Hello, SparkMode!

Created by The Glitch Mob’s Justin Boreta, and BRIGHT, Inc., SparkMode is the first artist-owned app that lets you create, edit, & share digital art and design your own custom art products, from prints to decor, and beyond…

 

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Get the free app.
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You may have noticed the crickets here at Social-Creature for most of 2014 (eeesh 160x160x85-see-no-evil-monkey.png.pagespeed.ic.dCoZ8IyrSj). I was a little bit busy. Justin Boreta and I were cooking up a new creative project, called SparkMode.

If you haven’t been to a music festival recently, Boreta is —

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We’ve made some things together before that you’ve watched and clicked and played with. SparkMode is the next step in the evolution of Mirrorgram, an app we launched in the Fall of 2012. More than 2.5 million people created 10 million pieces of digital art with the app, igniting a pop aesthetic that took over music, fashion, and advertising for a bit.

But since those early days when the idea for Mirrorgram was first conceived (on the Glitch Mob tour bus; rock ‘n roll \m/), a lot has changed….

 

The iPhone has completely revolutionized how we make art.


You and I take this for granted now, but it’s become insanely easy to make art. It used to require really complicated image editing software, and the whole learning curve that came with it. And before computers, you needed years of training and practice to get your creative skills to match your artistic intent.

Now, you can get an app that’ll let you create cool stuff with a few taps in seconds. It’s a totally new relationship to the process of making art. It’s simple, it’s effortless, it’s fun. It’s an instant jump from inspiration to execution.

But why stop at the screen?

As Boreta says, “I love the feeling of getting art made into tangible things you can feel with your hands.”

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SparkMode allows you to create art with app simplicity in a new medium — physical space.

In SparkMode you can layer multiple image effects to create kaleidoscopic patterns, trippy, abstract art, and beautifully symmetrical photo edits; and you can design physical art to make your offline world more beautiful, too. Order your creations through the app, and get them shipped to you anywhere in the world. We’re starting with canvas art, stickerbooks, and prints, and plan to expand into new creative mediums in 2015.

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BRIGHT, Inc. makes products, experiences, and brands people love. Find out more: brightincorporated.com

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  • Product Strategy & Roadmapping
  • UX Strategy: Mobile, E-commerce, Web
  • Growth, Community, & CRM Strategy
  • Brand Strategy
  • Content Strategy
  • Multi-Channel Communications Planning

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Music & Mirrorgrams: Lessons Learned From Working in Apps

musicandmirrorgramsMirrorgram by: bobdoran

 

This weekend I was invited to a salon-style dinner organized by Tim Chang and Les Borsai, hosted at the home of Steve Rennie. The event turned out to be a fascinating gathering at the intersection of digital media, technology, and music.

I have an art app called Mirrorgram. We launched it last October, and just this past month we crossed a million users! But I ended up in apps kind of by accident. I come, as did nearly everyone at the dinner, from music. For a long time, I used to produce music festivals. I’ve worked with Live Nation and House of Blues, and for years I was the marketing director for the Do Lab on the Lightning in a Bottle Festival. That’s actually how I met my Mirrorgram co-founder, Justin Boreta, who’s part of a band called the Glitch Mob. In fact, he came up with the concept for Mirrorgram while on tour, during the hours spent bored on the bus between shows, nerding out with iPhone photo apps. And it was built by the team at StageBloc, whose platform is designed to specifically support the unique  content and community needs of musicians and performers. So when Tim asked me to come to the salon with a few minutes worth of lessons learned from working in apps, the first thing that came to mind for me was how much we draw on what we’ve internalized from our experiences in the music world to shape the way we approach what we do in the app world:

1. Fans vs. Users.
Before we ever started thinking about “users” our reference point was always “fans.” Of course, now we’re incredibly concerned with usability, and how people actually engage with our product, but beyond the app itself, we have a deep understanding and respect  for the importance of nurturing the kinds extended social narratives and interactions that get created around it. Like what happens with a band people love, or an annual music festival that they revisit every year. We’ve seen so many Mirrorgrammers create connections and forge friendships and even artistic collaborations with one another through this shared love that they have for the app, and the art they create with it. And we’ve always understood that drive through the lens of fandom.

2. Choose your own adventure.
Coming from a world of creating real-life experiences we have a natural inclination to approach what we’re doing in the digital space with that same sensibility. It’s about creating a platform with a certain amount of structure — a concert set list, a festival lineup, an app feature-set — but then also leaving a ton of room open people to create their own experiences within that structure. When we look at the kind of art that people create with Mirrorgram, it consistently blows us away. Half the time we don’t even know HOW people are creating the images they are with it. We’re just watching the feed, mesmerized. It’s pretty unbelievable. Coming from music, that experience of creating something and putting it out into the world and then seeing people take it into directions you could have never imagined or expected is very familiar.

