Gloo: Howzit MSN
POSTED IN Portfolio November 17, 2011
_Role
My role on this project was Project Manager whilst providing insight and guidance to the User Experience and Information Architecture of the campaign.
_Awards
Silver – 2011 Loerie Awards
_Brief
MSN commissioned us to virally position its new portal, Howzit MSN, as the leading online news destination for South African Internet browsers and to communicate the variety of international and local content Howzit MSN has on offer.
Intended Audience: Existing Howzit MSN users and all web users who search for news content online. The target age group is roughly 22–45, with an even male/female split.
_Solution
We created ‘The Insider’, a viral spoof news campaign, originating from a stand-alone microsite that allowed people to create scam stories about their friends and spread them on the real MSN platform.
After reading these outrageous, but lighthearted stories, those scammed, as well as those just enjoying the scam stories of others, would also be enlightened about the wide breadth of real news stories on offer on the growing MSN portal.
The microsite was presented in the format of a sensationalist news channel called The Insider. After being directed to it by means of a banner or Facebook post, visitors were requested to select one of four fictitious news scandals covering a range of Howzit MSN news categories. They then automatically logged in via Facebook Connect, selected the person they intended to place at the centre of the scandal, chose a suitable photograph from their chosen friend’s album, and finally, provided a few personal details about their friend.
They were then able to preview the scandal, which was personalised to include their friend’s information and picture, live on the real Howzit MSN site. Once they were happy with the result, the scandal was posted to the relevant individual’s Facebook wall and all that remained was to sit back and enjoy the response it received as the article was shared via Facebook, twitter and email.
To give an unusual and added depth to the viral campaign, those scammed could continue with a reprisal component, without the knowledge of the person who scammed them. This gave the friend who had been at the centre of the spoof news scandal a chance to have the last laugh. If they took up the offer, a spoof email was sent by MSN on their behalf to the individual who initiated the prank.
The outcome was a humorous, but brand-relevant experience for all involved, as well as a great viral campaign that helped spread the word about Howzit MSN’s amazing content.
Stop Animation 2 / Time lapse
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else November 17, 2011
So I also wanted to grab my piece of sunset. Natalie and I went up Signal Hill to have a picnic. While I spent most of the afternoon squinting through the viewfinder, Nat actually managed to enjoy a glass of wine. Manually shooting time lapses is a bit of a pain. You really do need all the gadgets if you want to have a long flowing shot without all the shake you see here. Still, some good love went into capturing this little moment.
Stop Animation 1
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else November 17, 2011
A few months ago my friend Hernan came to visit from Spain. He’s a pro cameraman, and we spent an awesome afternoon on Kloof Nek shooting a time-lapse of one of the most amazing sunsets I have ever witnessed in Cape Town. This created a little itch, and I set about testing a few of my own little stop animation experiments. This is the first result – a version of which is currently viewable on the background of this site’s home page.
Gloo: Magic Moments Football
POSTED IN Portfolio November 16, 2011
_Role
My role on this project was Project Manager whilst providing insight and guidance to the User Experience and Information Architecture of the campaign.
_Awards
Webby’s 2011 – Best Website
Loeries 2010 – Gold (Digital Crafts), Bronze (Mixed Media)
Habari Facebook Awards 2010 – Most effective Facebook Campaign
_Brief
FIFA.com commissioned us to help position the online brand in South Africa in a more accessible way to all football fans, whilst re-affirming themselves at the heart of the game.
Intended Audience:
Anyone online who is interested in football, who has access to broadband and who would normally engage with YouTube videos.
_Solution
A viral campaign using a microsite at its core.
To help offset the general impression of FIFA being a cold and dry brand, the site creates a warm personality behind a mythical football team called the Magic Moments FC.
The players are your every day man in the street, with more passion than ability! But they love the game and they represent the heart of the game of football itself. At first, When you visit the site it isn’t clear whether they are talented and highly skilled players or not, and this provides extra fun and humour when you see the reveal of the videos, which in turn adds to the viral-ability of the site.
Phase 1 sees the players re-enact their favourite 5 goals from World Cups gone by and arguably the most memorable moments in football history.
