Audi A5 won Site of the Day at The Favourite Website Awards

Hold on to your molars! The Audi A5 microsite that won gold at the Loeries 2008 also won Site of the Day at http://www.theFWA.com. This is a truly remarkable site as it has a new (usually Flash) site daily that’s worthy of consideration. If you’re a web designer you have to know about this site for inspirational (ripping off) purposes.

Lesser known but equally interesting is http://www.fwatheater.com. This has movie clips like Youtube, but with much better quality and faster download times. The site doesn’t feature silly videos though and has a decent collection of showreels, animated clips, advertising and trailers. Check it out.

Weylandts is Live!

The new Weylandts website is live. Emma Carpenter (Art Director), Neil Garb (Senior Developer) and Carrie Davidson (Copywriter) have created a beautiful informative site that is chock-full of functionality. The CMS backend is just as beautiful functionally as the front-end is aesthetically.My involvement was only right in the beginning, drafting the first wireframes of the new site. Emma then took those and improved upon them immeasurably – later with the help of Neil.

Our stats are immediately showing a huge increase in average page views (25) and time spent browsing (12 minutes). Which is testimony to all the seriously hardcore thinking that went into this build.

I’m tremendously proud of their achievement. Go have a look at what they made.

The site: http://www.weylandts.co.za/

Audi A5 microsite goes Live!

I’m very please to announce that the Audi A5 microsite went live yesterday. This is a culmination of 8 weeks of work and I’m tremendously proud of the final result. Thanks go to Rudolf Vavruch who was the actionscripter/developer on the project – he also has quite a developed sense of the aesthetic and can be relied upon for some cut-throat critique (the only & best kind) even if its 3am. Carrie Davidson wrote the deliberately minimalist copy. David Orridge created the first conceptual 3D model which helped to sell the idea to client. Ferdi Dick from Disko (a subsidiary of “Am I Collective” based in Cape Town) built, animated and rendered the 3D – thanks Ferdi for keeping it beautiful.

This is the largest microsite (in terms of mb) I’ve ever built, relying on quite a bit of sexy video. It also has the most photographs (something over 40) and the most wallpaper downloads (21) of any car microsite I’ve ever built.

It is Ogilvy Interactive’s singular Cannes entry this year. I hope it does well.

The link: http://www.audi.co.za/a5/microsite/

VW Touareg Xmas e-mail

I like how this idea turned out. David Orridge was the designer on the job. It was sent to Touareg owners December 2007 wishing them compliments of the Season.

Website design

Websites are hard things to design. A balance of content, user interface, site goals, client CI all constrained by pixel size, kilobyte size, browser compatibility issues and content management systems. And then one hopes it looks kinda nice too. Then 2 years of adding content to the site makes it look old and second-hand and you want to start all over again with a fresh photoshop file.

I’m usually involved in the creation of the wireframes and site map, but as building a website takes many people, there are too many people to name who were involved in the creation of the websites below – but as to my involvement – suffice it to say if I didn’t design it, I was responsible for the design of it.

Websites
www.volkswagen.co.za
www.myaudi.co.za (username: myaudi@myaudi.co.za ; password:myaudi)
www.audi.co.za
www.mytouareg.co.za
www.mweb.co.za/productsservices (only this section)
www.weylandts.co.za : coming soon

Flash Microsites
www.audi.co.za/a3sportback/microsite/flash.html
www.audi.co.za/a4/microsite/flash/site.html
www.audi.co.za/tt/microsite/
www.hansa.co.za

Audi Widget

The first Audi Widget. It has Audi South Africa News feed, 3 day weather for any city, 4 customizable currency converters and the local time. I designed it in Photoshop and Flash. Dylan Smith and Rudolf Vavruch wrote the actionscript and configured the server-side feeds.

Visit: Widget Download Page (Mac & Win)

Audi Q7 Prescience

This idea came from a magic book. Add a little mathematical nonsense and you have a small little application that can read your mind.

Visit: Audi Q7 Prescience

Castle Lager 9644

Castle Lager was the big beer brand in the South African market. It started rapidly losing market share as South Africa’s political landscape changed. The brand was struggling.The cool crowd, the young progressive black urban market, saw Castle as a dated brand drunk by older men. The challenge was to get it back into the hearts and minds of the identified target market, 25-34 city living black males. But how?

Castle Lager ran the 9644 project, very successfully I must add, for 2 years. In the third year, a new management team on client-side stepped in and didn’t see the benefit in continuing the programme. A fellow designer, Vumile Mavumengwana, worked on the print material and we fed each other ideas throughout the project. If he was a little too rough in his design, I was too refined – together mixed up we found an original style we both loved to work in.

View some of the scamps for the never-seen third year of the 9644 programme.

Audi S4 Game

This was an extension of the Audi S4 Microsite. It won Bronze at the 2004 Loeries. I came up with the idea, the design, some of the actionscript and Dylan Smith helped me with the rest.

Visit: Audi S4 Game

Audi S4 Microsite

I won Gold at Loeries with this piece, along with my good friend Dylan Smith. I came up with concept, design and most actionscript.

It’s an old piece of work from 2004, but I still enjoy looking at from time to time. The big idea at the time was to use ‘full-bleed’ car imagery. Most car sites stuck their pride and joys into little windows. If the site was seriously advanced you could click on it for a bigger pop-up.

I wanted big fuck-off car pictures to take up the entire site – pratically obscuring the navigation in the process. Chuckle. I don’t think I’d be so brash nowadays.

Visit: Audi S4 Microsite