creative briefing

I came across a website today off my Facebook mini feed called I Met the Walrus. It is a microsite for an animated short film based on 14-year-old Jerry Levitan who, in 1969, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and interviewed him during his in-bed-for-peace phase. The film has already been nominated for a handful of awards, including an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

I watched the trailer, which is available on the site, and the art work really struck me. The film is completely animated in a sketchbook art style to the spoken words of the interview. For anyone who knows Lennon’s reputation as somewhat of a literary magician in his time, you’ll know you’re in for some seriously deep imagery. The flash-based website is done in the very same style as well, with quirky but unobtrusive animations dispersed around the site. The imagery is definitely odd but filled with meaning - almost as if Lennon had written the creative brief for the site himself. Even if you’re not a Beatles or Lennon fan, you should check out the site for some kick-ass art and animation.

Props to Dungeon for the great site work and James Braithwaite, Alex Kurina, and Josh Raskin for the art and animation.

I just picked up my new used BlackBerry 8320 Curve yesterday - my first handheld complete with WiFi functionality. Naturally I spent most of the afternoon and evening toying around with it, and in the few hours that I was able to experience the supposed greatness of the mobile browser it occured to me how far behind the mobile surfing experience is from the one we’re used to on a computer.

Granted, the 8320 is not the iPhone (I’m sure there are many of you who will be ready to pounce on that tidbit). But recognize also that the majority of the mobile users are not iPhone users either (not sure how this demographic will change in the next few years though). Plus, while the iPhone’s Safari browser is a few leaps ahead of the rest of the market, it’s still far from delivering a flawless surfing experience.

It’s certainly a give and take situation - web designers need to make their sites more mobile-ready while mobile software developers need to up the firing power behind the mobile browsers. But somebody should be the bigger man, and in my eyes, I think it’s the web designers’ move next.

What happened to the .mobi movement? If web designers start building sites that are more compatible for mobile browsing, the customers and end-users will have more incentive to demand better technology on their handsets. Users don’t buy fancy handsets to see crappy websites.

On a lighter note, my 8320 is probably the one single environment where Windows Live trumps Google. That made me smile… and then cry.

User-generated content is not uncommon to websites today and its popularity has grown over the years with the public’s demand to have control and input over what they’re seeing on websites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and countless others will typically offer a form on the front-end of their website for users to submit content for immediate publishing, enhancing user interactivity and overall experience.

For WordPress users, this is usually a problem because the post and page-writing functionalities are hidden away in the back-end admin panel of WordPress. Not only that, but users are required to have a registered account before being able to access these functions. Add on the fact that logging into the admin panel exposes the user to a different interface and visual environment, and you’ve got yourself a bad user experience and little incentive for the user to want to submit content.

So how do you create a site that offers a usable front-end form that will allow users to publish content immediately onto your site while still taking advantage of the powerful publishing engine of WordPress?

This tutorial will break down one way of overcoming this obstacle using cantwaitforchristmas.com to illustrate examples.

Read the rest of this entry >

Two posts in one day? I think I’m spoiling you guys. Maybe I’m just in the giving mood be it the holidays and all…

I told you I’d be back soon with word of a new project launch. It wasn’t too long ago (or at least it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long) since I became inspired by the powerful potential of WordPress as a CMS. Three great things have spawned since then:

1. A new skillset that opened a whole new door to potential future business.
2. cantwaitforchristmas.com (read this to learn more).
3. The complete relaunch of my agency’s website in all its WordPressy glory.

Hoping to take a lesson out of my own book, the team and I began discussion of a refresh for our agency website as far back as in August. We had grown a lot as an agency and everything about the old site just didn’t do justice to who we were now, so we knew we had to start fresh. Projects came and projects went, and so did the time and bandwidth we had available to focus on building a new site.

September, October, and November passed by far too quickly, and before we knew it, December was here and we still had no new site. Enter: meeting-with-designer-that-inspired-my-WordPress-fascination. Like a shot of creative steroids, I got to work immediately and quickly turned the new layout template that our team had been kicking around for a few weeks into a fully WordPress-integrated site. That was the first night after being inspired.

Fast forward 3 weeks, a lot of WordPress hacking, plugin-customizing, CSSing, Photoshoping, and copy writing, and we arrive at 6 am Friday morning when the new site finally went live at www.vdotmedia.com. I’m pooped, but am so stoked at how everything turned out. In our moment of glory, I felt like the new WordPress rockstar (with Adii announcing his “retirement”, this possibility becomes a little more real).

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), before

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), after

The entire site, from the rotating Flash banner to our new portfolio to our RFP form, is fully WordPress-powered. And just like the promise to post my WordPress tricks for cantwaitforchristmas.com (which I haven’t delivered on just yet), I will promise to do a full write-up of the ins and outs of creating a complete agency site on this platform. I’m sure you’ll get more of a kick out of that post as our agency site is at least ten times more complicated than the single-paged Christmas countdown site.

We’ve also got our new agency blog, Simply Put, running on the site which is great because the team and I finally have a common place to expel our thoughts, ideas, and banter. I encourage all of you to check out our most recent post on the Email Standards Project and if you’re interested, do that whole RSS-subscribing thing that some of you are pretty good at.

So there you have it, a long-winded excuse for why I haven’t been too active over here in the past few weeks. I hope you’ll accept my apology.

If you’ve noticed that you haven’t heard from me in the last few days (since my Inspired post), it’s because I’ve been completely submerged in the wonders of WordPress! I had the hang of it after the first night, but I’ve spent the last few days diligently perfecting the ins and outs of this underestimated platform.

Most of my time has been dedicated to building out my new agency site. The technical development progress has now sped far beyond the development of the content for the site, so it’ll still be some time before it’s ready to launch.

But to give some proof of my progress, and to alleviate some of the WordPress energy, my buddy and I decided to run our first project marathon last night - 24 hours of pure creative magic with the end result being a polished, functional, and stylish website. With that, I present to you the launch of cantwaitforchristmas.com!

In light of the holiday season, Satish and I decided to build a simple site that would celebrate all the things everyone is looking forward to come this Christmas. For extra umph, we added a giant timer so that we could countdown the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds left til all the wonderfulness of Christmas would arrive.

I will do a follow-up post soon to share some of the tricks and techniques used in the development of this site. But in the mean time, I hope you guys can go and support my first marathon project and join us in the countdown to the official best day of the year!

If anybody is particularly feeling the holiday spirit, you can also help spread word of the site by blogging about it or sharing it with friends.

Looking forward to seeing what you’re all looking forward to this Christmas!