AlphaDesigner Blogue

Mountain Lion Safety, originally uploaded by ekai.

I know this is funny and there’s no reason to explain why but after I stopped laughing I tried to imagine what would happen if this miserable sign survives a nuclear war and someone finds it during excavations in the year 3000.

Because it’s perfectly clear that in the 21th Century the pagan humans had the habit to worship wild cats and offer them their children for lunch.

Sometimes I think there should be a law forbidding stupid designers from practicing, with occasional capital punishments for the worst cases. Throw them to the mountain lions!

Now this is good, creative advertising. Plus, it’s a very Jokeresque thing to do. Check some more of the trailer’s filmstrip on Chris Presswell’s post. He claims it’s real, and hand-made. Someone even left his fingerprints on the film. I personally can’t wait to dive into the madness.

Creativestem was started about 3 years ago by Luis and Keith from Ratser and being among the beta testers, I had the chance to follow much of its development process. Looking back, I feel like it was in another world and another time. Social networking was just vaguely starting as an idea, nobody was sure what it would lead to, yet the old-fashioned way in which communities use to function was slowly getting irrelevant.

It’s very hard to keep yourself focused on such a complex idea for so long, especially if you aren’t a big company with a lot of resources but Luis, Keith and the rest of the Creativestem team somehow managed to push things further. And although, Web 2.0 sites are under construction by definition, since they have to continuously adapt to what’s hip and what’s relevant out there, I think Creativestem reached its maturity phase. Apparently the guys think the same because now the site is open for unregistered viewers and although the word “Beta” still stands near the logo, it feels more like Gamma.

Perhaps the best way to describe Creativestem is to say it’s a social networking site aimed at visual artists. The core idea is to build a community, and not only offer the users a way to showcase their work but also to inspire collaboration among them. The tag line is as clear as it is short - create, share, inspire. It’s the essence of Web 2.0 art or whatever you call it today.

Apart from user profiles, the site also offers forums, a news section, various themed exhibitions, and articles which makes it less user-centric than you may probably expect and which is a good thing, since community members today must learn to let go of the “me” perspective which is so strikingly emphasized in sites like Flickr, for example. In a sense, Creativestem mixes the old community feel with the new trends in online communication and if innovative may feel like a strong word for many, I think it’s safe to say that it’s at least different than most of the sites which offer similar experience.

Go ahead and have a look.