Web
optimized.com
ADG has always been focused primarily on strategy and design, but due to what we’ve seen as very strong demand for “last mile” assistance – driving the last 10% of successful app development that is often the most difficult – we’re pleased to announce the complement to ADG’s existing strengths: optimized.com.
Headed by ADG principal Mahboud Zabetian and a team of iOS and Android specialists, optimized is focused exclusively on technological fit and finish – the last 10% that often makes the difference between a successful app and a flop.
Optimized.com can quickly field experienced guerrilla teams against:
architectural & design reviews
code reviews
performance testing
even new design and/or development
As the development environments for desktop and particularly mobile become more approachable to new developers and designers, the challenge is to get an idea off of the drawing board and on to a device as quickly … Read More »
yes, we still do banners …
… since people keep asking. Amazing that these things still work.
Way back in 1996 Red Sky built what has been called the first interactive banner (the Pong Banner, built in Shockwave, before Flash, brainchild of Joel Hladecek). We thought at the time we were shepherding in the demise of the static banner, but these things refuse to die.
We don’t do any web banners anymore (mainly because we haven’t been asked), these are all mobile. But they’re still for the most part static. And they still, despite our efforts to obsolete them 14 years ago, work.
Humbling.
(More on the Pong banner here.)
Twitter: the Beta …
It’s only been a little over 10 years, but web retrospectives still have the potential to make one feel old when they re-introduce projects you worked on with phrases like:
“Think back to the early days of the World Wide Web, just after the invention of the Netscape browser …”.
But it’s true. In an article on adage.com Kevin Maney recalls the Miller Beer Pager (created by Red Sky back in the mid-90′s – ancient history) and suggests that those early web “apps” were – like today’s early mobile apps – just the appetizers.
Intelevision Beta
After two years of design and development a beta version of Intelevision launched on Saturday, November 1.
Intelevision is a next-generation program guide designed to help you decide what to watch on TV. With hundreds of channels on at any time, existing TV program guides suffer from an overload of information, not usefully displayed. Intelevision uses the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to recommend what you might want to watch at any given time, and then creates a social environment around the watching of any show on TV. This is done through an interface that presents programming information in a new way, separating the wheat from the chaff of the TV landscape.
Early users have said we have created the best and easiest to use guide to television extant – powered by users – and we’ve only begun.
Initial concept and strategy on the … Read More »
Amdocs Logical Phone Interface
Proof-of-concept Clonefone web interface design for Amdocs (the back-end transaction provider for many major carriers).
The Miller Beer Pager
Trying to tap into peer-to-peer marketing before anyone knew what the hell they were doing, Red Sky created the Beer Pager for longtime client Miller Brewing in 2000. The concept was to build a downloadable desktop widget that you could use to “page” your friends to organize impromtu “Miller Times”. The thing kind of got out of control. My favorite story was when we discovered that another client of ours was using the Beer Pager throughout the company to schedule meetings & conference rooms.Clay Jensen, Red Sky Art Director, gets credit for the concept and directing the extraordinary (Alias Wavefront) modeling and animation in this piece.
Miller Virtual Racing League
VRL was an extensive promotion to connect bits and atoms for Miller Brewing. Specially marked six-packs of Miller Light had codes imprinted under the bottle caps. Red Sky created a full-blown fantasy racing environment online where fans could exchange those codes for NASCAR basics: a driver, a manager, car upgrades, tires, etc. And then race in brackets throughout the year against other players. The Red Sky system spawned an entire ecosystem of related sites where they traded racing tips, insults and even codes. View Detail for the splash Flash intro to the VRL experience.
Best In Show across all media categories in the 2002 International Food and Beverage awards, and Gold medal in the interactive category.
The HP Pong Banner
Launched in 1996, this was evidently the world’s first interactive ad banner. Credit for the concept has to go to my partner Joel Hladecek (co-founder of Red Sky with me). It was simple: build a tiny functioning version of Pong in an ad banner, allowing the viewer to play along with a supposed engineer at HP (“the guy who built this”). Even though the game play was real, and quite compelling (people spent time in this banner), the complete run-time execution weighed in at less than 12k. Brilliantly coded by Chris Hurwitz, the dev team incorporated unheard-of tricks at the time; such as creating the bounce tone in the game from a single sine-wave slice of audio – replicated quickly in code. The graphics themselves were composited mathematically from one single pixel graphic. To … Read More »
Nike’s First Website
So the story goes like this: around 1993-94 Red Sky (the agency I started then) was creating floppy (!) and CD-ROM-based multimedia presentations (using Director) when the Internet happened. On a whim – I think it was initiated by Red Sky co-founder Joel Hladecek – in 1995 we decided to create a concept piece and send it to Nike – who had no website – out of the blue. No introduction. We created this weird piece and sent it up to Beaverton expecting nothing. Instead they invited us up immediately to talk.
We ended up being asked to design the first Nike website (and many other Nike projects) to be launched simultaneous with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta (or @tlanta as we labeled it). Red Sky did the visual design. Organic did the back-end. … Read More »
