Google’s Search app is one of the all-time, most downloaded free apps in Apple’s App Store.  Innovations of the app are specifically targeted to the things you need in a mobile setting—things like searching by voice when you can’t type, or searching with a picture when you can’t describe something.  Still, users often forget just how useful the app can be, especially when compared to a standard search in their desktop or mobile browser.

To help keep the app and its practical uses top of mind, we created a first of its kind mobile ad.  The experience, called Uncover Your World, speaks to the way the world around you becomes discoverable with the Google Search app.  With that insight developed, we wanted to marry the brains of the concept with beauty in a unique, visual display and user experience.

Google has an exciting tradition of representing its digital products in the analog world.  We explored varying modeling and crafting techniques but found that most wouldn’t give us the perfect combination of high detail, fast build, and unique art direction that we wanted for the project. We found what we were after in the up-and-coming technology of 3D printing.

We used a powder-based, color 3D printer that took our custom, 3D models and built them from hundreds of layers of fine powder and glue.  In that transition from digital to printed objects, we created a very unique visual: highly detailed, slightly grainy, and seemingly handmade.  When you see the objects in photos and videos, you know they’re real, but you can’t quite put your finger on how they’re made, and that’s what we love about them.

Check out the full “making of” video above and then read more about the project on our website.

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.

Earlier this year for Sprint’s Experience 4G website, we were tasked with building a 3D wall of boxes that served as the primary interface of the site. The boxes were complicated in that they needed to be open-faced, dimensional cubes that housed interactive video, image, text and sound content. Each box needed to be able to move in all directions in 3D space, cast shadows on itself and other boxes, reflect on the floor, and cast shadows on the floor, along with a multitude of other interactive features.

When approaching a 3D project in Flash, the first big question is inevitably almost always, “Which 3D engine do we use?” We then need to find a way to translate the designer’s vision and keep the process collaborative throughout development. Here’s how we approached those two issues with the Sprint 4G project.

(more…)