The fact is, they could never do these goals justice, so they find another way of re-enacting the goals with a help of their 12th man, dressed in green astroturf. The resulting style of these videos is amateur c-grade movies, that the team regard with utmost pride.
This is something they live for at weekends and take very seriously. So seriously that they offer to give away 3 articles from their prized collection of football memorabilia, to the person that suggests the best goal from this years World Cup, for them to re-enact and add to the site.
Our team created the core concept and directed the content for this site, as well as building the microsite.
The site contains added depth with behind the scenes footage of their celebration and warm up techniques. Also information about all the players and their 2 key cheerleaders who happily join them in their hobby.
To make maximum impact of the brand association we decided to keep phase 1 unbranded and only reveal the brand in phase 2 as an unexpected twist, which will generate another wave of interest and buzz for the experience.
Phase 2 sees FIFA.com reveal it’s support for the team and shows their help to re-enact the chosen goal from the recent 2010 world Cup, using the extra magic of the FIFA.com brand.
_Results / Outcomes
141,665 unique people to date (and growing) have viewed the experience either via the site directly or a viral video. (Currently 121,453 uniques visited the site and an extra 20,212 watched viral videos on other platforms)
1,042 people have also signed up as fans to the FaceBook fanpage that is directly linked to the site (only 4% of all fanpages in the world have over 1000 fans)
The site has also been featured by many sites and blogs, and has even been discovered and reported in a double page spread in Europe’s well known 442 footballers magazine.
The FaceBook campaign was rated by FaceBook in the top 5 creatives in August 2010 across Africa and Middle Eastern region, with a click through rate of 2.23% (average being 0.5%).
This is a truly viral experience that has attracted and continues to attract football fans across South Africa.
Gloo: Puma – Love Equals Football
POSTED IN Portfolio November 11, 2011
_Role
My Role on this project was that of Project Manager.
_Awards
Loeries 2010 – Bronze
_Brief
Despite a limited advertising budget, Puma was looking for a way to outsmart FIFA with a successful campaign showcasing its love=football concept during the 2010 Football World Cup held in South Africa.
_Solution
The campaign, conceptualised by Gloo, centred around World Cup fans and their love of football. The ambush marketing campaign consisted of two viral videos capturing the World Cup from a spectators point of view, but bringing the famous love=football icon to life in an unusual way.
Using a combination of raw footage shot combined with CGI renderings, Gloo created realistic representations of what appeared to be innovative brand activations taking place in and around the Cape Town stadium.
The first video showed some tourists on a helicopter tour of Cape Town. They are seen taking in the city’s sights, when they spot a large number of vehicles on the fields next to Green Point stadium, which move to form the love=football icon.
In the second video, fans are seen videoing their experience inside the stadium during the World Cup game between Portugal and Korea. Just before a goal is scored, they look up to see the love=football icon in skywriting above the stadium.
Both videos were anonymous and included no branding. However all discussion online by journalists and commentators referred strongly to Puma, therefore providing strong promotion for the brand.
_Outcome
The videos created a buzz on the social media scene, both here in South Africa and around the world, with the number of views in the first 4 weeks reaching 74,231 across various video sharing sites. The videos were featured on sites such as Football Marketing, MSN and many other blogs. Also reaching number 1 spot on YouTubes Honour List for ‘Most Viewed People & Blogs’ in South Africa.
Continuing the brand’s tradition of innovative advertising, this latest offering will definitely be remembered as one of the greatest stunts of the 2010 World Cup.
Experiencing WP3.2.1′s Full screen mode
POSTED IN Blog, IA and UX September 29, 2011
Today I am trying out WordPress’ new fullscreen mode. As a UX designer, I am always on the lookout for what the smoothest, and simplest experiences are available in today’s online applications.
There have been a few delays in me upgrading to the latest version of WP – mainly because of my hosting provider’s legacy version of MySQL. WP3.2.1 requires MySQL 5 or higher, and until recently I was running on v.4. There were instructions in the knowledge base on how to upgrade manually, but it seemed like a lot of work for something that I was sure they would need to tackle eventually. I was right.
At first galnce, it is really cool. Kinda like Ai’s writer all wrapped up in the browser. I never really thought about how much the extra buttons around you actually serve to distract you from really getting down to writing. Recently I have been feeling rather ADD when tackling many tasks, especially getting down to writing, but this clean environment really does focus your attention purely on getting your thoughts down.
