For us, doing our own projects has always been very rewarding. In the time we did not work for clients, we successfully organized Hack De Overheid, Music Hack Day´s, the Fail Conference and the Cognitive Cities Conference. We’ve released stuff like the Twitter Printer, an icon set, City Crawlers, Little Big Details and lots of other bits. Doing our own stuff helped us to brand the studio, refocus ourselves and give something back. But in the back of our head, we always wanted to focus on a self-initiated project full time.

When we started Your Neighbours we gave ourselves six months to build a company. And that´s what we did. After six months, we were profitable and decided to root in Berlin for the time being. The reason is simple. Berlin is an amazing place to live in and has an amazing group of young startups going for world domination. An objective we can relate too.

So, after two years, we´ve started on the next chapter.

Our new startup is called Gidsy and last Friday we launched a temporary splash page on Gidsy.com. With Gidsy, we’re building a marketplace for authentic experiences. Within the upcoming weeks, there will be a lot more news to be announced. Since we will not be posting much here anymore, you can follow us on Twitter, or signup for the Gidsy newsletter. Meanwhile, you can always contact us if you want to learn more.

We’re also very happy to welcome Philipp in our team! We met almost a year ago and can’t be more honored to have him as our CTO. You should follow him on Twitter and check his code on Github.

At the moment, we’re finishing up current projects for Etsy and Schindler Parent. Our shop is still open for client work, but we’ll just do consulting on a daily basis.

In the upcoming three weeks, we’ll travel through India to meet up with people and have some well deserved time off before we start with new things.

It has been a wild ride for us in the last month. It’s a little hard to bring down in one paragraph, but I’ll try. We co-organized the Cognitive Cities Conference (read more on how awesome this was here), we helped out with a very successful Hack de Overheid (the biggest and most prominent open-data event of The Netherlands), did a lot of presentations (among this one on ‘How To Start a Studio in Berlin’, by Floris), finished a website for Etsy (it’s called Hello Etsy and will be online soon here), finished the design for the new website of Schindler Parent (watch this space), moved out of our apartments (hey, that needs to happen too sometimes), and we prepared a three-week-trip to India.

And if this was not enough of stuff, we also started preparing for a new adventure. When we are back from India, we will spend all our time on a new project. We’ll become a start-up and expand our team. There’s (a lot) more news regarding this soon. Also check out the open job positions.

There’s also some sad news. Our office got robbed and we lost everything. Everything, except our data. Fortunately, with the help of friends, we could continue working after 2 days or so. Thanks a lot  for helping us out everyone, in particular Andreas, Gernot, Martin, Katrin and Laurent for lending us the spare laptops – you rock. Also, Anna-Lena deserves a very special mention for brilliantly organizing a charity-themed-waffle-event called ‘Cleptowaffles‘.

Last month was amazing on a lot of levels. And with more energy than ever, there will be a lot of things happening in the upcoming months. We’re very excited to start new things and we couldn’t been more grateful to be surrounded by such an amazing group of talented people. Stay cool like Fonzie, enjoy the video’s of the CoCities speakers that will be online soon, and we see each other again after three weeks.

If you are interested: we’re going on a three week trip in India, arriving in Mumbai moving down along the shore – passing Goa, Kuchi and Trivandrum. We’re mostly travelling by train or boat. If you are there and want to get in touch with us, drop us a line.

The Concept

For every project, the design process is an integral part. We believe that a good branding does not start with a logo, website or flyer, but instead with understanding the goals and vision of the entity you are doing it with. Having said that, we tried to create an identity that is not only recognizable and iconic, but one that also translates well to different media outlets without losing it’s impact.

The Logo

The logo can be interpreted in many ways, and that is exactly what the conference is all about. Some interpret the C as a map of a city, others see it has a circuit board, or even a collection of Lego blocks. Whatever you see in it, the logo reflects a certain playfulness and level of depth that you’ll also see at the event itself. All the shapes in the “C” are based on a grid which has similar proportions to the New York City Grid Plan. The colors of the logo are randomly generated from a hand picked color palette. Through the use of Scriptographer, we were able to generate many different color combinations that could be used for different purposes. All the colors work on both black and white backgrounds. The type we used for the logo is Forza, a font that was originally commissioned by Wired. Coincidentally, the moderator of the Cognitive Cities conference is Editor at Large of Wired.

