Neverending Good Things

I absolutely fell in love with this flash site as soon as I saw it. As part of mobile service provider Orange UK's campaign for their new Speak Easy pay-as-you-go plan, the site Good Things Should Never End is a gorgeous interactive "never-ending" page that offers tons of little nuggets to click on and play with. It's really hard to explain.


The idea is you scroll down this rainbow and interact with the various characters you meet along the way, each offering a different activity. The site was created by a London-based company called Poke. One of the most interesting elements is the use of "share" links throughout the site.


Clicking on these links pops up a window with code that enables you to embed that particular element of the site into your blog, share it on your MySpace page or Facebook profile or post it to del.icio.us or StumbleUpon (with one notable omission: Digg). Behold:

More and more, marketers are becoming savvy to grassroots online marketing, particularly with the popularity of widgets taking off in recent months. They seem to be recognizing blogs and social networking sites as virtually free, far-reaching advertising vehicles - not that they didn't realize the potential before, but I feel like they're becoming significantly more creative in terms of how they tap in to that medium. Peak the bloggers' collective interest with a neat and innovative nugget and you could just make morning blogrounds™, reaching Jebus knows how many (surely lots!) of eyeballs.

P.S. I was too lazy to make it all the way to the end of the page (it's really long and takes forever). If anyone has taken the time to do so, please let us know if there's reward at the end!

Mark Verhaagen

Mark Verhaagen is a Dutch illustrator and animator that creates beautifully surreal characters and scenarios with a varied cast of fuzzy wuzzies, cute robots and bipedal rolly pollies. His work is slightly reminiscent of Jeremy Dower's style, whom I previously blogged about here. His Flickr page is also definitely worth a gander. I'd love to get copies of some of his prints if someone can point me in the right direction.

Jeremy Dower

Jeremy Dower's artwork had a fantastic glossy three-dimensional property that makes his little characters (astropuppets and robonerds, dontcha know) jump right off the screen. Actually his work looks more like photographs of designer vinyl toys than illustrations. Let's have a look at the creatures of his imagination:




Via Drawn.

Uh Oh LocoRoco

Move over Ninja Town, there's a new game in, uh, town. In a valiant effort to supplant the Nintendo DS as the undisputed reigning king of unbearably cute casual hand-held video gaming consoles, Sony came out with LocoRoco for the PSP in 2006 and are taking another stab at it this year with LocoRoco Cocoreccho.


The plot - which, as we all know, is integral part of cute, colourful Japanese video games - revolves around the LocoRoco, a peaceful, fun-loving, group of hippiesque rolly-polly blobs made of a jello-like consistency. Think Barbapapa meets a bag of Skittles. So anyway these globulous goobers are all Greenpeace, making sure everything is right with Mother Earth and tending to nature etc. until these bastard Moja Troops (invaders from outer space, dontcha know) swoop down from the heavens for some vague reason that isn't well defined in the Wikipedia entry about LocoRoco that I am currently paraphrasing (someone should really elaborate on that party of the entry). So anyway, mad cute video gaming hilarity surely ensues.


So the LocoRoco roll and tumble their way through the world, presumably in an attempt to save it, and meet a whole bunch of wacky characters along the way (see detailed character chart above). And of course, as is the standard nowadays, I've got a trailer for the game displaying the LocoRoco in all their shapeless glory. Be prepared to be amazed and astounded. Your eyes will go wide, your mouth will go whoa and your brain will go "I want that" as you cast your gaze upon the candy-coated beauty of LocoRoco. Behold:

Great. Now I have to get this game. And a PSP. Le sigh.

Via Notcot.org.

Unlucky Charms

OK so I 'm pretty sure I want to get the t-shirt Marshmallow Factory from Threadless but I'm a little hung up on the gross factor. As my brother said, "poo is not for eating." No truer words have ever been spoken, however there is no denying the awesomeness of this shirt. I mean, look how constipated that unicorn looks. Or maybe he's just really disturbed that those whatever-the-hells are eating his poop. And look at how happy those whatever-the-hells are! I mean, that's sheer ecstasy right there. That's it, I'm getting it. Thank you for helping me work that out.

Won't You Take Me To Ninjatown?

From the people who brought you Shawnimals, those little nondescript designer plush toys, comes Ninjatown. A spinoff off the Wee Ninja Shawnimal character, Ninjatown, is, well, I actually have no idea what it is. From what I gather it’s a bunch of cute little ninjas living in a town:

Ninjatown is similar to any small town or village, with corner stores, parks, and houses, except with a few key differences. First, by and large everyone in Ninjatown is a ninja, each with a unique set of skills. Second, there are only a few types of structures: A ninja hut, a training dojo and a Stealthscraper where Business Ninjas and Ninja Consultants work.

Characters include Anti-Ninja, White Ninja, Ninja Dropping (“just when you thought it was safe to walk around in Ninjatown barefoot, Ninja Dropping appears out of nowhere and makes you very unhappy”) and Ninja Consultant (“he’ll show you ways to make your business process more efficient by using side steps, smoke bombs and stealth hugs”), amongst others.

And as if that weren’t enough, Ninjatown will soon be a videogame for the Nintendo DS! Woo! Here’s the trailer:

AMG. I feel like someone just pummeled me with a cute stick. I wants it. And the music is pretty awesome too.

Via Notcot.com.

Cute!...Not!

Meghan Murphy's webcomic Kawaii Not is pretty to look at and fun to read. Mostly cause there aren't too many words. Kind of like my blog. Kawaii means "cute" in Japanese and Not means "not" in English. Get it?


Via The In-Sect.

Sweet Glass Creations

One of my co-workers came in today wearing a super cool necklace with a glass robot pendant so naturally I was all: "OMG! That's soooo cute! Where did you get it?" and she was all "I know, don't you love it? My boyfriend totally got it for me cause I love robots, lemme look it up on the internet!" And a couple of seconds later I was looking at Toronto designer Izik Levy's sweet glass creations including the robots (apparently robots can either be happy or pretty pissed off looking), sock monkeys (but they're made of glass, so I don't know if they can technically be called sock monkeys) and these totally sweet-looking yet very impractical blossom pendants. Izik's creations can be purchased at various oh-so-look-at-me-I'm-hip locations in Toronto or via e-mail if that's too far for you to travel for a glass sock monkey.

Thanks to Amy for coming to work with that super sweet necklace. And to her boyfriend for buying it for her.

Fairy Interesting

When I first started reading Jonathan Wright's site Urban Fairies I thought he really believed in fairies and their magical little doors that randomly appeared in houses and stores all over his home town of Ann Arbour, Michigan. But we've already established that I'm a wee bit gullible so that's to be expected. However I'm better at blogging than being not gullible so I did do my research and realized that (duh) Mr. Wright has been building these little curiosities himself in an effort to bolster tourism in the area. Either way I still kind of like these little doors. They are finely crafted and appear on both the inside and outside of buildings. Lots of pictures on the site as well as bunch of crap about how fairies like to eat candy and drink coffee or something.




Via BoingBoing.

Moji Mojo

Mojizu is a great site to browse if you're bored. People post their Moji (little characters) for the world to see and you get to rate them. Lots of cute going on here.