Welcome to my ‘Pixel Pastures Residential Care Centre’. Home to a bunch of digital concepts that have served their purpose, but rather than let them languish on some hard drive, I thought I’d wheel them out onto the terrace to get a little sun.
If you’d like to see some younger stuff strutting its stuff try >Latest work
This was a viral idea designed to help Christian Aid promote their ‘Christmas present promise programme’. Basically someone could give someone a present by selecting one of the gifts that included, housing, toilets, animals etc. This would then be given to the needy on behalf of the person you were buying the gift for, who would receive a certificate informing them of their gift. One of the gifts on the list was a can of worms that were sent to people to help improve the quality of their farming soil.
We decided to use the worms as a way of being able to send messages to friends while at the same time virally spreading the word of the programme.
When Sanford asked us to create an online experience for their range of pens, the irony of using computers to promote the very thing they were slowly making obsolete didn’t pass us by. We chose to use the digital medium to start something that hit at the heart of the problem – Save Handwriting.com.The basic idea was that with the increase of keypad technology we were writing less and so our handwriting was suffering too. Using a multi-media approach we highlighted the threat posed and championed more interest in how our handwriting was very much told us a lot about what we presented to and hid from the world. Posters featured famous people’s handwriting with graphological analysis explaining how it reveals their real personality. They were driven on line where we further explore the wonders of handwriting, finishing off with an online analysis of your handwriting. All you had to do was answer some calibration questions, then use your mouse to write a couple of words. This would then be analysed and a description of your character traits would be emailed to you. You would also receive advice on what pen would best reflect your personality.
If the truth be known Carling had a shed load of promotional materials leftover from the years activities and decided they wanted an interactive Christmas promotion to help shift some of it. At the time Carling had their name on all the academy venues and spent a lot of time and money backing this music scene. It seemed only fitting that we pay homage to this by combining the advent calendar with a ‘name that tune’ competition. However, as our target market cared little for such traditional things, we decided to use badly recorded covers of carols. They were so bad you could hardly tell which one was which. Oddly enough it worked very well.
A few years back the idea of buying your christmas presents on Ebay was a relatively new idea. This convenient and seasonally flavoured pressie picker enabled people to select gifts based on more human decision criteria. By setting the elves along the sliding scales the pressie picker would randomly select gifts that matched from ebay.
Penguin decided to go digital and replace their paper bound book catalogue that they sent to the trade with an online version. The paper editions were becoming expensive and were quickly becoming out of date with the increase in the turnover of titles.
The problem was that the book trade at the time saw themselves as the last bastion against the digital tide, so acceptance and uptake was not going to be easy. ‘The Story of the’ is an online/offline promotion that used an imaginative story about the word ‘the’ in the world of books that learns to embrace the world of digital medium. It was to be animated online, accompanied by printed book to demonstrate that the two mediums can coexist. Sadly due to budgets and timing it never got developed.
Banners for cars can so often be dreary affairs. Luckily for us this particular car was nicknamed ‘The Great White’, which spawned an interesting collection ideas that we pitched to the client. Among them was the idea of a car that could smell blood and had a habit of suddenly appearing even when someone got a paper cut. Another featured a diver in a diving cage being lowered down above the car. In the end we went with this elegant and slightly spooky execution that stood out in the auto online arena.
Part of a complete multi-media pitch for the WTA women’s finals in Doha. It included site design, TV, idents, ambient and an online content piece about the Doha ball boys academy. The over idea of ‘Glam Slam’ was built around the fact that these 8 women were almost super heros in ability and strength. The ball boy academy was to revolve around the fact that the ball boys had super hero ability of speed and agility in order to have to be able to perform their duties during these finals.
This mobile game allowed the user to put the face of a male friend onto a person that then had tennis balls fired at them by Maria Sharapova. You scored points and share it accordingly.
A tough brief with a promotion which the average student wouldn’t bat an eyelid at. The solution was to make light of it using the Lloyds academy where various professors introduced different aspects of the promotion. It included a funny video that delivered the nitti-gritti in bite size student portions, a puzzle of a competition where they could win their tuition fees for a year, a student radio that allowed users to source music and student gigs and a psychology tutor to take you though the written detail. The link below explains it all in full, courtesy of Matt Benny the designer.
This is one of those self promotional ideas that agencies cook up and usually never have the time to make happen. This time it was different; although by the time it was finished the conceptual approach we were following had been canned by the chairman. The idea was loosely based around digital alchemy, where DC Interact (previously known as Dow Carter and now known as Altogether Digital) had discovered the secret element – Docatium – that helped combine creativity and technology. The viral demonstrated how this creative element did not fit into the world of science, showing just how carefully one has to tread to successfully combine creativity and technology.
