Yep, it's not often that you see those three words next to each other. Even rarer when it's on an agency website. But then we're not about the ordinary. In fact, we're not really an agency. We're a collective. We're about the awesome. And Cardiff, Halo and Cats are all, we'll hope you'll agree, pretty bloody awesome.
We Make Awesome Sh was founded by Tom Gibby and Syd Lawrence. Tom and Syd met at Cardiff university through a shared love of all things gaming, geek and tech. We joked about one day starting our own company, little did we know that one final unexpected element would spark this opportunity – cats.
In early 2011, a few days after the Instagram API was released, we built Instac.at, a comical site that quite literally displayed a live feed of cat images being uploaded to Instagram. After just 24 hours over 30,000 people had visited the site and just a couple of weeks later that number had rocketed, fuelled by coverage from publications such as The Next Web and Mashable. The success of Instac.at lead to us creating Search Instagram – the best place to search for Instagram images online. Less than 9 months later, we've helped a number of brands integrate Instagram into their marketing and social media strategies, as well as increasing our offering to pretty much any piece of digital technology or social media application you can think of.
Just before the summer of 2012, Adam Howard joined us. He's a shit hot developer. I am sure you agree. He makes awesome shit.
Then at the end of the summer of 2012, Paul King joined us. This man tinkers like you wouldn't believe. It's an absolute pleasure to have him on the team. He also makes awesome shit.
We work wherever we want to work. Our bases are our homes. However Syd has been known to work from yachts in Cannes. Tom primarily works at Poke, Adam likes to check out the sights while he works, like Trafalgar Square, quite literally, and Paul is famous for working whenever he god damn likes.
We Make Awesome Shit.
Think of any social media platform or piece of digital technology. Chances are we've already made something awesome with it. Because that's what we do. We Make Awesome Sh.
Mobile, web, outdoor, interactive, hardware. Hell, we've even hacked a fish. Literally.
Here are some examples of the awesome work we've made.
We created a mobile app for Columbia Records as part of the promo for Calvin Harris new album: 18 Months.
The problem: Many of the album tracks had been already been released as singles, but due to licensing issues there was no way to 'upgrade' to the full album on iTunes. Meh :(
Our suggestion? Let's give it away... sort of.
So grab the app and you can listen to the whole album for free, so long as you're prepared to dance for it!
For Outlands festival in San Francisco we created a massive wall showing instagram pics
Modestep wanted a "virus" for their fans to promote their album "Evolution Theory".
We came up with a way for their fans to be "infected" by the "modestep virus". Fans were able to download a song by singing in via either their twitter account or their facebook account. Unbeknownst to the fans, this meant that we then had write privelges to their accounts. On launch day, we posted on their accounts "MODESTEP TOUR BUS CRASH CAUGHT ON CAMERA" with a link. Clicking on the link took the user throught to a site that took over the users screen.
Native LDN approached us to give them a helping hand with their campaign for Global Poverty Project. GPP has a campaign to eradicate polio, The End Of Polio.
The client wanted a system that users could create their own superhero avatar to show their support for the campaign. We created an HTML5 Canvas tool to allow users to select various attributes of their Global Hero. As well as a simple way for people to export and share their generated heroes.
We were honoured to have the campaign featured as Third Sector's Digital Campaign of the Week
The campaign also had the backing of such people as Bill Gates, Stephen Fry and various others. We were tasked with creating custom heroes for each of the ambassadors. From our understanding, everyone involved liked their avatars.
For the launch of JLS' new album "Evolution", we built a site that revelaed a new track each day.
This used hidden soundcloud players so that we could customise the look and feel.
Everyone knows the online world is a very special place. We started to see a trend of people uploading videos to the backing track of Baauer's Harlem Shake.
To capitalise on this potential craze, we created Harlem Shake Roulette, a simple site that showed a continuous stream of various user generated harlem shake videos.
We also got people to submit their own videos. Hundreds of people from all over the world submitted their own videos. From the likes of Ministry of Sound, McDonalds, Capcom, Yo Sushi, Facebook, Vimeo, Deezer, Spotify.
We wrote up a very much tongue in cheek blog post about the success of the site, check it out here.
To launch kylie's new song we were heavily involved in a tweet to unlock campaign. Fans had to tweet 25000 times with #KylieTimeBomb to unlock the video for her new single Timebomb.
We managed to get the number 1 worldwide trending topic on twitter in 6 minutes.
Perhaps this is why the client said "I love working with you" *swoon*
#WakeUpMeowMeow is an interactive video installation to promote Meow Meow's Little Match Girl show at the Royal Festival Hall.
The installation asked the public to text in their name to wake up Meow Meow. Meow Meow then gave the person a personalised festive message. This was projected onto the side of the Southbank Centre in London.
