Whoah! KNI has been nominated for “Design Agency of the Year” over at the annual .net magazie awards. Get over there and vote for us … or someone else! Thanks .net!
Posted August 25, 2010 by dbox
Posted July 14, 2010 by dbox
We’ve been enjoying a lot of work for Venables this year. Having been working on a big Audi banner campaign, we also recently deployed a site for their client, Conoco Phillips. Check out the new conoco.com here.
Coming up: sites for 76 and a batch of mobile solutions for the whole family of Conoco sites.
Posted April 13, 2010 by dbox
Last year we worked with Specialized on a site for their new “lifestyle” brand of bicycles called Globe, and now we’ve finally gotten around to adding it to the folio. Check it out here.
Posted April 2, 2010 by dbox
.net Mag Interview
Posted March 9, 2010 by dbox
We’re very honored (honoured?) to be featured in the 200th issue of the .net mag. It’s on sale now in the UK and should hit US newsstands soon (sold as Practical Web Design here in the States). Thanks .net!
Posted February 10, 2010 by dbox
We just launched fun little side project at fav4.org. Pick your favorite 4 sites, then set as your browser’s homepage. That’s it!
Posted February 8, 2010 by kurtnoble
When Emerald Nuts decided to marry two members of their snack fleet, Emerald Nuts and Pop Secret Popcorn, they tasked GSP SF to come up with a campaign that could somehow nicely tie the two uniquely different products together.
Let’s see. How to marry these two together. Hmm. What could they do to really tie these two different snack foods together? Oh, right. Of course! A manically enthusiastic marine park trainer, who trains his “animals” by dispensing the snacks to them via hip-mounted snack holsters. Right. That makes sense. Hahah. When you’re pitching for the SuperBowl media-buy, anything goes, right? Play the spot here.
Once the spot started to take shape, GSP then pitched the client on a fun online component to house the campaign. And why not take the zaniness a few steps further, by having KNI design and develop a retro 8-bit arcade-game homage to seal the deal. Play the game: Awesome + Awesome = Awesomer.
Test your skills and see if you can knock someone off the high-score leader-board.
Posted January 27, 2010 by dbox
With a vast and rapidly growing proliferation of Cheetos-born curiosities out there on the internets, GSPSF knew it had become time to reign all of this disparately located content in and bring some aggregate order to the unbridled Cheetos armada.
The old cheetos.com had been an incredibly fun site, with some really great marketing content, but it was a flash-heavy, high-concept site that was a bit bulky and immense, code-wise, to keep pace with the volume of really great Cheetos-related material that was so rapidly mushrooming across the web.
With this in mind, GSP had pitched “Chester’s Feed” to the client. They naturally loved the idea of a new site that could easily and nimbly track and keep pace with Chester’s mushrooming world, a world increasingly inhabited by content that Chester didn’t even necessarily make or write himself. The days of completely caged and controlled content seemed outdated and he clearly needed an aggregate system that worked with the untamable new ways of the web.
At KNI, we don’t often have time to produce comps and detailed visual presentations for most of the RFPs that we receive. But when this RFP came in, it was such a great idea that GSP had pitched to the client, that we instantly, and without hesitation, decided to pull a mad dash, “stop, drop n’ roll” on it, whipping up a really nice series of boards and code demos to go along with our written proposal.
Not only did GSP love our presentation and award us the keys to a really great project, but the creative team was also nice enough to allow us to continue to play an extremely active and impassioned role in ongoing design duties during development.
Just one of those projects where you get immense satisfaction on all fronts. Thanks GSP! Thanks Chester! Thanks Cheetos!
Posted January 12, 2010 by dbox
“No matter how beautiful your interface, it would be more beautiful if there were less of it.”
— Edward Tufte (via Joshua Blankenship)
Posted January 5, 2010 by kurtnoble
We’ve just deployed another site for GSPSF, for their client, Sprint. Using the same shell as the Sprint Android Site, this site allows users to compare monthly mobile packages and plans, and their respective features and costs. The logic of the Charts (and data they display therein) presented us with a pretty challenging set of problems to solve in Flash, especially knowing that data was likely to change and be updated over time. Like most projects, Planning and mapping the logic out on paper, beforehand, played a pivotal role in successfully developing the code, thereafter.
Guess you can say that this “Plans” site needed a good bit of planning. = )
Posted December 23, 2009 by dbox
One of the most consistent requests we received this year from our clients was the desire to add “sharing tools” to their sites. The ability to quickly share a site’s content with friends is not only a nice site addition, it is now essentially a necessity.
