Category Archives: WEBSITES

Toshiba – The Journey of Innovation

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Lovely site promoting the latest Toshiba range of electronics, laptops, cameras and so on. Best explained by Unit 9, ‘An experiential website engaging users through gesture navigation allowing them to spend time with Toshiba’s innovations and products in a new and innovative way. The website detects patterns. Interact by drawing.’

Really like the illustrations and the adventurous approach to navigation and interaction, it works quite nicely, for example you draw a swirl around one of the fish and it changes shape, or draw a zig zag over the characters playing music and the soundtrack changes. It looks great and a nice, positive, non-techy approach to an electronics brand.

Made by Unit9.

Site here…

Vodafone Racing

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Site showing the 2008 season of Formula 1 team McLaren Mercedes. Nice clean crisp interface that displays photographs and key moments of the season, navigated via a 3D parallax system. You can jump back and forth between the various circuits from Australia to Brazil, with the camera flying through the scene. A nice way of displaying chronological information in a graphic, well structured way. Like the way the camera flies with great speed to the various circuits.

Created by Dare Digital.

Website here…

Bio Bak

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I remember seeing the first version of this site a while back and being very impressed, now v2 is out and it is awesome. Essentially it’s Coen Grift’s portfolio – navigating via a drag interface, zoom in and out with the mouse scroller, you can view the basic information such as biography, contact, etc, but the most interesting part of the site is the little games and puzzles you discover in the ‘explore’ mode. It is a huge canvas – 1000 megapixels – full of great illustrations and characters. Really great attention to detail and very stylish, you really feel that he is not restraining himself and it’s so refreshing to see a totally ‘different’ portfolio. Nicely coded and really intuitive, fantastic!

Site here…

Thoughtpile

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Nice site that presents thought provoking questions and asks the audience to contribute and rate ideas – the best is awarded a Herman Miller chair. Created in a 3d floating interface that allows you to fly through the responses and see how they are rated. A clean crisp interface makes navigation simple and an interesting rotation ‘wheel’ can be dragged around to zoom in/out and rotate the scene. Nicely crafted, simple and effective.

Made by Freedom & Partners.

Site here…

Coca Cola Zero & Nokia

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Nice site from Brazil – ‘Estúdio Coca-Cola Zero’. You can record your own message and apply effects to it and send the recording to a friend or download it to your phone to use as you please. Nice parallax scrolling effects and nicely designed and well coded – pretty slick.

Made by Gringo.

Site here…

Offlohi

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Very cool site of a group of talented directors based in Hong Kong. Their videos are presented in an 3D anamorphic ‘ribbon’ of thumbnails, you can zoom in and pan around, and click on any part of the ribbon to view the videos. Really like the fluid ribbon, and the unique way the videos are presented, its a nice mechanism to play with – cool.

Created by pill & pillow.

Site here…

Samsung Music

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Interesting site promoting Samsung’s music phones. You can create your own 3D ‘soundscape’, the closer various colourful blocks are to the phone the louder their respective sounds are. There is a wide selection of sounds, which you drag around in the 3D space, you can save it and share it and so on, the gallery is quite nice too. I like the idea and the way you can drag the blocks of sound to create a virtual space which you can then explore also in first person perspective, pretty cool.

Made by unit9.

Site here…

Nokia – Somebody Else’s Phone

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Interesting concept for Nokia – Somebody Else’s Phone. The idea is that 3 people’s phones are on display on the site, you can go through their messages, videos, pictures, contacts, calendar and so on. Each character has a storyline that you can follow in real time across the span of the campaign, even with ‘real’ phonecalls that you can listen to online. They each have a facebook page, some characters have flickr pages and some are interlinked. In typical advertising fashion they are aspirational, i.e. models, good looking, etc etc, their stories are relatively compelling – for example Anna the swedish student moving to London to get money for her studies, she has to model, so we see her going to castings and making friends, sending videos to her boyfriend back home and so on. Of course all at the same time as showing the features of the phone and being the primary tool to view the content.

There is a lot of detail and a lot of content, it’s quite incredible, all well produced and thought out. Not sure how effective it will be as a campaign, with some of the comments shown on this page, it will remain to be seen – but I quite like the concept. Its a good example of using online media to provide storytelling in a digital age, through the use of the very tools we use to communicate. The site looks cool and I like the attention to detail in the execution, interesting…

Made by W+K London and B-Reel.

Site here…

Hotel 626

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Immersive site, open only from 6 PM to 6 AM, set in a haunted hotel and presented in a first person perspective. The story starts as you awaken and try to escape the hotel, you must complete a series of tasks to get out. These tasks range from clicking on doorways whilst navigating the hotel’s hallways to taking pictures of a ‘thing’ to blind it, to trying not to wake the baby from hell. It all has high production value and is very well crafted, from the sound design to the animation to the video. I particularly like the 3d video and the interactivity (although limited) whilst moving through the hotel, the movement it provides feels relatively realistic.

Its quite intriguing as it’s all for Doritos, under the guise of the ‘Snack Strong Productions’, who just make nice sites and games like this one. There is really little branding involved – just the concept that Doritos the brand is providing enjoyable experiences like ‘The Quest’ that was earlier in 2008.

Made by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the people behind the famous ‘Milkatraz’ game that was so popular last year.

Site here…

Michael Cook Photography

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Nice portfolio site of photographer Michael Cook. Interesting way of navigating the pictures – you grab and slide, the next images comes in, click once to zoom in and again to zoom out, this provides an immersive viewing experience – that actually feels quite tactile. Nice animations on the menu and it is a breeze to use, some good photography also!

Created by Cru Digital.

Site here…

Adidas Y3 Lightbox

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Stylish site for the Y3 collection of Adidas clothing. Like it’s name sake the items are presented as if on a lightbox, you can zoom in to see the details on the clothes and scroll around to explore the video of the model walking, you can view the items from different angles too. Nice design, effects and transitions make this a simple and stylish microsite.

Made by Neue Digitale.

Website here…

Marc Ecko

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Very slick site of clothing label Ecko. Extensive website with a lot of content, presented in a really nice format, more like a magazine with nice visuals and lots of animation. I like that each section is slightly different to each other, and although it is a flash site, there is deep linking and so on. Very well crafted and thoughtout website of a large brand site.

Created by WDDG.

Website here…

Hello Hikimori

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Great website of studio Hello Hikimori. Showcasing some really nice work, the site is a slick, stylish, and  to-the-point, portfolio. Led by a young creative team this shows in their work – colourful, vibrant, and full of interactivity the 2008 showreel is a must see. The background animation is a 3d sound responsive flash piece – Very cool.

Site here…

Shanghai World Financial Center

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Website of the Shanghai World Financial Center. Interesting website of the huge SWFC building, based on the concept of its height the website is thus very long! In its vertical format you can scroll through the various floors and explore the building, each section cleverly loading when you scroll into its vicinity. Nice use of flash, with deeplinking and so on, slick animations and a lot of detail.

Created by Mount Inc and Triple 7.

Site here…