This article was published on September 28, 2009

Pinball makes idea generation easy (and looks gorgeous too)


Pinball makes idea generation easy (and looks gorgeous too)

BBC PinballHere’s an absolutely gorgeous new site aimed at making it easy to get your creative juices pumping.

Pinball comes from the BBC and takes you on a ‘journey’ around different sections of a pinball table, helping you create and refine ideas as you go.

It’s an unusual idea for a site, and one you’ll either be confused by or embrace immediately. Although there is a Help section, you’re encouraged to dive straight in and use the freeform tools in whatever way you see fit.

The four sections of the site all give you different ways of working through the creative process. Dot Dash allows you to quickly and easily build a Mind Map complete with images and customisable colours while Wild Reels mixes up different combinations of text and images to create new combinations. Most instantly enjoyable is Snap Shot, which allows you to quickly and easily manipulate images by drawing on them, rotating and scaling them and more.

What’s particularly useful is that anything you create in one of the site’s sections can be sent to another for further manipulation. Anything you want to save for future use can be exported as a JPG image file or printed for offline use.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Pinball has been developed by magneticNorth, the same company behind Skinni Popcorn, the film review site we enthused about recently. Pinball is set to be improved upon, with additional tools being added in the future.

With some people questioning whether a publicly-funded broadcaster like the BBC should be investing in the web, the BBC needs more projects like this. Unique, innovative and experimental, it’s unlikely that something like Pinball would come from a commercial source. Actually, there’s other one company we could see developing a freeform ideas generator; Google Pinball, anyone?

dotdash

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Published
Back to top