past work we love
August 27, 2019
written by
Greg Ciro Tornincasa
we’re digging through the flat files! 20 years has given us a bunch of diverse projects to #tbt about. here’s our team favorites.
barbara. aspen snowmass.
My favorite project was when Aspen asked us to build them a website and when we concepted something that wasn’t technologically possible, they loved it SO MUCH and had to have it. So we did it anyway using a hack to make it “seem” like it was a real-time widget with data updates. Plus we made this cute pop up where a Yeti wandered across the screen, threw a snowball at the user, snow then ‘splashed’ onto the screen and melted into the special offer. I miss flash sometimes.
My second favorite project was when we designed Geisel Hotels and showed them something in hot pink because we were trying to make other concepts stand out more. Apparently, Germans love hot pink.
chantel. waikiki parc.
It was the first big website build I worked on with the team and I was super inspired by the vibrant design, cutting edge interactivity, and animation. I had such an enjoyable time “bringing it to life”, that I gladly built templates and QA’d during my evenings and weekends, just for fun, lol.
greg. 300FeetOut.
My top fav has to be our own rebrand. Working on a project you’ve been close to for over a decade is NOT easy! All sorts of baggage had to be tossed out in order to fully realize our own potential with a new perspective. Working through our own brand discovery with our entire team fully vested in collaborating not only made it easier—it made us SO much stronger. Everyone on our team can tell you our brand values. Even better, we live by them (and whoever embodies them most each month gets goodies for it!). “Authenticity” can be so much more than a buzz word.
A close second, Walt Disney Family Museum. It was a creative and technical challenge, the people were magical, and presenting to Walt Disney’s daughter and grandson was one for the storybook!
rex. mozilla.
I’m going to say Mozilla Open Standard for this one. We wanted to create what would eventually be a world-class news and content platform which showcases the organizations, communities, movements and individuals who best exemplify how open systems empower people to reach their fullest potential. 300FeetOut worked as part of the Mozilla team, following their coding guidelines to help forward their open-source mission. Even though it got shut down almost as soon as it started (thanks to an editor’s opinion piece), it was a really great tight collaboration with a company that’s ultra-open-source. Lots of user levels, complex admin workflow, open code repo. It was great fun.
bri. ‘alohilani resort.
I would say ‘Alohilani is a favorite of mine. What made it memorable was that it pushed us out of our comfort zone designing and developing for Highgate Hotels. We were trying to create this very elegant oasis (to match the physical brand build happening simultaneously), but when we presented the first round of concepts (after the brand build had evolved), they craved more energy— “more VEGAS!”, I thought it was a nice challenge. We explored more exciting layouts and bold functionality that pushed the use of color, imagery, and video to reflect everything that the resort offers. It was a behemoth of a project that we all worked on, and it’s really nice to see how far it’s gone (and why we’ve won so many awards for it!)
andrew. granular.
I really enjoyed a small but challenging project for Granular. Granular has several country-specific versions of their website. The task was to create a way to retain the original referral data for visitors to one of their sites who automatically get rerouted to another Granular site based on their ISP location. So if a person in São Paulo clicks on a third-party website link (for instance) to the US Granular site, the US site automatically reroutes that person to the Brazilian Granular site. The referrer for that Brazilian site visit was then getting listed in Google Analytics as the US Granular site rather than the original third-party site. From the Brazilian site’s Google Analytics point-of-view, the third-party site never existed. I needed to come up with a way to have that third-party site or any referrer/search engine data get captured by Google Analytics as the original traffic referrer… a problem made more complicated by how quickly (we’re talking milliseconds) the redirect occurred. Working with the keen development minds on our team, we were able to devise a rather elegant solution using a bit of JQuery, Google Tag Manager, and a customized Google Analytics setup to deliver just what Granular wanted and more.
joren. edios media.
Edios Media is my favorite. It’s the culmination of a lot of progress in our design and development process.