There is some very interesting data coming out now showing how visitors are using these services. As expected Twitter and Facebook are dominating the amount of traffic, but from there it gets a little interesting.
Digital Inspiration reveals some analytics from Share This, a popular sharing service:
Twitter users click more..
According to ShareThis, while only 5% of the content-sharing activity happens on Twitter (compared to 33% on Facebook), Twitter users are more likely to click on shared links than Facebook users (see graph A).
This however doesn’t mean that Twitter users are more engaging – they have no other choice but to visit the shared page because the short URLs that they see inside the tweets rarely say anything about the destination. Facebook users, on the other hand, get to see image thumbnails and page excerpts in the share itself so they can better decide whether or not to visit the destination page...but Facebook users will spend more time
The other interesting part is that if a person lands on your site through Facebook, he will explore your site in greater detail than someone coming from Twitter. In numbers, a visitor from Twitter will check 1.66 pages on your site (average) while a Facebook user will spend more time checking out 2.76 pages.
See all the data, complete with some nice graphs.
Posted December 15, 2009 by kurtnoble
KNI spent the better part of ’08 working on a complete redesign and re-engineering of the Hyundaiusa.com website. Near the end of the project, the agency who’d retained us, GSP, actually parted ways with their client, Hyundai, leaving the fate of the project hanging in the balance. We had everything at around 90% complete, when we handed over all code and assets to Hyundai, unsure what fate would ever befall all the work we’d done. We’d check the URL periodically, curious to see if anything would ever launch. Then, about 6 or 7 months later, most of us ceased checking it and pretty much gave up hope that anything would ever launch, or at least anything that bore even a remote resemblance to what we’d worked on.
To our utter surprise, nearly a year later, in December of 09, a semblance of the code and the layouts we handed over finally launched! Many things changed, of course, and the launch was not without a significant amount of visual and functional degradation. It was a fairly typical case of Frankencode and Frankenlayout that often seems inevitable when one group hands off a project to another. Many of these degradations were naturally a disappointment to us. That said, it’s nice to see SOMETHING finally come out of all the work we put into the project.
View a video of the “before”.
Posted December 14, 2009 by dbox
For many years Specialized Bicycle’s brand bible had one verse: “Thou shalt use black.” They’ve now switched it up and asked us to give the two of their sites the new, lighter treatment, which we were happy to oblige.
View I Am Specialized→
View Tarmac SL3→
Posted December 7, 2009 by dbox
We’d be lying if we would have predicted we might someday end up building Printer Apps. It’s certainly a far cry from the microsite mania of the late 90s, from whence we began this strange and marvelous journey, back in 2000. But here we are, nearly a decade later, amidst the App-mania of 2009, and KNI now finds ourselves building apps for HP’s forthcoming TouchSmart printer platform. HP’s developed a nifty little touchscreen browser that lives right on the front of a printer. Owners of this nifty little printer, will be able to browse and download a variety of Apps from HP’s official App store. You’ll find all the heavy-hitters, like Google Maps, Fandango, MovieTickets.com, Coupons.com, Snapfish, and the like, along with apps we’ve recently developed Goodby Silverstein & Partners, who’s been pitching boatloads of interesting and fun App ideas to HP. So far, we’ve finished up Apps for Paper Magazine, Vivienne Tam, and Lonely Planet, and have at least 3 more coming this holiday season.
It’ll be interesting to see where this nascent little touchscreen platform goes over the next decade. Much like Apple, HP has opened the API up to a publicly available SDK, so look out for some interesting developments from GSP and John Q. Public, alike, over the coming months.
Posted November 19, 2009 by kurtnoble
Anyone who knows this business well knows banner ads are sort of a dirty little secret, even amongst some of the most austere and high-brow shops. The fact is, banner projects are like an ever flowing faucet that never seems to slow up to more than a steady trickle, even in the so-called “down-times.” And, more often than not, the faucet is an unstoppable torrent. From time to time, we admit, even KNI has drunk from this mighty, if sometimes scorned wellspring. The truth of the matter is, banner work is a concise, finite engagement, with a clearly defined beginning and an end, and, on occasion, they can offer up a fair bit of creative satisfaction, when you ship them off to traffic on time and on-budget. Here’s a little confessional smattering of banners KNI has produced for GSP and Publicis, over the last year or so. Ok. There. We admitted it. WE do BANNERS. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
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