Sorry…you just got Rick Roll’d! You might have been expecting something profound and Christmasy for the 25th, but unfortunately all you got was Rick. However, this should be considered a gift, you’ve now joined the millions of others who got Rick Roll’d in 2008! If you haven’t heard about it, Rick Rolling is a prank in which people expecting a particular message or website get a link to Rick Astley’s video instead. Go spread the love… Happy Christmas!

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house and nothing was stirring except for … thousands of lights on a cool Coca Cola google maps mashup!  We thought we’d give you something festive for the 24th and what better than this great site where you can decorate your friends houses. View it using the link below.

Nike 1/1 was a great project that ran this year and featured 11 artists, from 11 countries in Europe, who were all invited to encourage submissions from emerging artists in their own countries based on the theme ‘the art of football’. Although submissions have now closed it’s worth a visit to the site to view all the entries and also take a look at the final exhibition that took place in Basel.

Thoughtpile.org is a fantastic website developed by F+P to help raise questions and share ideas. Each week a different question is listed on the homepage aimed to provide a stimulus for conversation and help foster new ideas. You can browse peoples responses and add your own thoughts to the topic each week. One of the things we like most is the flash interface which really adds to the experience.

One of our favorite books this year had to be Marion Bataille’s ABC3D popup typography book. We featured this on our own blog back in April, but it deserves another mention purely because of how much time, effort and care went in to making it. Since October you’ve been able to order the book online and we strongly recommend getting your hands on a hard copy if budget permits!

2008 was the year that saw the UK’s first live TV commercial from who else, but Honda. The ad featured a team of skydivers spelling out the word ‘Honda’ in a 3minute live mid-air broadcast from the skies above Madrid. Provided below are links to the live ad, the polished and slightly less cool edited version and the fantastic behind the scenes ‘difficult is worth doing’ blog that Honda used to promote the story leading up to the broadcast. (sorry we couldn’t embed the video above, but Honda don’t seem to like it!).

Mossenger is a project from Anna Garforth and Eleanor Stevens part of the El&Abe partnership. Their work involves creating sustainable creative projects like this which only use natural or organic materials. Mossenger is a series of statements grown in moss across city walls with the aim of encouraging people to find inspiration in nature. We were inspired!

The disclaimer at the bottom about listing stuff that wasn’t strictly from this year was written mainly so we could feature lolcats. lolcats are a bit tricky to explain succinctly, but are essentially pictures of cats with captions written in ‘lolspeak’. It seemed that wherever you turned in 2008, there was a lolcat image waiting for you somewhere on the web! Still confused? You really need to browse through some to understand…

The second entry in the calendar from BMW is another fantastic piece of beautiful and indulgent self promotion from the BMW Welt in Munich. The kinetic sculpture is an installation of 714 metal balls that move and morph to create an amazing variety of BMW car shapes through the ages. Stick with the video until it really gets going. Awesome stuff!

It seems like the site’s been around for a while as there’s a lot of great content, but we only stumbled across it recently. Artofthetitle as the name suggests is a fantastic site dedicated to film title sequences. As well as really good quality video of some well known and less well know film titles, there’s also some fantastic interviews and behind the scenes information to get stuck in too. Go and take a peek…

The silver lining that surrounds clueless politicians is the opportunity for internet nerds to create satire. With that in mind we give you ‘Palin as President’, a popular flash site from early this year which gave us a glimpse in to what life could look if Mrs.Palin had her finger on the button. Visit the link below to see for yourself what America missed out on.

As well as being a crazy icelandic genius, Bjork’s work is often so far out that it inspires great visuals as well. The 3D music video for Wanderlust was no exception and received (rightly) a lot of attention culminating with a video of the year award at this years VMAs. We’ve put the low quality 2D version above for those that don’t have their 3D glasses handy, but should you feel inclined to go looking, the link to both the 3D version and hi res (recommended) version are provided below. In addition there’s a great making of video on vimeo also worth checking out.

