Multi-participant online advertising - SheratonPlay.com

Today I am taking a break from talking about everyone else's work to talk about a new online advertising campaign for Sheraton that I have been a part of that launched today.

Sheraton has the simple one word tagline of 'Belong'. For the digital space we look at that brand position to be the concept of community and it is what drove the re-design of Sheraton.com to be the first hotel site to include user generated content and our being one of the three launch partners for Microsoft's multi-user Surface technology. We have now extended the concept into our online advertising bringing that concept of community to life in what I think is a really break through.

The new campaign is the first one I know of that let's multiple participants interact with each other through a single ad unit or landing page. The first execution in the campaign is a pillow fight that takes place in one of our rooms so when you mouse over the ad unit a pillow attaches to your cursor and you can bash it into other users pillows and watch the feathers fly. Each ad will let you interact with 5 different live users at once for a set period of time before it time's out showing a call to action. The ads are flighting to major sites now but if you can't wait you can experience the same thing on the campaign's landing page now.

HP talks branding with Burton

HP has released another celebrity based TV commercial and microsite aimed at creatives. Their last venture with Gwen Stafni yielded a good TV commercial and a very lackluster online experience. This time they are it is fronted by snowboarding godfather Joe Burton who focuses on branding and identity. Unlike the first attempt this micro site has content, depth and a reason to be engaged and explore. It is not all great as the the cookie cutter "creative" content does re-appear in the form of "Build your own identity" which will let you choose from a few simple options to create basic collateral. The sites moves forward with "Building a brand identity" that is a documentary video of designer and identity crafts woman Paula Scher. "Inside Burton" and "Known your customer" take you through the Burton offices and their creative process through things like their inspiration books. It is nice to see a brand keep working at a concept and improve upon their first attempt. The simple addition of deep content and a more mature subject matter make all difference.

LEGO - Simplicity is powerful

I am a huge fan of great ideas that are done simply, support the brand and have an impact when you see them. These new print ads for LEGO blocks do all of that and more. The ads couldn't be more simple and take you right back to your childhood with no copy needed.

A LIST APART findings from the Web Design Survey

You may remember back in April I did a post asking everyone to participate in the A LIST APART Web Design Survey. Close to 33,000 did answer providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. The 82 page PDF of the results can be downloaded here and it is an interesting read that is worth your time.

Assassin's Creed

I been complaining for a while about the sites that promote video games and movies rarely display the same level of creativity as the product they are trying to promote. The site for the upcoming video game Assassin's Creed comes closer than any other site I have seen recently to creating an experience that draws you in the site while showing off the game it is promoting.

The experience is created by a large format high quality video that shows footage from the game. You have to use some quick reflexes to press one of the four arrow keys at certain points in the action to try and unlock 13 additional pieces of content. These range from mundane things like alternate views of of you running to more meaningful interactions that effect your actions or storyline. You have to get all 13 in order to get anything but message which is annoying but I can see they are doing it to get people to engage with the site more than once.

So while this site isn't the greatest one I have seen overall I do applaud Ubisoft for trying to make the site more than a collection of screenshots and hope this bodes well for more creative and engaging marketing for the entertainment industry in the future.

Speaking at World Usability Day NYC

Thursday, November 8 is World Usability Day which was created to raise awareness about the importance usability and last year 40,000 people in 35 countries participated.

The event here in NYC this year which will focus on raising awareness of the importance of the user centered design process for businesspeople. I will be speaking on Reinforcing Brands With Every Interaction with Brandt Flomer - Creative Director of Experience Strategy at R/GA, Anthony Manson - Managing Partner at Sudler & Hennessey and Bruce Temkin - VP Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. The session will illustrate how key brand attributes can be successfully translated to customer experiences both online and offline.

Those of you who are interested can buy tickets here and the event will take place in the 60th floor penthouse of JPMorgan Chase in lower Manhattan.

Future of Web Design

I will be attending the Future of Wen Design conference November 8th in NYC at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center so if anyone else is going and wants to meet up drop me a line.

Not so Interactive Annual

Last week the latest Communication Arts Interactive Annual landed on my desk. In years past I would spend hours devouring the publication, turning each page with excitement to discover new designers and sites I have never seen before. This year brought a much different experience because for the first time it held nothing new or exciting for me.

