cmyplay

The Thomas@ series by Carina Diedricks-Hugo is a popular title amongst Afrikaans teens. LAPA Uitgewers approached Etiket with the desire to make a more engaging reading experience for the next title in the series. In many ways, this project came along at the perfect time for me.

I found out about JC Hutchins & Jordan Wiseman’s book, Personal Effects: Dark Art, on Adam Christensen’s MacCast. Despite never having seen the title in the flesh, I was immensely inspired by the big ideas that form part of the storytelling.

I had just finished an initial brainstorming sessions to conceptualize the rough ideas for an ARG for a locally produced feature film. All I could see was possibilities. Alongside a couple of colleagues we threw around ideas on how to make this book interactive and engaging in meatspace.

The project progressed to a point where I had to bring together all of the ideas into a concrete way to extend the reading experience without changing the story for those who didn’t have access to things like smartphones or internet connected computers.

In certain places Microsoft Tags and URLs appear alongside the text of the book. The reader is prompted to scan these tags, at which point they are taken to an element related to that particular point in the story. The collateral created for these sections include photos of characters in the book, chat conversations between these characters, audio clips and a video performance of the characters’ band, webpages and Flash games.

For budgetary reasons approximately 60% of the initial ideas made it into the book. Etiket submitted the Thomas@ Augmented Reality reading experience for 3 categories of the Pendoring Awards 2011 and we got 2 nominations for it. I’m very much looking forward to the awards ceremony later this month.

Pushing the boundaries of what an AV can be, at Etiket we decided to actualize the figurative expression of beginning a new chapter.

The Brand Union Johannesburg and Coley Porter Bell Cape Town have merged. As part of the publicity around this enormous development, we were tasked with creating an AV to be aired at the launch event. The problem we faced was figuring out how to bring the message home to The Brand Union and Coley Porter Bell employees, clients and to the industry as a whole.

How much more real can you get than a physical book, that is paged through, written in and burned? The process of designing, printing, collating, binding and filming the book seen in the AV (and three successive books detailing both companies and their previous work) was a visceral and time-sensitive experience. The hard work done by the team of 9 comes through very successfully in the end product – so much so that this very same AV has been used to market The Brand Union internationally.

What you see here is the product of frustration. The therapeutic process I went through making this cannot be overestimated. As you can see in the graphic, my own body of work straddles the boundary between good and bad design. I like to think that I mostly only step outside the good circle when I’m pushed.

There’s little else to say other than, I am still on good terms with the client that inspired it. Hopefully we’re a little further along on their journey of education.

As an introduction to fully-fledged WordPress design and coding from start to finish, I’m glad that I had the Etiket website to practice with. I managed to overcome a number of technical hurdles, not least of which was creating separate sections that are automatically updated according to how a post is categorized.

The design evolved as a reversal of the style of the Voluma.tv* site created by my colleague, Jaco van Der Walt. I set about using elements of the design and applied them to the 960 Grid System. The Grid System is incredibly useful as a framework for constructing layouts.

The work that I put in on this site has helped us win new work for a number of companies. It turns out that they’re all looking for similar solutions for their online presences.

I haven’t been happy with the cases on offer for the iPhone 4 so far. They’re either terrible imitations of Apple’s official bumper cases (which aren’t available in South Africa yet) or they’re the incredibly ostentatious Ed Hardy silicon condoms that refuses to leave your pocket.

We’ve recently had some vinyl decals made for the office and I really enjoyed the vinyl solutions I’ve seen floating around for the iPhone 4. Instead of making yet another internet purchase, I thought I should try my hand at making my own.

What you see here is two early examples of the end results. I’ve made the obligatory reference to the greatest television show of all time alongside the appropriation of a previous piece of my illustrative work.

The printing wasn’t perfect on these prototypes and I’m not completely pleased with the die-cuts, but I’m very excited about these pieces. Let’s see if they’re going to show up in the cmyplayStore.