Mathieu Triay

The challenge in converting what’s effectively a research tool into an accessible interactive game lies in abstracting what’s not necessary for the user to understand, and emphasising what’s taken for granted in the original presentation. For instance, in the original programs you could breed creatures continuously but seeing the consequences of your actions over multiple generations was almost impossible. Instead, by using a tree similar to phylogenetic trees, we made it possible to visualise multiple generations from multiple creatures at the same time. It now clearly shows the difference in offsprings over time. Realising how far you had come from your original creature but how closely related they can seem is part of the magic.

“I’m spellbound by the fact that the Penguin computer wizards have managed to put a different random biomorph on every single jacket of both The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable.” — Richard Dawkins

When it came to manually tweaking your creature, replacing the series of obscure numbers was crucial to make the process more accessible. We wanted the user to feel like they could elongate and squish their creature by hand. Given that the genes have a high interplay, we paired the relevant ones together and plotted them on an interactive surface. This way you can make your changes in the physical space rather than in number space like the scientific original, and you get something closer to direct manipulation.

Creative Review Annual Award - Best in Book winner for the categories Digital Craft & Technical Innovation and Websites

The Pocket Penguins website was designed to showcase the simplicity and the quality of the books as objects. The series has a very minimal design which lets the content speak for itself and the website echoes that by putting an extract for each title, emphasising the use of quotes to hook the readers into the rest of the text. To enhance the physical aspect of the series we also include 3D renders of the books with a 360º view. Getting the homepage right was crucial, presenting all the elements we thought were essential to the series in a playful but also reminiscing of high end brands like Apple.

Explore the Pocket Penguins at pocketpenguins.com

A digital narrative that brings to life Carlo Rovelli’s bestselling book Seven Brief Lessons in Physics. The book, which explains our universe and the evolution of physics in seven short, simple lessons, has a striking cover. The website uses the same visual language and we crafted a unique interactive animation for each of the chapters. The resulting animations allow readers to experiment with the principles of physics in the most unusual ways, and are accompanied by audio and text extracts to explain what’s happening on screen. At the click of your mouse, particles swirl and undulate, multiply, scatter, disappear and explode, all by the hundreds.

“The site is serious, yet playful, and we think that’s very important. The interactive diagrams offer another level of understanding and playfulness which you can’t get in print.” – It’s Nice That

The Little Black Classics website is now in its second iteration. The first version was an iPod clicking wheel inspired interface which allowed the user to flip through the list of 80 ttiles very swiftly. For the second version, which included 46 more books, we revamped the interface with a familiar bookshelf look, reflecting the way these books were presented in bookshops, whilst retaining the original functionality of the first website.

“This is how you sell books in the digital age” — FastCo Design

The website was extremely successful in driving pre-orders and was an important point of contact for customers to discover the series.

See the 127 books at littleblackclassics.com

Play the game at default-man.com