I also recently upgraded to OSX Lion, and it seems to be a pervasive feature amongst todays leading software manufacturers (I’m very broadly sweeping Apple and WP under the same brush here – I’m sure there are others too) to cut back heavily on unused functionality, whilst focussing on the core user tasks. This is a good thing, and has been trumpeted over and over by UX evangelists for years now.
There are a whole slue of new and fascinating devices and interfaces entering the market at a rapid rate. Just yesterday Amazon announced their Fire tablet, with it’s own browser built on the back of Google’s Android OS. Facebook also recently announced that they will be rolling out a few major changes to their service – the biggest of these being the replacement of current profile pages to the new Timeline interface – which is going live tomorrow. Finally there is also the highly anticipated announcement of the new Apple iPhone expected next week – 3 October. It’s a crazy few weeks in Internet Land.
As we enter a space where the major internet players are increasingly competing for users’ attention (admittedly they’ve been at this for quite some time – but we’re feeling it now more than ever) the way in which we experience these products – be it a hardware device or application interface – is increasingly going to effect our immediate impressions towards that product. Being able to strip away the bloated “additional” features, and get straight to the core of what makes an application useful to the user, is what will keep us coming back for more.
I enjoyed writing this post, because nothing distracted me (except my wife arriving home halfway through writing it).
Square Pictures
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else September 25, 2011
I felt like making something in photoshop, so I did this.
September Remember
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else August 11, 2011
So two things are happening:
1. I’m rooting through all my old mixes and getting them up online.
2. I’m kinda dumping soundcloud for mixcloud, mainly because it lets you upload unlimited “minutes” of music for free, which is nice.
You Name It
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else August 11, 2011
Here’s an old mix I pulled out of the archives. Groovy summer vibes!
You Name It by Neongrape on Mixcloud
Barely Legal in the Ukraine
POSTED IN Blog, Everything Else August 10, 2011
Here’s a mix I put together recently. It’s a little slower than usual, but groovy as hell!
Barely Legal in the Ukraine by emilbergh
A few random doodles done in Processing
POSTED IN Lab August 5, 2011
These are a few screen grabs of the first few sketches I did in Processing a while back.
Incite Sustainability Consultants
POSTED IN Portfolio June 23, 2011
After undertaking a complete rebranding, I was commissioned to help Incite bring their new identity online. This project entailed a complete overhaul of their online presence, including migrating the site from Drupal to WordPress, a complete re-look at the site architecture as well as WordPress theme development.
GT Bank UK
POSTED IN Portfolio June 22, 2011
Guarantee Trust Bank is the foremost established bank in Nigeria and West Africa. Part of their strategy to expand into Europe included an new site dedicated to the region. My role encompassed Information Architect, along with Account and Project Management.
FEDERATION EQUESTRE INTERNATIONALE
POSTED IN Portfolio June 21, 2011
FEI is the international governing body for all equestrian sport world wide. A major update to the site, including extensive architectural restructuring and interaction design. My role encompassed Information Architect, along with Account and Project Management.
Latitude
POSTED IN Portfolio June 20, 2011
_The Brief
My agency was approached by Latitude Group to provide a solution for their new website, which would tie in with a company wide rebranding. As one of the leading SEO specialists in the UK, any result would have to comply with the highest level of SEO best practices.
_The Solution
It was decided to use WordPress as the CMS for the new Latitude site. This was a bold step, as WordPress has usually been under fire for its lack of SEO standards, however recent versions of the platform have come leaps and bounds, it is truly maturing into one of the most powerful open source solutions available today.
Working closely with the client and the development team, a very comprehensive spec was drafted, encompassing sitemap, wireframes, functional and technical specifications.
Latitude opted to host the site internally, which meant the site had to be developed on Windows IIS servers. With the strict requirements regarding friendly URLs and 301 redirects, we encountered numerous new ‘adventures’ along the way.
The final product was to run three sites from one WordPress installation, being the Latitude Core, Express and blog sections of the site. This required three different templates being applied to each of the areas, along with very granular tagging and categorisation.
