Imaginative director Guillermo del Toro has his new movie Hellboy 2: the Golden Army debuting in the middle of July and as a teaser to that launch they have launched an in-depth alternate reality game (ARG). Typically ARG's get intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence like you would have in a video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities.

In this case visitors find clues that have all been hidden through various blogs, YouTube videos and microsites to unclock the Secret Device that seems to be the centerpiece of the movie. The first mention of the Secret Device was in the campaign's initial site for HEFTET, an organization that's an acronym for Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls and is also directly involved in the film's storyline. The bulk of this played throughout last month and had participants scour for several codes hidden in videos, news stories, photos, limericks, email, phone messages, and forums using YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter to solve a series of interconnected puzzles. Like all ARG's the gaming process unfolded in real-time as more clues, codes, and supporting content gradually became available and was shared across the community. The final prize for those investigative players was access to the Secret Device that when solved launched the world premiere of an original animated Hellboy II prologue comic with the added bonus of winning a trip to an early screening of the film hosted by Guillermo Del Toro himself.

I love ARG's and wish they would be used more often since that last great execution I can think of was the I Love Bee's ARG for the launch of Halo 2. I think they they created more engaged and deeper interaction using the interactive medium than any ad unit ever could.

Labels: Design and user experience, Digital culture, Exceptional creative, Exceptional experiences, Viral

Greenpeace has launched a new online game called WeAtheR where, you guessed it, you can play with other people to solve environmental problems. You choose one of four characters, and then ally with other players so you only win if you work as a group and have to solve all the problems before the 16 rounds runs out. The problem with any community based site and especially a community based game is that if no one shows up then all the work is for nothing. That is what I found in this case where after I registered I tried 6 different times at all different times of day and could never find anyone else playing the game. So I am going to keep trying but for right all I can do is give you the info, you try it for yourself and maybe I will have someone to play against next time I go to the site.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review

In case you didn't see UNIQLO's music dance clock called UNIQLOCK won the Cyber and Titanium Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. The clock was created by a several different Japanese artists including the time signal that was created by Fantastic Plastic Machine and the “UNIQLOCK” dancers are directed and choreographed by Yuichi Kodama and AIRMAN. It was initially built to create buzz among bloggers and it started slow before exploding into 60 million views in 209 countries.

Labels: Viral

Not sure the site says but I thought this new site called Fans 2008 that was an interesting new site from Mercedes Benz.

Labels: Site review, Unique interface design

Digital Books and online circular are nothing new but they have always been clumsy solutions based on a wide collection of technologies. Today I got a link to FluidBook which is the first Flash based solution that has an interface that is really well thought out and works well. You can send them PDF, InDesign, Illustrator or PowerPoint files and they will convert them in a book. I may have to try this with my PDF portfolio to see if it is as easy as they make it sound. If anyone out there has tried it let me know because I am curious to see how to worked and what the final product looked like.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Great resource, Unique interface design

Saw an interesting site today for Ecco shoes called the Ecco World. The site is videos of several different people walking around the small and very round world they have created to discover the spring summer collection of the brand. The simple use of video and animation does a good job at creating a unique feel for the site but you do have to notice that it only uses the bottom 50% of the page real estate. I do also like that the animation and atmosphere does extend into the product detail areas which are shown just as much attention as the main experience. All in all it is a simple but nice way to bring the Ecco product to life and create a unique world that stays true to the brand.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review, Unique interface design

Fosters Beer has launched an interesting new microsite called Ride The Scuba. The concept is that Fosters has launched a new beer with smaller bubbles so can control the world’s first Internet enabled Scuba device in real time at the National Marine Aquarium in the U.K.. Once you register you can either wait in a line to get your 2 minutes controlling the scuba or you can schedule a time later when you can come back for your turn. When you have control of the device there are 4 different camera angles from which you can see the device. The point is to drive it around to destroy the most big bubbles and get the highest score for a chance to win a trip to Australia. So it is something new but it is nice to see that it has a concept to ground it.