The New York Art Department were running a 4 day exhibition around Nyan Cat, NyanCatCity. For it they wanted a creative way to represent images both online and in their physical locations, taken all around the world to be presented in a nyan cat type display. We used our Awesome Wall package to create a Meta#NYANCAT.
For Christmas 2012, we decided that we should celebrate the holiday period with our friends. We created a simple site for our clients and friends to send in their favourite cracker jokes by sms. So many agencies do similar digital cards, and they are all a bit meh. We decided to go over the top meh, and make the worst experience we could think of.
Using an emotive headset. When you wink, you get a screenshot from whatever film you are watching on your phone.
At Digital Sizzle, we hooked up fish in a tank, to music. we created musical fish.
Tracking two goldfish, biggie & 2pac, via a simple webcam, the fish generated sound.
At Way out West in Sweden, we created a beer bottle midi instrument. 13 beer bottles, 62 metres of cable. Due to it being a MIDI instrument, you could change which sound was played for each bottle.
We won the "best hack" award at the event.
Connected a genuine 1950's morse code entry pad to the Facebook API so that people could post Facebook statuses using *the* original electronic communication method.
At Music Hack Day London, we created a browser based HTML5 canvas multiplayer kinect 'dance' game. Two players can play at the same time. They dance to score points.
Ubelly commisioned us to make a Windows Kinect game for Future of Web Design London 2012.
The game tests designers on their typeface knowledge and they have to spot helvetica from arial.
The hack uses the Kinect for Windows on Windows 8 consumer preview. With the skeletal data being piped to IE10 via WebSockets. This shows off not only the kinect but also IE10's support for HTML5 features such as WebSockets
A simple auto reply based of a call to action on all the album posters... Tweet this hashtag, get a link to the album sampler
A simple bookmarklet allowing fans to blow up any website. This is a must see!
Playing around with HTML5 canvas. Created a site that takes your current location and gathers weather information, then displays it in an animated HTML5 canvas.
A Search Instagram site with facial recognition to render mos on faces.
A cool instagram viewer
A clone of the Philips ambilight lighting system.
Everyone loves bunting! We created a bunting bookmarklet in commemoration of the Royal Wedding
For the announcement of Swedish House Mafia's "One Last Tour", they were shining lights onto historical buildings.
They wanted a site to bring in all the content being shared around these three dots. Using our Awesome Wall they could do this really easily.
For Delilah's latest album, "From the roots up", Atlantic records got in touch and asked us to create a simple site to unlock a new song on each day.
For the launch of the Deezer App Studio, PIAS asked us to remake their spotify app as a deezer app in an extremely short turnaround. The PIAS app was one of the playform's launch apps, and the CEO of Deezer said it was one of their favourite apps.
For Fake Bloods's latest album, "Cells", [PIAS] got in touch and asked us to create a simple site to unlock a new song on each day.
With some help from some of the guys at Tomahawk, we created Toma.hk, a music service for people to share music worldwide. Hooking into the desktop tomahawk client when available.
For Emeli Sandé's new single they wanted fans to submit content to create a fan video.
This was a great use for our Awesome Wall as they could do this really easily.
Tour Images using user submitted Instagram images
We got bored of our home pages so we decided to create a new home page. We hope you agree, it is the most awesome site ever!
A simple real time segmented chat service for tv watching companion app. For both mobile and desktop.
A lighting system (for Mac) that matched the colours of the video on screen. Also featured a manual iPhone control.
The guys from the Diabetes Hands Foundation contacted us, and asked us ever so kindly if they could have an awesome wall for their site. Charity, that means for free right? Sure, why not :)
Go get test yourself for diabetes and post your results on instagram with #bigbluetest.
Let me tell you about this girl Vivienne, Vivienne is raising money for child slaves around the world, by running a lemonade stand.
Vivienne's dad got in touch, and told us about Vivienne and asked if we could provide her with an Awesome Wall
Simple pong game knocked up in Processing while hacking around with the Kinect.
Used: Processing, OpenKinect, Daniel Shiffman's Kinect Processing lib
A Simple html5 port of a doom map. A canvas based raycaster.
Controlling a light to turn on and off from a mobile phone
Picked up a few of these fun RGB LEDs for cheap at the Maker Faire last weekend: IR transmitter/receiver pair, ATtiny25 and PWM to drive the RGB LED.
Simple build and reprogrammable via the onboard header.
A bit of a joke really. Paul took @sebly\s creative js logo and made it badass.
Collaboration with artist Fiona Chambers, displayed at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Scrape the web - save playlists and songs you come across while you browse so they are always easy to find and play.
Tomahklet currently supports over 35 sites (and growing).
A cross browser plugin to stop the dark knight rises spoilers from runing your fun.
Someone asked me to create an olympics blocker, so I did.
Find out which ladies have been getting all excited by 50 Shades of Grey.