Managing the project from the start, and seeing it come together from all its various components was a real thrill and pleasure!
_The Result
The site is now live. Latitude are very happy with the result, and continue to lead the way in SEO innovation in the UK. You can see the site at www.latitudegroup.com
The Grad Shack
POSTED IN Portfolio May 20, 2011
The Grad Shack is a new concept aimed primarily at helping university students save money through the buying and re-selling of second hand text books.
This site posed a unique challenge as it needed to provide ease of use for both people wishing to buy as well as sell books on the site. A virtual credit system was created – allowing students to safely exchange books whilst their money is held in escro.
Besides having to help students find books on their specific subject, the site also identifies which students are on the same campus as the buyer/seller and also greatly simplifies the postage/delivery system should it be required for a sale.
My role on this project was User Experience and Information Architecture – Facilitating the planning and structure of the site to best cater for the various personas that would be utilising this service.
We Are VI
POSTED IN Portfolio May 19, 2011
_The Brief
As part of our wider rebranding, my agency decided to upgrade our personal site to reflect much more of what was going on behind the scenes in our studio. Moving away from our video based flash site, we decided to build the new version on a robust and scalable CMS.
_The Solution
There is an intrinsic problem with web agencies designing their own sites. It is very much a personal love affair, and therefore, a lot more (in most cases too much) thought goes into making it perfect.
Having matured a lot over the past 2 summers, it was decided to re-launch the We Are VI brand, with a more sophisticated look and feel. We wanted to reflect this in our website, and so decided to greatly enhance the scope of content covered on the site.
Specific categories and areas were created on the site to facilitate the services, showreel, case studies (across various areas including web, strategy, branding and print), our blog as well as individual staff portfolios.
Furthermore, we emphasised our enthusiasm towards social media by integrating our presence on sites like twitter, facebook and flickr within the new website.
As we wanted to create a unique experience, new and innovative techniques were used for HTML and CSS, which resulted in some really cool effects for the improved interface.
_The Result
We Are VI launched a new site featuring a whole lot more interesting content, with a new look and feel that was both more mature and much more enticing to explore.
Sadly, VI has since closed for business, but you can still see some of the awesome work this agency did at www.wearevi.com
Atelier Mayer
POSTED IN Portfolio April 19, 2011
_The Brief
As a unique start-up, catering solely for the high-end vintage fashion market, Atelier Mayer tasked my agency with creating an ecommerce solution that would accentuate the quality and style of the brand, whilst providing a comprehensive and easy-to-use interface that would become the first port of call for users wanting to find out more about vintage fashion.
_The Solution
The emphasis of the Atelier Mayer brand is on quality. The vintage pieces showcased on this site are predominantly one off pieces from some of the world’s most desired fashion labels.
As a result, categorisation and indexing of products within the site could not rely solely on garment types, designer labels or standard sizing charts. Taking this into consideration, we conceptualised a flash based interactive dressing room, where the user can input their various dimensions, and a list of all relevant items is returned from the database.
Furthermore, Atelier Mayer also wanted to be positioned as a central resource for all things relating to vintage fashion. To this end, the site features in depth information on all designers and icons that have items featured on the site, as well as an interactive video wall, where users can view footage of the latest vintage fashion news and interviews.
A lot of attention was given to optimising the checkout process of the site, as it was established through research that the main target audience would likely be less tech savvy and need more reassurance when entering their credit card details.
_The Result.
Atelier Mayer now have a highly active and successful online store, featuring some of the most sought-after vintage fashion items. The site features a comprehensive and in depth search function, and easy categorisation allows obscure and unique pieces to be easily found on the site.
The site can be viewed at www.atelier-mayer.com
Kay Cooks
POSTED IN Portfolio April 18, 2011
The bubbly chef asked VI to produce an exciting and interactive website to showcase her love for cooking, and travels across Thailand and South East Asia. My role on this project included Information Architecture, HTML and CSS and Project Management.
Random Bubbles of Love
POSTED IN Blog, Lab April 10, 2011
This is one of my favourite sketches so far: Random bubbles popping up all over the screen. You don’t even need to do anything, you can just sit and stare. To me this is what makes Processing so appealing. Looking forward to creating more random beauty… but better!