The Website
The visual design is dark, vivid and futuristic. The website is divided into a 10 column grid system and all of the mouse hover colors of links are random, using the same color palette as the logo. For the maps, we used a Custom Google Map. We still plan on adding more content and features to the website, so be sure to keep an eye on it.

The Animations

Besides doing all of the branding and the web design, we are also working on a series of animations for Cognitive Cities Conference the conference. We plan on making 4 animations: one to introduce the logo / conference branding and another 3 to introduce the conference speakers in unique ways. Aside from this, we also did a 3D rendering of the logo that can be used as a wallpaper (that’s available here).

On January 11th, we’ll have the friendly folks from the Coffee Circle over to do a serious coffee tasting session. You’re welcome!If you follow our Twitter feed, you know that is it’s no secret that we love good coffee. And what’s better than locally roasted beans by three social entrepreneurs who work just around the corner? Moritz, Robert en Martin are three young guys who have founded the Coffee Circle: a company that imports the best Ethiopian coffee they can find to Berlin. And from every kilo coffee sold, a fair amount of money is getting invested back into local projects from the area of origin of the coffee. You can find more about them here.

So, together with the Coffee Circle and our friends from Third Wave we’re organizing a coffee tasting. The Coffee Circle will bring their best beans and some unique ways to brew coffee and you are welcome to join us!

Coffee tasting at Your Neighbours
January 11th, 2011 – 18:00
Adalberstrasse 5
10999 Berlin

We hope to see you there! It was a great event, check out some photo’s here.

The Cognitive Cities Conference

We believe that collaboration and diversity lead to the best results. By inviting bright minds with different perspectives, it is our ambition to enable not only an in-depth exchange about the current state of affairs, but also to foster new projects and contribute to the ongoing global discussion. The topic? Cities and their future. Cognitive Cities Conference February 26-27 Berlin, Germany We co-organize the event with Third Wave and friends. We’ll post another article on the whole design process of Cognitive Cities that’s worth sharing.

Speakers

There’s an awesome line-up of speakers that has already been confirmed (more to come soon):

-Adam Greenfield (Nokia’s former head of design direction for user interface and services, author of Speedbird and the book “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing“. Adam is also the founder and managing director of Urbanscale);

-Ben Hammersley (editor-at-large Wired UK, will be our moderator of the first day. You may also know Ben as the Head of Digital at Six Creative, Director at CampusPartyUSA or as the founder of JPDGP);

-Ton Zijlstra (from FabLab, ourdata.eu, and a lot of other Open Data initiatives in The Netherlands and abroad);

-Graffiti Research Lab Germany (you probably know the GRL people from different projects).

- Juha van ‘t Zelfde (Half Finnish, half DJ and the co-founder of Vurb, Juha van ’t Zelfde is interested in ubiquitous culture and urban rhythms)

Tickets

A limited amount of early bird tickets are available right now – so get them while they last…!

Small user-interface details can make all the difference. Because we find a lot of examples every week, we decided to make a collaborative blog called Little Big Details: an inspirational collection of UI details.

A few weeks ago, we decided to make a new blog called Little Big Details. The content is simple: we try to find nice UI elements that are intelligent, user-friendly and pretty. We take a screenshot (or more than one) and post it on littlebigdetails.com. Anything goes, as long as the UI element is on a screen and is interactive. After a few week, we have more than 20 nice posts and the reactions so far have been great.

And the best thing about Little Big Details, is that we need you!

If you find any nice UI details that should be seen by the rest of the world. You should consider submitting them here. Be sure to read the guidelines before submitting.

