So we thought (as we often do), wouldn’t it be cool to combine the random meeting of people with the lessons learned from SXSW presentations? After some quick emails back to SWHQ to discuss, the idea for SXSWLesson.com was born.

We don’t see SXSWLesson.com as a comprehensive play-by-play of every panel, but more of a place to capture the insights and nuggets of knowledge. It’s a way for everyone – panelists, presenters, and attendees – to share the lessons they learned. By adding the #sxswlesson hashtag to your insights via Twitter, you automatically share your wisdom with the crowd via the SXSWLesson.com site. In turn, people can comment on each insight to continue the conversation. You can browse all of the lessons sequentially, and you can also randomly view the lessons, much in the same way that you randomly come across interesting people around the convention center and out on the streets. You can also follow twitter.com/SXSWLesson to receive new ideas right to your Twitter account.

The other thing we implemented on the site is the new Twitter OAuth into the site, which accesses peoples’ Twitter accounts through the SXSWLesson.com site without them having to share their username/password with us. Basically this allows Twitter users to comment on the site and associate their Twitter profile with their comment, which in turn can increase the level of conversation between people.

As a Substance Labs project, we moved this one through quickly, focusing on the most important task: helping people share ideas. Erin, Cory and Eric honed the vision to launch within four days of coming up with the concept. Nothing like rapid prototyping, launching, and seeing what happens.

Hope you enjoy it! Oh, and if you can help spread the word about SXSWLesson.com and let people know to add the #sxswlesson hashtag, you’ll be contributing to a richer, deeper conversation. So thanks in advance for that.

There’s a built in help section, but here’s a short video that outlines the basic idea:

Since I didn’t include a voiceover for this example, the basic steps involved are:

1. Export a custom class on an empty symbol.
2. Write logic to add a text field and draw a circle.
3. Publish SWF and load into the image encoder.
4. Create 20 PNG images in the “output” folder on the Desktop.

Extra notes on functionality:

1. The application attempts to pass in the current serial index to the constructor of the class you’ve chosen. This has a variety of uses, but is especially good for looking up array data, or directly populating a text field (as in the example above).
2. Even if you don’t declare a constructor parameter, the export will still run just fine. This makes it easy to see what any class will look like as an image, or to export a series of images from a Math.random-based visualization class.

The application is available for download here. If you have any questions or requests, post a comment and I’ll do my best to help out.

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We’ve been busy with projects, but we’ve also been working on a little side thing. It’s more of a digital social experiment: Logobama.com

As our first project under the Substance Labs banner, we wanted to create something that can show how quick and easy it is to build a powerful digital media vehicle. We’ve created a lightweight Flash application that allows people to upload their photo, choose their color theme, and save their logo (their “logobama”) to use on social networking sites, or wherever else they might want to use it. We then save all the logos to Flickr where you can subscribe to the Logobama gallery on the Logobama Flickr page. How many personalized Obama logos will be created? We have no idea.

For this initial launch (we’ll call it ’08.1) we limited the colors you can choose and the masking around the uploaded photo. We wanted to build it quickly and release it into the wild to see how people will use it. How people use it will help determine and drive the improvements and enhancements. So many times you can spend weeks and months making something “perfect” but have very little idea how people will react to it, only to find out they don’t use it in any way like you thought. We think we should get the idea out there, then make it better.

We’re also curious to see if people will donate money to the Obama campaign in exchange for creating a logo. We set a goal of $5,000… we’ll see if that was a lofty goal, or woefully low. It’s sort of like the Radiohead experiment… donate what you feel the logo is worth.

Can a logo change the world? We’ll have to see.

p.s. Does this mean we, as a company, are endorsing Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate? That’s up to you to decide. Yes, we’ve posted about Obama here and here, and as communicators and brand people, we really admire what he’s doing. Apparently even famous designers like Michael Beruit like the Obama brand. So… we’ll leave it at that. Inspiration, emotion, passion. That’s the good stuff, the stuff we love.