This was featured on our blog (and many others) back in June this year when BMW unveiled their concept ‘GINA’ shape shifting car. The car is constructed from a moveable metal frame and stretched fabric which allows the driver to change the vehicles shape whenever they want. The thing we loved about it was that although the car is entirely impractical and unmarketable, BMW still decide it was a worthwhile design exercise building it. Take that credit crunch!

Of all the print campaigns that came out this year one of our favorites was the Sony Walkman underground ads designed by Saatchi & Saatchi, Sydney. A series of ads were produced which mapped the entire New York Subway and London Underground maps using Sony Walkman headphones. A great concept and great execution. There’s links to all the versions below.

For anyone who doesn’t yet know it, TED is one of the most inspiring and must visit sites on the web. There are tons of amazing talks on all sorts of topics and it’s easy to spend a lot of time there. In this talk from February by Johnny Lee demos some innovations he created using the Wii infra-red remote. Be sure to check out some of other TED favourites below if you haven’t seem them already.

There were lots of different news mashups and aggregators knocking about this year, but one of the most beautiful in our opinion was Brendan Dawes ‘DoodleBuzz’. DoodleBuzz is a brilliant typographic news visualiser where you input a search term and then explore related stories entirely by drawing lines on the screen. As a piece of interface design it looks amazing and works in a chaotic, haphazard kinda way!

This motorola viral features the twisty talents of David Elsewhere. If you don’t know the name you’ll probably recognise the dance moves as David’s the same guy who appeared in the VW Golf Singing in the rain commercial and iPod ads. We first saw a video of David in 2001 (estimated to have been viewed 200 million times!) which flew round the web after his appearance at Kollaboration – seems he’s still as bendy as ever!

The Big Picture was an absoloutely fantastic arts project that ran between January and June of this year breaking a record to create the worlds largest photo mosaic. One of the best things about it was that it happened right here in the West Midlands and was created from a massive album of 112,896 different peoples photos. The image above was compiled using all those shots and really needs to be explored in its original interactive format on the Big Picture site to be fuly appreciated (link below).

This video is a time lapse over 40 hours of an illustration produced by Chad Pugh on Vimeo. When we first saw this it blew us away and has rightly become one of the most watched films on the site this year. The sheer detail and dedication is mesmerizing. This version is condensed to only 5 minutes, but there’s also a full HD 18 minute version available from the link below.

Earlier this year Jodie Silsby produced this fantastic map of Portsmouth by renaming each street in well known Pompey dialect. This made our list a) because John our creative director is originally from Portsmouth and loves the thing and b) because we really want someone to produce a west midlands version and don’t have the time. Designers…the gauntlet has been thrown down!

We plugged this on our blog back in March and it’s still one of the studio favourites. The Helvetica drop clock is a slow motion typographic screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy Helvetica dropping into water in super slow-motion. It was produced by tha ltd and directed by Yugo Nakamura.

If you’ve not seen this already…watch it now before you read on. Earlier this year the BBC screened this short film which featured unbelievable pictures of a colony of flying penguins in Antarctica. The pictures were indeed unbelievable and it quickly became clear this had been a great April fools joke by the beeb to promote the BBC iPlayer. Flying penguins, who’d believe such a thing?!

There were a number of highlights the US elections brought us this year, but one of our favorites was the variety of artwork inspired by Shepherd Fairey’s original ‘Hope’ poster for Barack Obama. Fairey produced the original run of Hope posters in January of this year and soon after a number of designers around the world began producing their own spin offs. Our favourites are shown above and a full list can be found below.

To kick things off we’ve picked Weezer’s brilliant Pork and Beans video. This came out towards the end of April and was quickly picked up and fired round the web. Why do we love it? It immortalises a number of well know YouTube celebrities and is pretty funny if you’ve spent any time on YouTube. If you don’t recognise anyone (where have you been?!) go and have a hunt to find out why they’re well known!