3. More than the sum of its parts.
There’s something really interesting in approaching the evolution of an app, or any product, the way a band thinks about the new music it releases, or the way a music festival builds on what came before, year after year. A band doesn’t think about its next album like an “update.” It’s about a journey that we want to take our fans or our attendees or our users on with us. The day we went live with Mirrorgram, we referred to it (kinda jokingly, but kinda not) like the start of “The Symmetry Revolution.”

We still reference it in a tongue in cheek kind of way, but people in the iPhoneography world have really gravitated to that idea of it being about something bigger, of the app as an entry-point into a larger creative movement or community. To us, Mirrorgram has always been much more than just the sum of its features — it’s part of an ongoing, shared, cultural and aesthetic experience we’re creating and evolving together with the people who use it.

It’s still fairly early days for Mirrorgram, but hopefully you might want to come on that trip with us.

And thanks again to Tim, Les, and Steve, for hosting such a wonderful evening!

 

    



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This Is What’s Happening: 2012 Edition

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Remember back when I used to be a social media strategist?

I started before that term was even being used, and as late as this October the L.A. Times still hadn’t gotten the memo that I had move on, calling me a “social media expert” for my crimes (among them: 1, 2, 3).

So you’d be forgiven if you hadn’t realized that I’d become a product strategist. (Social media, it’s not you, it’s me. Well, it’s kind of you. But mostly, it’s  me. Anyway, at this point everything is social, so let’s call it even.)

While 2012 has been the quietest year on Social-Creature since I started the site, elsewhere it’s been quite prolific. So as the year comes to a close, I thought I’d take a break to share some of what’s been going on.

MIRRORGRAM:

This Fall I led the launch strategy for a new iOS photo app, called Mirrorgram. In its first week, the app, created by Justin Boreta, of the Glitch Mob, and StageBloc, had over 165,000 users (!!!), gotten selected as the top “New & Noteworthy” app on the App Store:

reached #1 paid app in the photo and video category:

and #11 paid app overall:

Less than 2 months in, Mirrorgram now has over 300,000 users, there are nearly 45,000 images in the #mirrorgram feed on Instagram, and mirroring has become a cultural aesthetic trend:

You’re welcome / We’re sorry.

Anyway, watching  hundreds of thousands of people use the product has offered visibility into some really fascinating behavioral insights around iPhone creativity, the mechanics of digital art creation, and the white space on the photo sharing landscape. More about what we’ve learned, and how these insights are informing further product strategy, including a truly exciting new direction in the app’s evolution — hint: what’s Instagram NOT for? (porn, aside) — in the new year, so stay tuned!

GATHER:

Gather began as a hip, little boutique, beloved by Racked LA and LA Weekly for carrying all local L.A. designers. Now this idea has evolved into what I, and my partner, Katie Kay Mead, see as the future of hyper-local design discovery and retail.

While shopping has moved online, the discovery of locally-created design is still trapped by brick-and-mortar, and coincidence. The new Gather site, relaunched this Fall, is designed address this gap, allowing visitors to easily discover cutting-edge design just around the corner. As the L.A. Times put it in their recent Sunday feature on Gather:

More to come on the arising cultural behaviors and beliefs that have laid the foundation for Gather’s new direction — including why flash sale leaders are desperate to reposition themselves as purveyors of special (rather than discounted) things, and the emerging local trend, bolstered by campaigns like AmEx’s “Small Business Saturday” and Millennials’ proclivities.

In the meantime:

And there’s other bright news as well, but I’ll tell you when I see you in 2013!

    



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Hacking Into Encom With The Glitch Mob

Super late to my own party on this, but here it is:

Last summer, I came up with an idea for The Glitch Mob to do a Tron: Legacy remix video scored to music from their 2010 album, Drink the Sea, and edited by Khameleon808. We released the video in November 2010 and after that lots of things happened.

Sean Bailey, the head of production at Disney, singled the video out at a press conference. It got a writeup on Wired.com, earning me a lovely compliment along the way for instigating this whole thing. And then, in February, The Glitch Mob were asked to do an official track for Disney’s Tron:Legacy R3configur3d remix album, featuring artists like M83, Photek, Moby, Com Truise, and others reworking Daft Punk’s original tracks from the movie score. R3configur3d just dropped last week and The Glitch Mob’s take on Daft Punk’s “Derezzed” is the first track on the album.

To celebrate the release, Khameleon808 re-teamed with the Glitch Mob to create another audio-visual-gasm.

Enjoy!


    



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