Services: Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Design, HTML, CSS, CMS
Time Frame: 4 months

Your Shape Fitness Evolved Brand objectives

The Your Shape brand needed to reach beyond the core group of Ubisoft followers to a new emerging demographic of casual gamers.

Challenge

When Ubisoft apprached us, they wanted to create a site totally different from their core gamer websites. Since their target audience for this game was a new emerging group of casual gamers, we needed to approach them from a different angle. More of a fitness angle than a traditional gamer angle.

We wanted to create a community around the game. To do so, the site needed to have A LOT of content and tap into exisiting social networks.... a.k.a. facebook!

Solution

We started with a market analysis phase - mostly in the health and fitness magazine arena as opposed to the gamer arena. From here we came up with a three pronged approach; content rich website, including plans to hire on a proefessional & prolific fitness blogger, facebook landing page with rss feeds from the site, and a facebook application that incentivised users to play, log, and spread the word.

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Services: iPhone app development
Time Frame: 3 months and ongoing

Creating a Presence for Abercrombie & Fitch on the App Store

Abercrombie & Fitch is a popular clothing brand for teens and young adults. This same demographic makes up a significant percentage of iPhone users.

Challenge

In late summer of 2009, Abercrombie was looking to build an iPhone app on a tight deadline. Fashion runs on a quarterly calendar, and A&F wanted to make a splash with a new app on the App Store to coincide with the Christmas season.

Timing wasn't the only issue. A&F has a strong, established design and they wanted this reflected in the app. It was important to balance their design vision with how iPhone users expected apps to behave.

Solution

Working with the in-house design team, we architected an app that used the iPhone frameworks as much as possible, reskinning them as necessary. During implementation, we made sensible use of some open source code to complete features on time and within budget. In the end, the app shipped before Black Friday and consistently is downloaded thousands of times every day.

We shipped four major updates to the app throughout 2010, adding new features and integrating with A&F's online store.

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Hollister App

Services: iPhone app development
Time Frame: 2 months

Adding Hollister to A&F's presence on the App Store

After a successful launch of an app dedicated to Abercrombie & Fitch's adults brand, they wanted to expand their presence on the App Store to include Hollister.

Challenge

Create an app that provides many of the same features and functionality of the A&F app, but in a way that appeals to the teens that love Hollister.

Solution

As with the A&F app, we worked with Abercrombie's in-house design staff to implement their design. Implementation of this app was a bit simpler than the original A&F app because we could leverage commonalities between the two. The second app introduced a new wrinkle, though, as A&F desired to ultimately transition the maintenance to an in-house resource.

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Services: Information Architecture, Design, FLASH, HTML, CSS, CMS integration
Time Frame: 4 months

Shaun White Skateboarding Brand objectives

The Shaun White Skateboarding brand needed appeal to non-skateboarders but keep it's 'cool' associated with being a skateboarding video game. The goal was to appeal to casual gamers in a way that hard core skateboarding games had previously left feeling alienated.

Challenge

When Ubisoft apprached us, they had a pretty strong brand already established with the Shaun White Snowboarding games. We needed to keep this tie, but also 'grunge' it up a bit, not too much, in order to have the skateboarding cache without the skateboarding clique.

At first we had to do a lot of messaging with one photo and a sign up button. The next iteration had a video. The final full blown site had a media player that showed videos, screenshots, street art and 'shaun's gallery'.

The new technical challenge, at the time, was to create an interesting site while cashing in on all the SEO possible.

Solution

We achieved this by creating an html site with only the media player built out of Flash. The bulk of the text was to remain in html.

All three sites also need to be localized into 7 languages. Always an interesting challenge design and development wise... especially when you get into some of those german words!!! Text areas that had the flexibility to grow were key.

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Services: HTML, CSS, CMS
Time Frame: 6 months

Developing an easy to use website for Vitality Magazine

Vitality Magazine is one of Canada's largest publications on natural health, alternative medicine, and green living. We partnered with RedStapler to bring a fully featured, modern website for Vitality Magazine and their users.

Overview

Often times, the most difficult part of a Content Management System is the "Management" portion. Getting stuff on-screen is a piece of cake! We wanted to make sure that, no matter how technically inclined a staff-member is, each person can easily and quickly manage their own portion of the site.

We didn't forget about the user, either! We implemented easy membership for users and build the site around allowing users to interact with the content. We built a smooth recipe rating system and fully featured comments for user interaction. Nearly every bit of content on the site also has social media plugins for users to share interesting stories with their friends.

Overall, this joint project went smoothly and the client is happy!

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