We may not know who won the World Cup yet but we launched an iphone app this week that screams “Gooooooaaaaaal” every time a team you follow scores. You then get a push notification that tells you the score and gives you the option to taunt a friend by posting a message to their facebook page.

Get it here before the cup is over! The six week turnaround time was tighter than tight but FIFA wasn’t about to delay the start of the Cup just because we would have wanted more time to design, develop and test. This is the first of a series of apps that we will create under the brand Scoretones together with a great team at McCann Worldgroup.

One more note on taunting: there is an amazing amount of mobile traffic that occurs during real-time events tied to specific event details such as a goal. The volume of TXT traffic during the Cup games has been written about on Flowing Data. We’re looking forward to parsing our own data for trends in a few weeks. On that note here is another post, this time showing water usage during the Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game of Canada vs. USA. Water usage? Yes, every period end was punctuated by a spike in water usage attributed to millions of Canadians peeing simultaneously.

We need your votes! We submitted STACKD to the Pepsi Refresh Project in order to apply for a grant. We’re proud to say the idea was accepted and we are in the running to win. The grant will enable us to devote real time and attention to STACKD so that we can improve what it does best: connect businesses to each other that are in the same building or neighborhood. It’s our idea of where the internet is heading – hyperlocal. Please take the time to cast your vote, there is a lot of competition and we can’t do it without you!

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a very brief story about map makers who, in a quest to replicate the details of the original perfectly, created a gargantuan map the same size of the country they were illustrating. I’m always struck by how difficult it is to show an image of a website one a website. Should I make it small enough to show at once and loose the details in the typography? Should I crop in to a detail and loose the overall impression? Here’s my newest contribution to the problem: excitingly tilted in a a constructivist 2.0 kind of way. Terrible, isn’t it.

Oh, by the way, take a look at the new website we designed and built for Kliment-Halsband Architects. We did the first one four years ago and they came back to us to rejuvenate. That felt good. Portraits of the partners were shot by the amazing Francois Dischinger.

The iPad is coming and whether you like it or not, whether you are under- or overwhelmed and whether you will get it or not: the iPad will be here soon! At $499 and the alleged savior of the print industry, it will most likely make as much of an impact as the iPhone did.

To help us to get ready for some iPad GUI design, we found this handy PSD template (via teehan+lax). It’s quite a collection (24mb) and it even has the blue cube icon that indicates a missing Flash plugin.

About two years ago we designed a new website for Dattner Architects. The second part of the job was to help the New York firm put together their second monograph, which took considerably longer but just hit the street and we finally hold it in our hands!

We liked the idea to create two pieces that would showcase the company’s work in the distinct nature of their medium, and at the same time allow them to reference each other through a mutual graphic language. Front and center, book and website refer to the wide range of public and private projects Dattner Atchitects has realized over the years — in lieu of a title, the full list of their their fields of action is stacked in large letters, filling the entire available height and marking the sections projects belong to.

Get “Dattner Architects” from amazon. Funnily enough, at amazon there’s an older design of the cover showing up for the book which they took from the publisher’s catalogue (and which we really really liked because it was a little more mysterious). take a look…

Using a custom font as opposed to a system font has been a huge issue for web designers for a long time. Luckily there is sIFR and cufon, 2 methods we use to realize dynamic rendering of fonts on web sites. The latest browser generation (at least Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) support the @font-face CSS rule which forces the font to download to the clients computer. The result is quite amazing but the results vary widely between browsers.

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Speaking of sIFR and cufon, there appears to be more fish in that pond: FontJazz and facelift both offer custom font rendering but in very different ways. While FontJazz appears to be a cufon clone (which appears to work on many, even old browsers), facelift renders images in real time. Not sure if I am tempted to try these approaches as cufon works pretty well for us.

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csstypeset is a nice tool that allows you to format small snippets of text using system fonts. On the left you have a WYSIWYG editing area and to the right your CSS code is generated. Bookmark!

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Today everything is about em in CSS, no px anymore. Yeah, I know, how nerdy can it get. But seriously, this online tool helps you convert to em easily and thus enables you to create better stylesheets.

Our latest development KimWendellDesign.com just went live this week. We created this slick portfolio website with blog navigation in mind. Content is clustered into three different categories which can be switched on and off in real-time without re-loading. Content boxes can be re-ordered and – on click of a button – reveal detail overlays featuring a multi-media viewer (image slide shows or video clips). The team at Kim.Wendell Design, a rendering and animation firm, uses a custom CMS tool to manage content. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

I’m proud to announce that STACKD is featured in an online publication called Urban Omnibus that intends to “increase understanding of the city we have and encourage ideas that can lead to a more inclusive, more sustainable, more beautiful city that could be.” We’ve worked hard in getting some of the kinks out of the system in time for the article’s publication and are keeping our fingers crossed that people will sign up and start using STACKD to build relationships with others in their building – or nearby. The article gives a bit of conceptual urban theory background to the project, how we originated the idea as a way to meet other businesses and where we think it could lead. Please let us know what you think, even the bad stuff!

Only 24 days left to apply for this year’s Macktez Summer Stipend. For the fifth year in a row the tech consultancy has been offering $500 to support creatives and their ideas: those just taking shape and those gasping for oxygen with the finish line in sight. There have been some really great nominations and winners.  In 2007 Macktez helped Andrew Sloat finish his video project A More Perfect Union and just last year support was given to Nicole Kenney and her wildly successful Before I Die I Want To. How did we find this one? Because we’ve been Macktez’ ideas and illustrations partner on the project since it started.

We have been working with Van Alen Institute for the last two years on a variety of web site related assessments and projects. 6 months ago we launched the first version of their current web presence. We are happy to report that on Friday, we launched an improved version of the calendar – a key interactive feature of the site. The calendar is now faster and more fun to use and displays multiple upcoming events at a glance. To a certain extent web sites are never finished. If you are really dedicated to creating a presence that will draw people back time and again then a site needs to evolve as users interact with it, provide feedback or new ideas emerge.

Have you ever had an idea for something and just never got it done because “work” was always in the way? Well we finally made one of those projects happen. It’s called STACKD and it’s meant to put people together for business, collaboration or anything else that comes to mind.

When we moved our office to a 20 story building last fall the elevators became pretty important. Sometimes they’re broken and a crowd gathers. Sometimes people post items that they have for sale. Most days you just squeeze in with a bunch of half-familiar faces and wait it out. It’s not a talkative environment but there are stolen glimpses. I’ve always been curious to know where people go and who they work for and so we built a website to facilitate that. It’s simple really. You sign up, list your company info and find others that work in your building. Once we get going we’ll add a way to sort by industry, post messages and receive notifications.

We’re planning to go knocking on a lot of doors in the next few days to say hello and let our neighbors know what we’ve been up to.

UPDATE: We’re gotten the first dozen signups and a little bit of coverage. Rob Levin of New York Enterprise Report posted earlier this week titling his write up “Know Thy Neighbor” which focused on the social aspect of the project.