Labels: Design and user experience, Digital culture, Exceptional creative, Exceptional Flash, Site review, Unique interface design

A came across another new search engine today called SearchMe.com. When I first went to the site I had a strong flash back to the early stage of Snap.com when you are presented with a simple search field and visual search results. It is different from Snap.com as the when you start to type into the simple search you get a line of icons that appear beneath the form so you can narrow the search down by relevant categories. The search results are then presented in an interface that is nearly identical to Apple's Coverflow that was first introduced in iTunes before making it's way on to OS X and the iPhone. The strong similarities aside, it is an effective way to present the results especially for me who so often is looking for a specific site that I will recognize visually or is drawn to certain visual site design styles. The site is still in Beta so it will be interesting so see what changes before it goes final

Labels: Design and user experience, Site review, Unique interface design

I have started to see more and more SMART cars rolling around here in New York City since they finally launched here in the U.S. a few months ago. SMART Japan has just launched a new site called Play > Smart that lets you use Papervision3D to design and drive your own digital version of the car. The design process is simple enough with the ability to choose color, accents and wheel types. Once it is create you can take it out for a spin on one of the six course they currently have loaded. The interesting thing here is that when you drive you have to go through a series of markers to move through the course and your car leaves a lines behind it as it drives. When you are done you see that the markers work like connect the dots so your path through the course forms basic symbols etc. Overall I don't know that the experience would do much to change my perception of the brand but it is a nice way to introduce new customers to the advantages of the car.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review

Nike going great and interesting interactive is nothing new but this is the first site from them I can remember that isn't about one of their peroducts. The 'The Girl Effect' is a new microsite created by Wieden + Kennedy in Portland is designed to show how adolescent girls in developing countries can bring unprecedented social and economic change to their families, communities and countries. The site starts with a two and a half minute intro that is the only one I have seen in the past 10 years that I actually enjoyed. It is a simple but extremely well designed and written introduction to the site and what it is trying accomplish.

The site is broken up into three sections - Learn, Change and Share. Learn explains the problem in more details and gives you access to four videos that details the lives of four women. Change links you over to their section on GlobalLiving.com where you can donate money to send a girl to school, help fund a legal case or give a microloan among other things. Share is one of the most comprehensive offline and online viral kits I have seen with the usual online social media including a YouTube channel as well as posters, stickers, logo, banners, etc.. This is one of the first social change sites I have seen from a major brand that goes beyond the lip service and minimal action that will get their press release picked up to something that is trying to effect real change. It will be interesting to watch how this grows and what other brands run to mimic it.

Labels: Design and user experience, Digital culture, Exceptional creative, Site review, Viral

I got a link tonight from one of my best friends to an article from Marissa Mayer the VP of Search Products and User Experience over at Google in response to the uproar over the scandalous Favicon change on their site. The article explains that they made the change as the first step in a design exercise to create a more unified set of icons. The one that was the final one chosen was taken from more than 300 permutations which are all shown in the article. Click here to head over to the Official Google Blog to check it out.

Labels: Branding

Yugo Nakamura is at it again. For those of you who don't know the name he is the guy behind the visionary work of the NEC Ecotonoha project and a number of sites for the clothing brand Uniqlo including their astounding global site. I reviewed the Unqilo site when it launched and I still think the Uniqlo Explorer section of that site it is one of the most amazing pieces of Flash work I have ever seen.

This time he is back with another microsite for Uniqlo focusing on undergarments. The site interface is made up of tiles with the faces of 343 Uniqlo customers. A question appear in the upper left hand side of the browser and the tiles re-arrange themselves to reveal the answer. Most of the questions are obviously centered around answers to questions about bra's and fashion but there are some about things like your favorite animal, country or food that just feel like filler. You can filter the tiles being displayed by height, age, bra size and body type and only those tiles will be displayed for each question. Clicking on one of the tiles reveals information like age, height, bra size and even blood type.