Maybe it's because I write this blog or maybe it's because we all now check blogs and sites daily for the latest news and designs so that we have changed the industry and the roll of the annual. On the one hand I think it is far easier for small but well crafted work to get noticed by a huge audience in a very short amount of time and not have to wait for yearly publications to get noticed. That immediate gratification has also killed the power and impact of an annual publication because we could have seen the work a year before it was published. It will be interesting to see how and if Communication Arts decides to evolve this model or submission process to make this relevant again.

Infinite OZ

In November the Sci-Fi Channel a futuristic makeover of the Wizard of Oz called Tin Man which is said to be decidedly darker take on the original. They have launched a microsite to support the show called Infinite OZ that was conceived by Fallon in collaboration with interactive firm B-Reel and a several noted CG artists.

The strongest part of the site is that this collaboration produced a lot of interesting visual and animations which you can navigate through on the site. The way you interact with them is very similar to the new IKEA kitchens site as you can again move back and forth along a linear path through a series of scenes of worlds from the show. The interaction isn't as fluid and intuitive though as it has to be done with a slider in the top left hand corner instead of having the controls on the video. Once you stop on a section you like you then have to choose from one of the very small and hard to read fan like spokes that are inside of the slider. The content is mainly copy and still images which was a let down since I was hoping to find something more interesting and suited to the material. You hope they go back for round 2 when they have more content or time to bring all of the site up to the same level.

Gas pump Haiku

It's 7:30 on a foggy Wednesday morning just north of New York City as my car pulls into a gas station to fill up. I'm not a morning person so my brain is at least an hour away from getting up to full power and I mindlessly go through the actions at the pump to just get what I need and go. After starting the process the small green screen in the middle of the pump starts to scroll the usual up-sell messages which I glance at and then go back into my morning mental fog. Some part of my brain was awake enough to make to look at the screen again. It took me a lot of brain power and several read through before I realized that I was not crazy. I think the other customers thought I was since I was standing there laughing and taking photos of a gas pump. I was laughing at the screens which are shown above and are a combination of typos and massive user error to create these new age haiku.

Since then I have been sure to check the screens at every gas station I go to and have found several more. GasPumpHaiku.com is available (patent pending) so has the next viral sensation just been born? Should I sell it to one of the energy giants and retire a millionaire? Am I kidding myself by thinking I have the free time to do any of it? Keep your eyes peeled and send me any good ones you find along your travels.

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

Last week a friend of mine sent me this Right Brain vs Left Brain test where you are supposed to look at an animation of a dancer turning clockwise or counter-clockwise. The direction you see her turning is supposed to tell you what side of the brain is your dominant one. If you see it turning clockwise then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa. They also say that if you try to focus you can change the direction.

I have tried this test by myself and with a number of other people and I have never been able to two people to see different things. If the dancer changes direction then everyone in group saw it change at the same time. What do you see? Can you get two people to see something different? Is this just a hoax we are all wasting time on?

Interactive "Best in Show" winner at The One Club lecture series tonight

Those of you in the NYC may want to stop by The One Club tonight for the Gold on Gold lecture series featuring Nick Law, Chief Creative Officer of R/GA North
America and Nick Coronges, Senior Technical Director from R/GA discussing the gold pencil-winning work for Nike+. One Club members get in free and non-members are $20. The One Club is at 21 East 26th Street, 5th Floor, between Madison & Fifth and the lecture starts at 7pm.

More IKEA kitchens

IKEA has launched the next installment in their dream kitchen online experience. The original version that looked like a middle class version of the Matrix let you spin in a 360 degree arc moving between different frozen scenes and kitchens. The new version keeps the same simple control scheme of letting you one of two ways but this time instead of a circle you are moving along a linear path through the scenes. This way at any point you can turn around and go back the way you came only from the opposite point of view. Unlike the previous version the scenes are now separated by you having to fly through kaleidoscope style product montages.

