pass the relish

The holidays are a busy time.  Presents to buy, friends and family to visit, meals to prepare.  It’s hard to keep track of everything.  If only there was a way to keep tabs on it all…

      

How it works

by Paul on December 23, 2008

No, this isn’t about the upcoming Celine Dion box set.  That will be the subject of many future blog posts, but not this one.

Through the Eyes of LOVE is a site that we launched yesterday morning as a project of Motorola’s Raise Your Voice.  We worked with Hill & Knowlton on this one and what makes it special is how beautifully simple the concept is: the site contains a slide show of 50 photos taken by youth who have been affected by violence.  Every photo you view contributes 10 cents towards a $10,000 donation that Motorola will make to LOVE (Leave Out Violence).

So you set aside 5 minutes to look at 50 photos and you just donated $5. Bam. Then you share it with all your friends and they each donate $5. Then they send it to their friends, and their friends… you know, it’s like the warm and fuzzy version of a pyramid scheme.

After being online for less than a day there’s already been almost $1300 contributed.  That’s 13,000 photos viewed.  Wow. Doesn’t look like we’ll have to wait long to hit that $10K mark after all.

by Steve Palmer on November 19, 2008

Real-world version of an interface many of us have spent way too long looking at.  Pretty impressive, I must say.

by Steve Palmer on November 9, 2008

As happens to a lot of smaller web shops, we’ve been so busy doing client work that we’ve neglected to update our own site.  We all like the current site and didn’t want to go in a radically different direction, but thought it could use a bit of a refresh.  A little spring cleaning if you will.

Below are some before and after shots to compare the difference or you can check out the real thing online.  What do you think?

Before:

After:

by Paul on November 6, 2008

It’s always been one of my favourite movies…

…and last night I got the chance to live it in person at the 2008 Digital Marketing Awards.  The Tell Your Story site that we designed and built for Dentsu Canada was part of an integrated campaign that won a DMA Gold award for Integrated Campaign and Best in Show.  The campaign encouraged users to tell their own story by uploading a series of 12 photos to the site.  Visitors to the site can view and search the stories, vote for the ones they like and even save their favourites so that they can find them easily again later.

On a geekier note, not only is the site slick, but it’s also run by an easy-to-use custom CMS.  The CMS allows Canon to review and approve submissions as well as get a top level view of the entries that includes the most viewed, highest rated, etc.

This was a fun project to do as the whole team was involved and we were able to get our hands dirty on the design, Flash and PHP development.  Tip of the hat to our lead designer on the project John Thai.

Congrats to Michael Gramlow and Dentsu Canada on a campaign well conceived, thought out and executed.

In addition to the kudos for the Canon site, the Test Your Breath site we worked on received an honourable mention.  Not a bad night for Relish’s first appearance at the DMAs.  Looking forward to next year!

by Paul on November 4, 2008