As I said before, for me the original Uniqlo site that Nakamura create was a masterpiece of technical power and visual design but the sites since have never been able to recapture that vision. With each successive site since the original launch these sites seem to be becoming more and more about information design and production techniques than creating an engaging experience. This site seems to be the most guilty of those qualities, thought I am clearly not the target market, I find it hard to believe that seeing a bunch of charts would make a woman want to buy a bra. Part of the brilliance of their main site is that the cool visual mosaic that also information but it links directly to the product so the product makes up the experience. Here that link feels too removed and the experience too cold for a product like this. But again I am not the target market so I would some other opinions on this one to see what you think.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review

I saw Ken Martin the Chief Creative Officer at Blitz, an interactive agency from Los Angeles, today and it reminded me that I never wrote about some really cool work they did for Adobe called 'Creativity Conducted'. It debuted at the Adobe MAX 07 Conference in Chicago and was created to celebrate the history of Adobe and Macromedia. Instead of creating a simple timeline of major events they brought the challenge to life as an interactive wall experience that lets you paint images and designs using a Nintendo Wii remote control. You choose from different brushes that represent different events in Adobe's history and when you start to use it you get a small pop-up showing you what the brush represents.

Two people can work on the canvas at the same time and the experience is created with a holographic-like quality with a projection system that shows the work on a specially made fabric canvas. The experience runs as a full screen Flash application projected at HD resolution of 30-60fps, running at 1280×720 resolution. To keep people moving through the experience, every person is timed with an ink well that will run dry and thus end that session. When it is over it captures the work in full HD and emails the artist the work as well as posting it to Flickr. You can see a video of it in action that was posted to YouTube by clicking here.

Labels: Consumer generated content, Design and user experience, Digital culture, Exceptional creative, Exceptional design, Exceptional experiences, Exceptional Flash

It isn't a new trend that great brands breed fanatical followers but last week the Google faithful created an uproar of intrigue worthy of the best spy novel. Google changed its favicon from the uppercase "G" from their logo to the lowercase "g". It is astounding to see how many people are flipping out over this. If you want to see the strength of what branding can do this is it. Can you image what would happen if they changed the logo, the home page, the results page or anything but a sixteen-pixel square icon that shows up in the favorites menu and in the browser away from all the content?

Labels: Branding, Design and user experience, Digital culture

I just finished a collaboration with the New York office of Code and Theory to create SPG.tv which is the main portal site for over 9,000 videos across the 8 different Starwood brands. Now hot on the heels of that launch, they have re-launched their own site, CodeandTheory.com, to reflect the evolution of their business. The site, built on proprietary content management system implemented using the LAMP stack with AJAX and Flash integrated to create a very nice hybrid user interface. That interface organizes the company's work into a simple way to browse or search through their work and see other projects that relate to it. You can then create playlists of case studies that are the most relevant work for your needs that you can then review later or send the list on to a friend or co-worker. It is the first time I have seen something like this. It is simple but it is a really smart idea. So go for the cool site feature and stay to check out the great work.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional creative, Exceptional experiences, Exceptional Flash, Site re-launch, Site review, Unique interface design

Following the footsteps of the now dead MillionDollarHompage.com, The Big Word Project is one of those sites that when you see it you say "Damn it I wish I would have thought of that".

The site was created two Masters students from Northern Ireland who wanted to explore changing the definitions of words so they mean altogether different things and make some money doing it. The concept of the site is simple, when you go to the site you can purchase a word for $1 a letter from their list and associate it with any site you want. That way when you anyone goes to the site, searches for that work and clicks on they will go to the site you chose for it. In my case I bought 'GATES' so when you click on that it goes to my portfolio site. So far there have been 5,499 words that have been purchased and redefined.

I think the idea is a great one not only because it is a way for two college kids to make a lot of money but because it fun to click around and see hat people have done with the words and where they linked them to.

Labels: Consumer generated content, Design and user experience, Digital culture, Site review, Unique interface design, Viral

I know the Power 150 sounds like a classic rock FM Radio station from Detroit, but it is instead AdAge magazine's ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world. When you go there you notice that right now the list on the AdAge 150 is more like 646 and it grows and shrinks every every week depending on who gets listed and taken off. The list uses an algorithm to create the rankings based on the sum of eight sources. Seven of sources come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati with whe last as the editors own personal subjective measure.

My blog landed on it's first listing at a respectable #512 and them promptly dropped three places. I can already tell that ranking number is going to be something I am not going to be able to watch everyday or it will drive me crazy. I do encourage you to cruise through the list because I did find a lot of new blogs that did have some really good content and a few that completely boggled my mind as why they were ranked ahead of me. So get out there, tell your friends, link to my site, favorite it on Technorati and save my sanity.

Labels: Great resource, Shameless self promotion