Inspired by flash mobs that have been occurring around the world, our design team has decided to offer our own take on these. As defined in Wikipedia, a flash mob is “is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” While some of the better known flash mobs have brought people together for absurd events like pillow fights, clapping and chirping, we thought we could use the concept for applied design efforts. Though you never know, maybe you’ll see us impersonating chickens on the front lawn some day. We are kinda crazy in that way.

In the coming hours and days you will see the fruits of one of our first forays into the crazy world that is flash mobbing … albeit … AIM design team stylie.

Here are the rules and guidelines for this one:

Assignment

• Design an AIM desktop wallpaper.

Rules

• Must include AIM logo
• Use 1600×1200 palette
• Don’t use rights protected photos, fonts or other proprietary content.
• Give credit where credit is due for photos, fonts, etc. (Creative Commons).
• Spend about 1hr to a 1.5hrs on your design only exceeding that if you have to do some finishing touches.
• Write a blog post to design.aim.com about your thought process and include your desktop for viewing and download.

Guidelines

• Its all about AIM, however you want to interpret that.
• Try to reflect some personal style into your design.
• Have fun. Be creative.

-Tom

NOTE: originally posted on the AIM Design Blog.

Originally posted on Design.AIM.com

I know what you are thinking. Something like “Tom, are you excited about the big game this weekend?”. You haven’t been able to sleep you are so curious. My response is “Heck yeah, I’m excited about the big game. Aren’t you?”. If you happen to live on another planet, please allow me to explain. This weekend the mighty Florida Gators play the feeble UCLA Bruins in the 2007 NCAA Basketball Tournament Final Four Playoffs. It’s a rematch of last year’s final when the Bruins of course decided to spend time making sure their baby blue uniforms looked good instead of playing hoops.

What does this have to do with design you ask? Well, not much other than the fact that the University of Florida is where I received my degree in graphic design. To celebrate the big game I decided to scurry together a desktop background in honor of both teams (though primarily the Gators) and this soon to be historic event. I hope this will be the first of many desktop designs my AIM design peepz will make available in the future.

Now, I didn’t want to pick on the poor little Bruins any more than I already have so I’ve taken some liberties and changed their name to Bears. After all, a Bruin is a “baby” bear. And after the they loose, we can go back to calling them Bruins as we watch them wipe the tears away for the second time in two years.

Now, talkin’ trash is fun but in all due respect to the Bruins and their fans I wish you the best of luck. Your team will be looking for revenge which ought to make for an exciting game. May the best team win.

Without further ado, here are the desktops available for download:
Big (1600×1200)
Small (1024×768)

Special thanks to the folks who made their photos available for remix on Flickr. Here are their due credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lausanne/342796608/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackcustard/98691713/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemorris/26347864/

Fonts used: Rusted Plastic, Trashed, Brody & Arial

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

One of my latest projects is a new product at AOL/AIM called AIM Pages. Its a system that allows anyone to create a web page in a matter of minutes. Not only can you set up the page quickly but you can choose a variety of themes and content blocks to express yourself however you would like. The pages are built upon the Buddy platform that is built into AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). For clarity, the Buddy platform is a network of buddies or friends that you chat with via the application. I found that once I had my own AIM Page created, I was getting contacted every now and then by people I didn’t know. I wanted a way to learn more about the person who was contacting me without having to engage in conversation or chat. If I could simply type in a screen name and search AIM Pages, I could see if the person had a page to see if this is someone I already know. Better yet, if the search were built into the browser, I could perform this search in a just a few seconds.

I’ve been wanting to do this for some time but didn’t know how. After floating the idea around the office I received some information and encouragement from at least a couple developers to tell me that it was easy to do (easy for a developer at least). Development of this type is certainly out of my comfort zone but I’m dangerous enough with code to at least give it a try. It turns out that the most difficult part is simply figuring out how to decifer the search parameters. Once you’ve got that, it is quite simple in fact.

Long story short, after a few tests I created my first browser search plugin. Once I figured this out for AIM Pages I wanted to see if I could replicate it for a few other sites that I search quite often where a plugin. Those sites are AOL UnCut Videos, a user-submission video site I just helped get out the door, and Twangville, a music blog I administer. Here are links to all three plugins for you to try out yourself. All you need to do is click the title of the plugin to install. The browser will ask you what you want to do with it. Just click ‘OK’ and then you will see the search selection in the upper right corner of your browser.

Browser Search Plugins*:

• AIM Pages
• AOL UnCut Video
• Twangville

*requires a Mozilla-based browser (Firefox, Flock, etc. Not IE)

Thanks to Paul Petty and Shawn Carnell at AOL for giving me the info I needed to make this happen.