Awesome illustrations by Ars Thanea for Wrigley’s chewing gun “5″. There are a few close-up images that show off the level of detail that is synonymous with Ars Thanea’s work. Wonderful color and compositions.

Prologue Films designed and produced this year’s opening titles for the OFFF Festival. The concept feels post-apocalyptic and the visuals feature some fantastic color tones and motion-tracked copy. Check them out over at Motionographer.

Pretty cool Adobe AIR app called TiltShift Generator that simulates the photographic effect you get from using a tilt-shift lens. The settings are simple and give you the ability to quickly create some interesting stylized results. The images above show the app in use and the bottom two photos show the kind of results you can get.

The creator, Takayuki Fukatsu, also built an iPhone app called Toy Camera which some of you might be familiar with. Toy Camera gives you the ability to generate images that look like they were taken with plastic film cameras. The bottom two examples above were taken by Toy Camera before being post processed in TiltShift Generator and I think the two apps together create styles that a pretty cool given the limits of the iPhone’s built in camera. Although it’s arguable that the limits of the camera help sell the “toy camera” look since the optics in those cameras are generally made from plastic and yield low-fi results.

There are Flickr groups for both TiltShift Generator and Toy Camera which are worth browsing.

WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine and the next endeavor of Wolfram Research, the company responsible for Mathematica. Essentially WolframAlpha is a search engine, but unlike the ones we know today as the results you get from WolframAlpha are actually answers that have been computed and compared based on analyzing the terms of your search query. WolframAlpha is still in it’s infancy and has yet to publicly launch (the timeframe is May 2009), but it has already drawn comparisons to the Google giant and in some cases is considered a potential Google killer. I think that assessment is premature, but it does show promise in being a revolutionary way we discover data online.

Google currently provides the means to solve basic equations or questions. For example you can type in “2+2″ and get the following result:

You type the same thing into WolframAlpha and here’s your result (click for larger view):

So a little bit more information. You get the result, that result spelt out, and then a visual representation of that result. So let’s try something more advanced. If you enter a more advanced mathematical equation into WolframAlpha you get this result (click for larger view):

WolframAlpha shows the integral and other things that might be of interest. If we try that same equation in Google we get this result:

10 result pages that may hold the answer, but hard to tell from this view. Now obviously Google isn’t structured to handle this kind of query, but it does show the difference between the engines. I’m by no means bashing Google or saying it’s inferior. Google excels in multiple areas, especially with sifting through millions of sets of data and finding matches to your search term(s) based on relevance and importance. That’s what makes Google so powerful.

But Google’s downside is that the caliber of the found data rests solely on who created it and who affirms it (by linking to it). As a user I can quickly find results that match up to what I searched for, but that doesn’t mean I’ve found my answer. The chances are better than Google’s competitors, but I still have to click into the results to find out and sometimes those answers are buried on the page causing me to do a browser search by word to find out where the information I searched for lies.

This is where WolframAlpha could potentially trump Google, because WolframAlpha attempts to solve your search query rather than pointing you to pages that may hold the answer. It also provides related data that might be of use, potentially furthering your search and providing insight that may not have been apparent at that time. Plus that data is plotted in charts, graphs, etc which helps emmensely when viewing data on a timeline.

It’ll be interesting to see how WolframAlpha performs when launched. Until then, check out this screencast to see it’s variety of uses and capabilities.

This Also is a photography blog created by designer, previous co-worker, and NYC transplant Brian Baker. Brian has a natural eye for design and it’s reflected in the photographers he highlights and his portfolio.