I was lucky enough to have been invited to a party celebrating Creativity Magazine’s annual Creativity 50 last night in New York and had hoped to bump into a few of the honored guests. Creativity’s list “represents the biggest innovators of the year, who—through repeated demonstration of sheer brilliance or even just one spectacular feat—brought new spark to their respective fields of advertising, entertainment, marketing, technology, design and beyond” and included such names as Radiohead, the Coen brothers and Yugo Nakamura.

With that in mind, I had conjured up a brilliant conversation between myself and the Coen brothers about their use of postmodern visual art and techniques in Miller’s Crossing. Of course not all of the honorees could make it, including my new best pals, Ethan and Joel, but nonetheless it was a great party and led me to discover (and re-discover) a lot of amazing design in the work of the Creativity 50.

So, as you may have guessed, I did not actually find Yugo Nakamura at the party, but I did revisit his work. Yugo P, as he is also known, is a brilliant web designer who has researched and developed both experimental and consumer projects dealing mainly with interactivity. I regularly follow him on one of his personal projects FFFFOUND! (bookmark this now) for inspiration, but it was his work submitted in the 2000 New York Flashforward festival that first caught my attention. That work being a site for the Try Group, aptly named Willing-To-Try.com, created for students to navigate through an interactive story (Intel-based mac users will need to run their browser in Rosetta emulation mode). Yugo P’s interactive work has since become even more visually intriguing and thought-provoking.

Be sure to check out some of his other projects:

☛ Kaze To Desktop - a screensaver that moves according to the wind in your city.
☛ Eye-Project - a large-scale mosaic movie dynamically composed in real-time with the image/movie postings of the users.
☛ Ecotonoha - a virtual tree grown through user involvement. Each user posting represents a leaf on the tree.
☛ Industrious Clock - An on-going digital clock using video clips to display the count (one of my favorites).

There is much more to explore on his personal website and his company site.

I want to thank everyone at Creativity for throwing a great party and for motivating me to revisit the work of the Creativity 50. Now to go revisit Radiohead…

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