Catch them in the mood and introduce yourself as 'Christian' on Twitter or Facebook..
This is a mashup of public facebook posts and tweets of women talking about reading 50 shades of grey.
"Half way between genius and creepy"
A mobile app enabling of sharing photos around you.
See and show what is going on around you.
I was commissioned by ShareMyPlaylists to create their new iOS app for both iPhone and iPad.
This is a phonegap app using a custom plugin to use libspotify to allow the user to play songs from spotify directly in the app itself.
We created a simple search instagram hack to celebrate May 4th, Star Wars Day.
A service tracking your 'this is my jam' jams. With a beat matched looping stop frame animation of me eating what was my jam. 'Hilarious'. Uses Toma.hk to play the tracks.
At Barcamp Bournemouth, we made an arduino hack that displayed tweets on an 8 by 8 LED matrix. It displayed tweets containing a specific hashtag is a custom typeface that we created, "Lawrence Sans". Once this was completed we then connected it up to a real time website. Where people could turn each LED on and off.
This made that people could draw on our LED board from their website all around the world. This got people from all over the place drawing, you guessed it, penises.
We won the hack competition :)
The typeface we created "Lawrence Sans" is available on github and some kind gentleman, Brandon Hawkes, created an actual downloadable font (ttf) of it. We definitely need to use this font on this site.
A klout style ranking on your musical tastes
View Project A simple service to show what people are currently watching on tv (powered by zeebox)
A film recommendation site. You enter a film, it recommends other films.
Can you spot the cat among the pigeons. Stop bots from spamming your site... Ladies and gents, I introduce to you, Catcha
True (WPP) approached Syd to build a KFC store locator app for iPhone & Android.
Syd has to admit, he does love his kentucky fried chicken...
I have created an app for Spotify called Suggestify.
Suggestify recommends songs based on the current song being played and creates a custom radio.
I was commissioned to build a mobile app for nervous parents. This involved building a backend admin system with a full API and an iPhone app for consumers.
The iPhone app uses PhoneGap, iAds and in app payments.
A mobile friendly, flash free, html5 compatible, responsively designed site. Buzzword bingo full house! *only when browser doesn't support flash
A facebook tab showing the latest photos shared on Instagram for the Australian Tourism board.
Some super simple customisable buttons using only css.
@skattyadz did a simple tech demo for css animations to create a spinning perspective christmas tree..
Here I use various services online to pair up user accounts across multiple systems. Do you find it spooky?
Playing around with the Audio API
Together with a few other people we looked into facial recognition technology in regards to the London riots. It would appear that it caused a stir amongst the media (within the first 24 hours)
Using Face.com's API and Facebook I was able to obtain a percentage accuracy for facial matches for friends of facebook users and cross reference them against the photos released by the police.
It didn't work accurately, it wasn't really meant to. It was more about looking into the possibilities of facial recognition and services such as Face.com
An instagram slideshow for the Diesel Black Gold fashion show.
Adam's dissertation project. 15,000 words, 2 Ruby on Rails apps, 2 iOS apps.
Assisted Miami-based artist Joseph Baum with his interactive installation, "Inference".
A Chrome extension to add quick view functionality to Google+
Instant whois for simple domain availability checker.
A simple Windows Phone metronome app.
A usability experiment on the concept of "recognising" passwords.
Creative Social approached me to go into collaboration with them for a simple Instagram visualization for the World's Biggest Advertising Awards, Cannes Lions.
An animal symptom checker for vet advice and clear guidelines.
Using the new fullscreen api with javascript
A quick reminder about Twitter app authentication. Don't get me wrong. I love what the guys have done with the World's Most Exclusive Website. And to be totally honest, I am jealous that they got their first. But they didn't need to do an auto tweet...
Safari 5.1 introduced a new full screen API. Use this bookmarklet to make any site go full screen
A countdown app for the rapture 21/05/2011 - The End of The World!
This is simply a prototype for an idea of people asking questions to other people around them.
Firefox 3.6 introduced an accelerometer to the web. We created a game to showcase this new feature.
A tutorial for 12 devs of xmas.
A javascript cheatsheet for mobile web app development
A css cheatsheet for mobile web app development
A jQuery plugin to add a background video to any page.
A jQuery plugin to add various types of shadows to elements.
I set up a blog to showcase all the new javascript APIs available in the HTML5 specification.
Here are links to the demos:
Turn the text inside any element to generate a centaur
A jQuery plugin to replace click events with hover events. More a proof of concept.
Instagram + Cats = The very nexus of the internet.
It's a pretty bold statement. It's also a pretty awesome word. So what makes us awesome and how do you know we're not just talking sh?
There's been a lot of sh said about us and the projects we’ve done. And not bad sh. Awesome sh.
Come on, get in touch right now!
fuckers@wemakeawesomesh.it
f.ckers@wemakeawesomesh.it
