We have come to the end of yet another year — just in time for another roundup of wallpapers for your New Year 2011 celebrations for your desktop! Made in Design wishes you all a Happy New Year and hope that 2011 brings you much success and prosperity in all your endeavors. And don’t forget to stay inspired and creative!

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night,  is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says. At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.”

Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.

Only very rarely do music videos make an appearance on this site, so this must have a very special something. The way they play with the environment is nothing but supreme genius. It’s the Official video for ‘We Got More’, taken from the album ‘Eskmo’ on Ninja Tune. The video was directed by the one and only Cyriak Harris. 

For someone who professes to prefer his studio to the limelight, Deadmau5 sure gets around. This year, the Grammy nominee headlined Coachella, the Olympics, and MTV’s VMAs, where he was house DJ. He cameo’d on Gossip Girl and even appears as a character in DJ Hero. But there have been stumbles along the way: He and dubstep producer Rusko Twitter-beefed after a backstage incident in Denver; then onstage at D.C.’s 9:30 Club, Deadmau5 collapsed from “exhaustion,” while bedecked in his customary costume — an oversized mouse head that serves as his brand and shield against the outside world.

4x4=12 is his third album as an artist-producer, and it’s aimed beyond Electric Daisy Carnival’s forest of fuzzy bras and platform boots. (After Random Album Title and For Lack of a Better Name, it’s easily his most ambitious title.) Punchy progressive house predominates (the Baroque-inspired “Some Chords” and the more linear “I Said”). But “Animal Rights,” a collaboration with DJ-producer Wolfgang Gartner, obviously grabs at Daft Punk’s electro-funk crown, while “One Trick Pony” and “Raise Your Weapon” offer Deadmau5’s approximation of dubstep’s wobble and buzz. “Sofi Needs a Ladder,” with its grating female rap, is like a tweaker version of M.I.A.

Hipsters will hate it, but that’s partly the point. Admitting he was “born and raised an Internet hate machine,” Deadmau5 knows the power of provocation. So out of 5 stars, I give this one a 4.

The Arctic Circle is a short stop-motion animated film by Kevin Parry. It tells the tale of a solitary man who encounters a mysterious box — one that seems to offer him great wealth. Filmmaker Tim Burton described to it as “a cross between 2001 and Rudolph: The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Pahnl: 'Nowhere Near Here' is a stop motion animation that uses a combination of light with stencils and long exposure photography to tell the story of a dog running around the city at night, doing whatever a dog does. The animation was first exhibited at the The Herbert, in Coventry, on the 7th October 2010.


With well over 300 hours in the making, more than 200 stencils involved and too many cold nights spent outside on my knees getting the shots, I am very happy (and relieved) to finally share this with you. Through the course of shooting 'Nowhere Near Here', I have dealt with curious drunks, a dog almost peeing on the camera (the irony is not lost on me, haha), the endlessly suspicious police and even someone nearly running off with a tripod.

"Imagine a futuristic transparent touch screen in a club - it is an instant magnet for attention," says Alan Smithson, co-founder and CEO of Smithson Martin Inc., the company that developed the Emulator system exclusively for the professional DJ scene. "At our launch party, everyone wanted to touch and play with it, there were 3 people deep trying to take photos of it."


The technology was developed by Pablo Martin, an Argentinean-based DJ with a passion for technology and the CTO of Smithson Martin Inc. He partnered with Alan Smithson, a DJ in Toronto, to create fully functional multi-touch Emulator packages. Their company, Smithson Martin Inc., provides the first and only professional DJ application for multi-touch technology available in the world. And Smithson Martin is the exclusive global distributor of the Emulator Multi-Touch screens for the DJ and Music Production market. Early buzz was created in August when a user released an Emulator YouTube video. DJ's from around the world were amazed and were asking how they could get their hands on this technology. While that video showed only the pre-release software, it generated over 1.3 million views, making it obvious that the DJ community is ready for this technology.

Emulator is multi-touch MIDI software that presents everything the DJ needs on a high-resolution transparent multi-touch screen; the only screen accurate enough for professional use that doesn't generate false or ghost touches. The current version of Emulator interfaces with Traktor Pro, but future releases will include compatibility with Virtual DJ, Ableton, and Serato. Emulator currently runs on Windows 7, but Mac OS software is scheduled for release in 2011.

www.smithsonmartin.com