For me the comparison between the two versions of the site is interesting because even though the control scheme is the same the change to the linear format makes it feel very confined and not nearly as engaging. In the latest version you are also much more aware that you are just scrubbing back and forth through a video because the transitions between the scenes aren't as clever and seamless. It's always hard if not impossible to follow up a successful site with one that is just as good and innovative but you leave this experience wishing IKEA would have found the next great interactive idea instead of trying to relive past glory.

Adobe XD - Inspire Experience Design

The Adobe XD (experience design) team has launched a new site called Inspire Experience Design. It is meant to showcase the work of 90 experience-focused professionals with expertise in interaction, visual and motion design, user research, information architecture, engineering. Right now the site is still in a alpha state so there isn't much content there but they say more is on the way soon. I hope this time the XD team will keep this going and let it become a real resource for the design community unlike their short lived blog that also had a lot of promise but never got off the ground.

TiltViewer

Came across another interesting 3D Flash site called TiltViewer which was built using Away3D, a branch of Papervision. The performance of the 3D on the site is better than I have seen apparently because Away3D provides better handling of mouse events for nested 3D Objects. The performance coupled with a simple and intuitive 3D interface makes the site an engaging experience. The images are pulled Flick and clicking on the image will make it flip over to real info about the author. I will be interesting to see how they continue to evolve the interface but it is a great first version.

Sony Bravia 'Play-Doh' launches tomorrow

I got an email from Sony today saying that the third installment in the Son Bravia advert series that I recently wrote about will be launching tomorrow. There is a sneak preview that is live on the site now on the site and shows the process for creating the video that's worth checking out.

Wacom goes wacko

I have designed with Wacom tablets for years and have converted a lot of my designers over to them over the years.I went to the site today to update one of my drivers and found that they a new logo and it is very... different. It seems that it was designed by Wolff Olins of the London 2012 Olympics logo meltdown fame. The new typeface is better but the new logo mark looks like a 1980's Photoshop gradient experiment gone haywire. I am very interested to see how this comes to life in their advertising and packaging.

Gwen Stefan, Toyrama and HP

HP recently launched two new sites which both go after the creative class and designers. It is the first time I can remember any computer company other than Apple even trying to talk to us.


GWEN STEFANI
I first saw the campaign that leads to this site about two weeks ago and I have to say it made an impression. The ad, which you can watch on the site, is simple enough with Gwen walking around talking about the creative process and how she comes up with ideas. It got my attention more for the reason I talked about in the open in that it was aimed at the creative class than anything else. I had high hopes for the site but was really left wanting and disappointed after the experience. The site has two projects which have been created by HP and Stefani which are a paper doll entourage or postcards and stationary. Both of these give you nearly no creativity as all you can do it chose from a set list of options.

So an experience that started out working very well when I saw the TV ad became a train wreck when I got to the site. This is a medium that is supposed to deep a brand experience so why did I go from seeing a TV commercial with a mature point of view to being asked to play with paper dolls? What happened to this being about creativity? Did no one think that maybe they should have created content that would appeal to someone other than a 13 year old girl? So all of this leads you to feel like they are paying more lip service to the creative community than anything else.


TOYRAMA
Toyrama is a visually imaginative site was launched to kicks off a unique contest that invites digital animators across Asia Pacific to create, design and direct short, animated skits. You are provided with music, backdrops, a series of actions, speech bubbles and more so all you aspiring amateur animation directors can so crazy.

It was created by Leo Burnett Singapore's interactive branch, ARC Worldwide and the cartoon assets were designed by cult British vinyl toymaker Pete Fowler. The final product can be submitted to the "Open" category for general entries or "Professional" for the more seasoned animating types. The deadline is October 7th and the entries will be judged by Pete Fowler. Four winners will get Maya Autodesk software and a trip to Dreamworks studios in LA to watch the animation process firsthand.

There is a lot of art to being able to create good work on the site since the actual filmmaking tools are pretty limited but the kookiness of Fowler's characters and background design partially help overcome the problem.

It's interesting to watch another computer company try and take a run at the sacred ground Apple has held with creatives since the beginning of digital design. For me the problem is that since none of the content is tied to any of their products and you can use it from any platform (including a Mac on Safari) I fail to see how this is going to make a real brand impression or get us creative types to ever switch from our beloved Mac's. I guess you have to start somewhere.