Site re-launch
Skittles.com Ends Social Media Experiment
Less than a year after Skittles launched their social media centric clone of Modernista.com they have re-designed the site yet again. This new version again looks to go against traditional conventions by foregoing navigation in favor of a long scrolling web page. I found it surprising that in spite of the page length there is very little content and even less interaction available. There are some photos include a clown in an astronaut suite, links to their Twiiter accounts and a YouTube video but that is pretty much it. Wrigley’s also launched a new microsite called ShareSkittles.com where you can upload video to a randomly paired interactive montage of two people sharing Skittles.
Though the content is light it looks to create a strong interactive platform for the brand that looks to make much better use of the medium than what we saw with the previous generation of work. It is also worth noting that this work is the first to come out of Wrigley’s new roster of digital agencies after they replaced Tribal DDB, Agency.com and Digitas with Firstborn, Big Spaceship and EVB. The three agencies collaborated on the Skittles work, with Big Spaceship handling Skittles.com, Firstborn building ShareSkittles.com and EVB doing their soon to be launched Facebook campaign.
Read more of: Skittles.com Ends Social Media Experiment »
HBO Imagines a new Voyeur
What do a drowning mime, a Japanese businessman and a pile of teddy bears have in common? They are all part of the new Imagine campaign created by BBDO as the follow-up to the award-winning 2007 Voyeur campaign. The campaign launched last Thursday with a video cube installation in New York’s Meatpacking District. The videos on the cube are two two-minute short films shot from four different angles. The cube was in NYC for three days and is now moving on to Philadelphia on Oct. 1 and then Washington, DC on Oct. 8. If you can’t make it to one of those locations then you can go to HBOImagine.com which has 41 video clips, audio clips, photos and newspaper clippings displayed in a 3D web. Each time you watch a clip then new footage is unlocked and linked together to complete the story through non-linear storytelling. The addition of this non-linear story telling is a key change from the Voyeur campaign where the story was very linear. I have just started to explore all of the content and will have more thoughts once I have been able to make my way through it all but if you get there first post your thoughts in the comments.
Read more of: HBO Imagines a new Voyeur »
2010 Ford Mustang drives at something new… individuality.
I have always been a car guy and one of my earliest memories is of a bright yellow 1964 Mustang my dad’s friend owned and took to car shows around Pittsburgh. I always loved the design of that car and it has gone through a lof of design changes over the years to arrive at this years incarnation. Firstborn has created the site celebrating the new 2010 Mustang and with the economy and car sales that seem to be headed south faster than a Lynyrd Skynyrd tour bus this sales year has obvious importance for the Ford brand and the Mustang model.
The first thing you notice is that the sites design breaks the traditional online car design structure of a white background with an over retouched hero photos and numerous small info boxes underneath it. This sites goes with the full bleed background image that makes transitions between the content more interesting than watching a loader bar crawl across the screen. I also like the site navigation that is a split navigation that has drop downs on top and all the options exposed on the bottom of the page.
The site has the standard content like photo galleries, model features and even webisodes but the most interesting part of the site for me is the Customizer that isn’t the ‘build your own’ feature that has been on every car site for as long as their have been car sites. It is instead an experience that looks to capitalize on the trend we have seen for years from brands like Scion where you can take the base model and through paint and after market accessories create a truly unique look for your car. This is the first time that I can remember seeing that type of customization encouraged and featured by an American car maker on one of their showcase models. The creation experience on the site has a lot of options so you can create the look you want and then save it the community of over 60,000 other creations. I expected that functionality for a site like this but I didn’t expect to see a link to a car summary where they list out the accessories you have chosen and links to the manufacturers so can create your masterpiece in real life. It will be interesting to see if this new focus and encouragement of individuality will take hold in this bastion of classic and traditional car design and culture. Check a parking lot near you in the not too distant future for the answer.
Read more of: 2010 Ford Mustang drives at something new… individuality. »
Blitz Digital new site
I have been a fan of Blitz Digital for a while and still think the work they did on the Corpse Bride site is the best movie site ever done. They launched a new portfolio site yesterday that is a clean and well designed presentation of their work and worth checking out.
Read more of: Blitz Digital new site »
Dear Yahoo – what a difference an ‘m’ can make
Just a quick observation on the recent Yahoo home page redesign. I have been trying it out since it launched and the one thing I hate more than anything has nothing to do with the design but everything to do with the URL. When you go to the site it is no longer www.yahoo.com but instead m.www.yahoo.com. The addition of that ‘m’ to the URL drives me crazy and keeps me away from the site because it screws me up every time I go to their site and then type in any other url. So this is one of those cases where breaking user expectation creates a negative experience that overrules everything about the design and experience to the point where people will start to avoid your site over something as small as a single letter.
Read more of: Dear Yahoo – what a difference an ‘m’ can make »
Burger King site re-design does it your way
Crispin Porter has just launched the re-design of Burger King’s web site BK.com. The re-design clearly tries to pay off the company tag line of ‘have it your way’ with site navigation that are three large sliders marked Fun, Food and King. You customize the content that is displayed by moving these sliders to have the content ‘your way’. The content is a mix of offers, company info and what feels like a Crispin Porter advertising shine with too many old campaigns dating back to Subservient Chicken.
