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This summer I had the great opportunity to be the designer and art director on the digital portion of American Cancer Society’s (ACS) revamped More Birthdays campaign. The huge initiative included television, print and web, all of which revolved around our MoreBirthdays.com site. We worked with The Martin Agency to develop their idea that American Cancer Society is “the official sponsor of birthdays.” This positive spin on cancer research offers a lot of hope to the people suffering from the illness. I loved the message from the start and was excited to help design an HTML site that included all of the wizardry of HTML5 and Javascript.
MoreBirthdays.com is a two-part site. The first part consists of the new Birthday Gallery where artists and musicians are invited by ACS to join the fight against cancer. The second part features tools that allow you to share the More Birthdays content with your friends in the form of musician phone calls, multi-user interactive group eCards and more. There’s no better way to share all of this interrelated content than with Facebook Connect.
Facebook Connect isn’t a new feature to sites, however, the collection of unique and timely content presented us an opportunity to leverage its capabilities in a much more relevant way. By focusing on the concept of birthdays and the content surrounding them, we were able to help people make quick and meaningful use of the site’s great content. Here are some of the ways we integrated Facebook Connect.
The Grow Housewarming is just around the corner, and we’re excited to announce that the party will benefit the Five Points Community Farm Market. If you’re unfamiliar with this market, you need to witness the goodness that’s developing there. Five Points is not only your local connection for delicious, local produce but also Norfolk’s opportunity to support regionally owned, food-related businesses.
We were published in the latest PRINT Regional Design Annual (Dec ’09) for our identity system. Since we don’t write a lot of letters, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll never see our identity system in person. So what better place to show you some more detail than on our blog?
We spend most of our time in the digital world, so the Grow identity gave us a nice chance to work with a natural, homespun kind of feel. That’s why we loved the idea of hand drawn patterns and customizable iconography.
Each employee receives business card labels with his or her own custom icon. The labels attach to any of the cards printed with 6 different patterns in 3 colors.
The envelopes match the same way. They come in 3 colors with 6 patterns printed on the interior, and each is affixed with an icon-specific address label.
To keep the look and feel of the identity consistent, we use the pattern on everything from our website to the tags on our Thank You campaign t-shirts. The stationery and template also make their way into our presentations and pitches.
I’m so excited to finally see our K-Y Intense collaboration with Mother New York go live! Just for kicks, I went through my sketches of the reaction room to see how close my original drawing compared to the final composition. I was both surprised and delighted that they were remarkably close. It just goes to show you that drawing your ideas out on paper before putting them into Photoshop is the best way to avoid making critical mistakes and help get your head wrapped around a project before even hopping on the computer! If you haven’t seen the live site, visit it at the K-Y Intense Satisfaction Lab, and enjoy a laugh or three.