This upcoming Saturday, in many cities around the world, people will participate in the first ‘Global Open Data Hackathon’ ever. And together with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Data Network and CouchDB, we will host a hackathon in Berlin. You can read more about the event on the website of the event, or continue reading here.

Update: the event was a success, one of the projects that we did, was installing Open Data ‘Dead Drops’ around the city. More info here.

View Larger Map

When, where?
December 4th (Saturday) from 09:30 – 18:00
Adalbertstrasse 5, 10999 Berlin

update: @CO_UP will also offer their space for the Open Data Hackathon! They are one building next to us, at the Adalbertstrasse 6.

What?
The goal is to make web applications, mash-ups, visualizations, apps (local apps or Apps for Development submissions), or anything else using open-data. You can also scrape data from government websites to make it available for others or create your own data catalog of government data. And most of all: we will have a lot of fun. There are some example projects too.

Who?
The event is for designers, journalists, hackers and anyone who’s interested into ‘making’ and improving existing government services (or creating new ones). While some attendees might be on an entry level, others will be more experienced. We want you to learn new things.

How?
1. Make sure you sign-up here;
2. Bring your laptops, super phones, Arduino sets and laser swords;
3. It’s good to get a better idea of the data that is available and start thinking of a project you might want to work on.

We will keep you updated by email if you’ve signed up for the event. If you can’t make it but still want to be updated with future events like this, contact us.

Every two months, we make a new data visualization for Bright Magazine, the leading Dutch publication about lifestyle and technology. Earlier this year, we did a visualization for the magazine in which we showed the amount of nuclear warheads in the world.

Two times yellow is red
In this spread, we visualized the amount of yellow and red cards that have been given out since the first World Cup in 1930. Using data from Infostrada Sports, we made a radial visualization in which every card that has been given out is connected with a year and the corresponding country. We might update the infographic with statistics from this year’s World Cup when the information becomes available.

The Good Times and the Bad Times
Every year since 2004, the Dutch spend less and less money on video’s and audio. While the future does look a little gloomy for the entertainment industry, the market of pc-games and console games is growing. There’s also a difference in the kind of products that have been sold. An interesting example of this is in video, where the transition from VHS to DVD went much faster that the transition to Blue-ray has in the last couple of years.

If you want to reuse these spreads in a certain way, be sure to contact us in advance.

Rammstein is a band with a lot of stories. Much can be said about the band that has sold more than 15 million records. The website was a perfect opportunity to explore the band’s legacy in a new way. Together with De Monsters and Universal Music, we made a platform for the band where everything comes together – the community, the web shop  and the band’s website. With the new Rammstein.com, we also tried to bring together a lot of open-source projects that we support.

Tickets
Many band websites use a standard template for fans to purchase tickets, but we didn’t. Normally, you have a list of the date, the venue, the town and the country. We rethought this ‘meta-data’ and came up with an interactive timeline, where we used Cloudmade to make a very custom map that fits with the brand’s identity. We made a new navigation, a faceted search and a custom map on which we plotted all the upcoming concerts. This resulted in an awesome (at least, that’s what we think) new experience to find upcoming concerts.

History
A band with such an interesting history needs a way to properly share their story with their fans. Through the use of a horizontal timeline, we found a way to easily explore all the video’s, tours, press articles, events and releases. From the founding of the band in 1994, to their latest gig in New York City – everything is there. Let us know what you think about the website and follow us on Twitter, we’ll be back.

Music Hack Day is an event we proudly co-organize. And at the last Music Hack Day event in Amsterdam, we started with making an animation to promote the event. In our after-work-hours, we finally managed to finish the 3D animation. For the animations, we used software called Cinema 4D – needless to say, the rendering took quite some time.

Because we did not have a soundtrack, we organized a competition with our friends from SoundCloud. It was very successful, because more than 30 soundtracks got submitted. After quite some discussion, we decided that the soundtrack submitted by Mark Theis was most suiting. Just like the icon set we released earlier, the video is released under the ‘Attribution 3.0 Unported‘ Creative Commons licence.