking into people’s environments.

…and yes, Xi does ask “are we recording?” at the very end.

Follow us on Twitter or subscribe directly to our 12seconds.tv channel at 12seconds.tv

Our application for CITYGUIDE is now available from iTunes App Store.

“The CITYGUIDE application lets you browse a list of selected, cool places in Switzerland with summaries, images and contact information. In most cases you will also find professional videos that will show you through the location of your choice.

This first release (1.0) is a basic, functional version. We are currently working on the new release that will include such things as: worldwide location coverage, redesigned interface and multilingual support.”

Free download from iTunes App Store