Briefs

That’s entertainment: Levi’s has released another CD-ROM designed by Antirom. The mini CD takes its lead from the ‘Choose Fun’ White Tab ad directed by Roman Coppola. Peter Ingwersen, Levi’s digital marketing manager, says: ‘While last year’s CD was an interpretation of Kung Fu arcade games, this year Antirom chose to explore what having fun means in terms of interactivity.’ Users get to play games, mix sounds, create poetry and, best of all, play with 3D imagery with the aid of 3D glasses that form part of the packaging. It is irrelevant, anarchic, non-educational and utterly compelling.

Festival of film: The ICA is currently playing host to the onedotzero2 digital film festival (2-10 May, call 0171-930 3647 for details or see the website at www.onedotzero.com), with remaining events including ‘Sequence + V1’, a selection of college talent and last year’s original programme; ‘Wow and flutter’: a music-led moving image programme; ‘lens flare’, full-motion video from computer gaming, including Tomb Raider 1 and 2 and Parappa the Rapper; and a rare screening of Japanese animated movie Ghost in the shell. An ICA spokeswoman said the festival would not be affected by the theft of a number of workstations from its Sun-sponsored New Media Centre last week. An E10000 server (worth 250 000) is believed to have been among the stolen goods: but as mailing list Need to Know (mail majordomo@unfortu.net with ‘subscribe ntknow’) pointed out: ‘With only about 15 made so far, it’s going to be easy to spot it in a car boot sale.’

All that jazz: New websites worth a browse this month include jazz label Verve Records’ site (www.ververecords.co.uk), designed by The Hub and featuring a direct purchase facility for the label’s entire back catalogue, real audio files of new releases and a useful question and answer facility. Visual effects company Artem has also launched a site at www.artem.com which shows how special effects are produced. Designed by The Apple Agency, the site details effects such as animatronics, sculpture, models and miniatures. Meanwhile, Recruit Media has uploaded a report on writing for the Web, targeted at both those commissioning and originating content, to its site at www.recruitmedia.co.uk.

It can also be obtained by calling 0171-704 1227.

Reviewing the explanations: Visual Explanations is Edward R Tufte’s third book on information design and the most relevant to the interactive designer. As Tufte writes in the introduction: ‘This book describes design strategies – the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words and numbers – for presenting information about motion, process, mechanism, cause and effect.’ Tufte’s somewhat academic style (he’s a professor at Yale University) won’t appeal to all, but it makes a refreshing change to read something about design that makes you think. It’s available from Graphics Press (Tel: 01424 854124) priced 28.