I like the fact that the design is simple and focused on supporting the brand. I have mixed feelings about the overall experience because on the one hand the sliders create a hunt and peck feeling for me and I’m not sure if I am missing content I would have liked to have seen. I know the flip side of that is by creating that sense you are creating engagement and will have users spending time on a type of site they would normally not spend much time with.
Read more of: Burger King site re-design does it your way »
Yahoo! adds new new advertising, I mean, consumer functionality
Today Yahoo! put their new home page design in to beta by making it available to the public. The only real change seems to be the addition of a ‘my favorites’ column that now appears on the left hand side of the page. It functions like Apple Safari’s top sites where you can you can add preset Yahoo! sites and categories or add your own sites. It is an overhaul of the block that used to appear on the right side of the page that would slide open to reveal updates of Yahoo! content like mail. Once this new version is set up you can then scroll down the list of site to see news, updates and summaries of what is new on the selected sites. It sounds like an interesting idea but the execution disappointing as the information display is really primitive often looking like nothing more than an early RSS reader. It seems like the main reason for developing the update is the box ad unit now appears in each panel so they can then increase their ad impressions. MI can only hope they will refine and improve it throughout the beta because as it is there isn’t much to write home about.
Read more of: Yahoo! adds new new advertising, I mean, consumer functionality »
Crispin Porter site re-design goes into beta
Crispin Porter + Bogusky has finally found some time to work on their agency web site which has been in dire need of an update for a long time. The new site has a visual design so simple it doesn’t even play into the experience with tabbed main navigation that puts the focus squarely on the content displayed there. The main navigation is a series of tabs made up of the agency and their clients. As you move from tab to tab the content made up of associated work, news and chatter from Twitter and Blogs is shown. I think this is the most interesting under the client tabs as it exposes what the real world is saying about the brands and the work both good and bad. I think it could even better if they had a way to participate in the conversation that is going about them so it was more than a one way dialogue but it is a good start. I wish clients would open themselves up to this type of social media conversation and admit that it is going on, good and bad, wether they want to be a part of it or not.
Read more of: Crispin Porter site re-design goes into beta »
Why is the Skittles logo on the Modernista site?
A little under a year ago I wrote about the radical re-design of the portfolio site for the agency Modernista. They turned the site into a redirected rollover HTML menu that appears on the top left corner on many established sites including Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. You can mouse over and check out the agency’s portfolio on Flickr, an about section through Wikipedia, latest agency news through Google New, TV work through YouTube and contact then via AIM or Skype. It had it’s hiccups along the road but it was a pretty cool and unique idea.
So I was cruising through my usual collection of digital designs sites this morning and a screenshot caught my eye for the re-design of the Skittles Web site. After clicking on that screenshot I was asked to enter your age and agree to a terms of service that acknowledges that the content beyond this page is not Skittles content. After hitting enter I was shocked by the realization that I was looking at the Modernista site with a Skittles logo on it. The site had loaded the Skittles’ Wikipedia page with a purple square navigation overlay in the upper left hand corner. As you start to explore you will find that ‘Products’ moves you to the bottom of the Wikipedia page, ‘Friends’ takes you to their Facebook page, ‘Photo’ to Flickr and ‘Chatter’ to their Twitter feed.
For me this is one of those cases where Agency.com, who did the re-design, should have done their homework and known better. Scratch that. We all know they have seen the Modernista site and this isn’t a case where the Skittles site is kind of close to the Modernista but is the closest thing I can remember to a straight rip-off by a major brand. How they didn’t think this would be viewed by current clients, potential clients and potential creative talent as a huge red flag is beyond me. I know times are really hard and we all need business but our industry is better than this.
Read more of: Why is the Skittles logo on the Modernista site? »
Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov
I have written for months that I have been impressed with how, now president, Obama has used digital media in his campaign. That was clearly part of a larger plan by his team to turn him in to a major international brand complete will a logo, word mark, color scheme, brand words and all the other elements you would expect. The results speak for themselves and the team that created the Obama brand has done a better job with it than 95% of the companies I can think of.
All of that being said it’s not terribly surprising that his digital presence has undergone a transition similar to the one found in the real world. Traffic to his campaign site will find a message directig them to go to the the White House site that has now undergone the same transformation as the actual Whitehouse. This new site draws clear inspiration and design elements of Obama’s campaign site but is able to temper it with more restraint than we have seen before in his digital assets. I thought that his campaign site bordered on a Pepsi sub brand at times with their heavy use of gradients on nearly every element of the site. The Whitehouse site again shows an attention to detail that is is sorely lacking in so many major brand sites and probably never seen on government Web sites. The new Whitehouse site is full 508 compliant for people with disabilities, has multiple RSS feeds so you can stay current on news and items on the countries agenda, a blog , a prominent contact us form and email sign up. All of this was created because the administration is “committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise”. They are promising more content and features in the months to come so it will be interesting to watch to see how they are able to leverage digital media to do some good and if it will keep the American people involved in what is going on.
Read more of: Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov »
