At any portfolio-driven agency you have fully crystalized hero-level projects, those projects that need no accompanying narrative and little, if any, elaboration. And, then, you have everything else, the activities and things you do with the other 30% of your billable time, most, if not all of which require more context and enumeration. This is the place for that 30%.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We had a great time teaming up with Venables Bell & Partners to brand, design and develop a new site to showcase all of HBO’s comedy titles. This was definitely a case where we didn’t mind having to re-watch a site’s videos over and over during testing.
Be sure to check out the custom boxart chooser we developed for displaying title boxart.
