December 27, 2009
Catching Up With ’09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.
It’s hard to survive in this cross-platform, cross-media, cross-channel, cross-everything-but-dressing world without, well, mixing up your executions a bit. So building VH1′s The Great Debates campaign was both entertaining and relevant.
VH1′s The Great Debates ran for a week after July 4th, providing its viewers with the answer to such debates as “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” or “Beatles vs. Stones.” LocaModa was tasked with bringing this debate to the general public. Using digital out of home and web executions, we gave users the ability to text or click their votes and then we showed live updates in Times Square, in bars across the country, on VH1.com, and on Facebook. We also used some “social polling” to check in with how popular each topic was on Twitter. And VH1 carried the baton even further, displaying live text-in results during the show. How’s that for a little buzz-word bingo action?
The campaign garnered a large number of interactions, especially considering its short seven day flight. And it’s already been named a finalist for a 2009 MITX award. We’re hoping the accolades continue through 2010.
December 24, 2009
Catching Up With ’09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.
ATT’s digital out of home presence at pop star Demi Lovato’s summer tour was really my first major launch at my newest gig. We gave concert goers (and online participants) the opportunity to text or email messages and pictures to screens at the show, then provided them with a “playback” viewing of all the messages at that show. Users could go online after a concert and see a virtual replay of the DOOH screen. They could then capture the screen as an image and post it to Facebook.
Turns out 12-18 year old girls love to text. Who knew?
This campaign, one of Loca’s most successful in terms of user numbers, is a great example of engaging an otherwise bored [albeit captive] audience. AT&T had hundreds of eye balls staring at their brand; and by the end of the campaign their brand was on thousands of handsets (in the form of mobile text-backs).
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September 9, 2009
In a previous life, I worked on some Flash elements for a national law firm. It’s got headquarters in Philly, so I felt right at home buiding these. Most of the back-end SiteCore/.NET work by the amazing Mark Stiles [his site link coming soon].
BallardSpahr.com Homepage feature navigation element. Each image opened up into a box of further content.
BallardSpahr.com Office Map
BallardSpahr.com Careers page header. Clicking on an individual brings up a quote from him or her on the Ballard Spahr experience.
March 20, 2009
Oasis/McKinney’s LetsHaveTXT.com won an Internet Advertising Award for Best Telecommunication Interactive Application.
So that’s nice.
March 4, 2009
Collected a whole lot of work and put it together here. Will be adding more. Comments welcome.
March 3, 2009
Have been working a lot more with Quartz Composer since my first screen saver attempt.
This one listens to the noise around the computer (as long as you have a built in mic) and displays a quasi-equalizer. Nothing fancy, but definitely progress. You can adjust the sensitivity by clicking “Options…” I also learned about the importance of the nested iterator patch, reducing the number of total patches significantly. Screen shots below. If you give it a try, let me know.
Install by copying to /System/Library/Screen Savers/ (more…)
February 9, 2009
About 10 years ago I wrote a program in REALbasic that simply displayed the same phrase in each of your installed/active fonts. The purpose was to quickly see what your options were when it came to font choice. I uploaded the software to various freeware/shareware sites and it was downloaded a few thousand times. It was also twice featured on the CD included with MacAddict magazine.
FontTasteTester 1.0
Right before the new year I received an email from a past user forwarded to me from my father:
I tried again today to see if FTT had leapt the Mac OSX gap, or failing that, whether there was anytrhing similarly easy and rational for trying phrases and then concentrating purely on their visual effect. I had to upgrade to OSX about a year ago and I really miss that facility and wish I had written fan-mail at the time.
Nothing comes near FTT, even the Linotype widget with its many bells and whistles.
Thank you for your ingenuity and generosity…
So I decided that I would challenge myself to redevelop this thing. I also decided that, as part of my January Self-Improvement challenge I would try to develop something for a platform for which I had never written before. While Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard is technically a webpage in a widget, this was still a new experience. I used Apple’s free Dashcode for development.
As such, I present Font Taste Tester 1.0b3 for Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s definitely still a beta, as I haven’t done extensive testing and it’s my first foray into Dashboard. Anyway – if you give it a try and have comments, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.
This officially closes out my January Self-Improvement challenge. Look for a February Self-Indulgence intro/update soon.
January 8, 2009
Anyone have a cool half-million sitting around? No? Well, head over to Liberty National GC‘s new site anyway. Masterfully pieced together by Mr. Palumbo with a little bit of help from the rest of us.
Will hopefully be launching more this month. Been at this long enough, it’s about time.
December 29, 2008
We all know someone who loves golf (well, you must know me by now, anyway). So how about a little seasonal cheer to remind them how much longer they have to wait until they can get back out on the links.
A quick project we launched last week. So far so good in terms of both client and user reaction.
Design care of BenDaly.
December 29, 2008
This launched this summer, but my blood, sweat, and tears are all over it. Well, all over the animation and Flash code at least.
About Virgin Money:
Virgin Money helps people access affordable and flexible credit, offering unique financial services and a customer experience that most banks cannot match.
The Lender Blender allows users to calculate how much they’ll save by diversifying loan sources.
Was a good exercise in Flash based web application development. And hey – would you believe it – it was even a finalist for a MITX.