Well, October 15th has come and gone and I successfully completed 24 hours of gaming for charity as party of the Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon event! As promised here's my recap of those physically demanding 24 hours.
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Got plans this weekend? Cancel ‘em. Starting bright and early at 8am on Saturday, October 15th, our very own Andy Mindler will be live-streaming his attempt to play video games for 24 hours straight. Much to everyone’s relief, this is not some new hobby Andy’s picked up, he’s doing it for the children! Or, rather, for charity. It’s all part of an Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon event to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
When Studiobanks first landed the Bojangles’ account, we knew one element of the digital platform would test our problem-solving skills: the menu. If you’re from the South, you know Bojangles’ is famous for its chicken and biscuits. All told the menu includes over 30 different entrees, 10 types of side items, 12 drink choices and countless meal, dinner, box and combo combinations. It’s a lot to choose from and even more to content manage.
It wasn’t the number of menu items or even organizing them into categories—we’ve done that before—that proved to be challenging. No, it was the nutritional values (of all things) that would become our nemesis. The nutritional values needed to display accurately for all menu items, including all possible meal, dinner, box and combo combinations. To up the ante even further, it’s common for Bojangles’ to tweak its recipes, thereby changing the nutritional values on a fairly regular basis. The digital platform would require a database and content management strategy that would allow for an easy, scalable approach to the way nutritional values are recorded. Challenge accepted!
Each summer, District 3 (D3) of the American Advertising Federation (AAF), comprised of AAF clubs in Asheville, NC, Charlotte, NC, Greensboro, NC, Raleigh, NC, Charleston, SC, Greenville, SC, Midlands, SC, Hampton Roads, VA and Roanoke, VA, holds a leadership conference to engage and prepare incoming board members for the new club year. These annual leadership conferences typically draw between 75 to 100 attendees, and AAF Charlotte had the pleasure of hosting this year’s conference in early August.
The first night of each conference features a large-scale, icebreaker game that allows attendees to mingle with other clubs. The responsibility of planning and executing this game falls on the conference’s hosting club, which in turn was my responsibility as an AAF Charlotte board member. I quickly recruited talented copywriter Katie Fisher of Balfour Beatty and Studiobanks' newest designer Joe Bauldoff to help out.
D3 asked us to create a game that incorporated the conference theme, “Social Uprising” in which attendees learned to integrate social media tools into all aspects of club management. During initial planning, we were a little stumped by incorporating social media tools, which are primarily used on an individual basis, into a game that needed to be interactive for a live, in-person group of people. Ultimately we decided on a concept that was a mix between the style of the scripted “dinner and a murder” mystery game and the classic board game, Clue. The twist was that our game would utilize Twitter to support the social media theme of the conference.
Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.
At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.
Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.
Designer Naz Hamid recently posted some screens of the new AIGA.org content management system (CMS) on his website Weight Shift. It's a page-based publishing system, which differentiates it from our own record-based Toolbox CMS. But, I'm not trying to pitch you on our Toolbox.
The lesson here is not to neglect the visual appearance of a CMS. Developers are usually great at what they do, but they are not designers. AIGA realized they were going to be spending a lot of time maintaining AIGA.org's content using that interface. Wisely, they contracted separate design teams to build the front-end and back-end for their newly redesign site and then handed those designs off to development teams. Hamid's informed choices on the layout not only make the site's content and structure easy to update and understand, but it gives AIGA something nice to look at while they do it.