This micro site, Â was created in parallel with the main exhibition of one of Portugal’s greatests African explorers, 19th century Henrique de Carvalho.
Our aim was to use specific elements of the Henrique de Carvalho exploration itself as the main material of the site’s structure.
An early teaser [last image] show the main layout framed using ornaments from that specific timeframe. This version was later substituted for the present one, a more visually ‘subdued’ layout.
Our first flash game is finally finished, The Memory Grid Game!
Requested for a recent Ginsana online advertisement campaign, this project was developed within a very tight schedule. Based on our ever growing pLib code library, this served as a starting point for a structure that will be used, hopefully, in many future games.
Basically it consists of “special tiles”, randomly distributed on a grid, and as long you remember them in time you should pass to the next level!
Home Page: includes 2 clickable promotionals spots from partners/sponsors
The site for Argonarms [http://argonarms.com], the brand created by Bruno Baleiras, a young portuguese artist, was recently updated by Plura.
Bruno’s brand of work is mainly focused in customized redesign of various electric appliances. The idea was “born of a personal necessity to oppose the monochromatic dullness of this type of objects of daily use” where urban art like graffiti plays a major part in the overall aesthetics of the final works.
Later and as complement, it became necessary to engage in other interior design interventions, like furniture, wall, etc. as a mean to create fully customized and decorative environments for each client.
About Me Section
The site’s structure was completely rebuild from scratch, using the latest Actionscript 3.0 based framework from Plura, pLib. Its ‘bandwidth footprint’ was reduced to almost half given the modular structure on which it now operates.
Spain and Portugal have seen some of their arenas [ie. Palacio Vistalegre] evolve into multiporpose buildings housing commercial areas, alongside its most notorious function. The latter also has to accomodate different types cultural and sport venues.
The entry by João Bravo da Costa and Tiago Simões focused on the cultural history of the city and region, mainly its equestrian and bullfighting aspects. A surface covers and envolves the isolated ring structure and the new, loosely distributed, program.
In order to complement a PHD thesis regarding the EDP Foundation, a major cultural promotor, it was solicited  a graphical compilation of all its events between 2000 and 2009.
A cronological bar showing the length and calendar position of each occurrence and a series of spreadsheets with  a summary of each event [author[s], title, location, type and date] were created for that effect.
Chronological Event Bar
Chronological Event Bar (detail)
Below you can check the entire spreadsheet series. Read More »
Respecting the newly created identity by their in-house designer Katja Schalk, we integrated many new functionalities and a more intuitive navigation and sitemap.
It uses PWP, a module specifically created for the new Content Management System [CMS] and its comprised of a jQuery javascript framework and our own jQuery plugin, p. Also includes an extensive collection of API handling methods.
We consolidated the entire company’s media in one section, Company News, organized by category [ie. Press, News]. All the video is now handled by the newly created Youtube channel at http://youtube.com/visionboxtv.
An always present ajax mailing list submission form easily allows the user email and name to be collected for Vision-Box’s newsletter
Updating banners was made easy for the administrators, by simply uploading the correct image and adding the desired title. The latter can also be changed just by adding specific parameters to its height, and x/y position within the banner.
Outsourcing is soooo 2003. One of the most interesting books we recently had the pleasure to read is Crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, whose work we were already familiar via his Wired blog. According to the author, crowdsourcing can be defined as the following:
The White Paper Version:Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
It’s extraordinary how communities driven by common goals and interests are achieving much more that typical corporate structured enterprises, less expensively and effectively.
Being familiar with the open source community and its out-of-the box approach to many development problems it’s interesting how this methodology is impacting businesses and other areas unfamiliar, until now, with such unorthodox problem solving solutions. Plura will write more about this subject in the future, especially on how crowdsourcing may impact the architecture and design fields and, who knows, our own development process.
Plura feels the need to give props to Dropbox, an invaluable collaborative tool, storage and sharing utility. Its full potential came to light on the current work-in-progress, an architectural competition with team members residing in London, Lisbon and Beijing.
One can quickly update large files and share them almost automatically because only modifications are actually synced. And it mantains an history of updates to each file, rendering possible the undoing of certain updates or the retrieving of specific versions of your file. More info here.
This micro site, Â was created in parallel with the main exhibition of one of Portugal’s greatests African explorers, 19th century Henrique de Carvalho.
