designing the other way round



After having created an interactive cover for the printing magazine AGI we had a half-page ad to play around with and decided to use it to promote a secret club, so it seemed interaction was, once again, key as we wanted the ad to be half about us and half us, if that makes sense - we wanted to advertise without stepping out of the creative realm we were advertising, so interaction it was. being pressed for time, we looked to the advent calendar we had made in December for recyclable ideas and we chose to revisit the most minimal of animations: The Thaumatrope.


a minimal bit of planning of format and communication.


Annabelle's sketches for the Thaumatrope.

What would make sense would be to have the illustrator design the image for the 'trope and the the designer do the ad, and that was how we started, but what made this design process interesting was that after initial sketches, we swapped.


Kenn baring his chest to create the thaumatrope.

Not only did we swap roles, we also pretty much swapped the order you usually make these things in, starting a rough layout in Illustrator (of course initial ideas had happened in the sketchbook) before creating the artwork for the ad as a collage, building the ad as an oversized object.


Kenn's initial Illustrator sketch next to Annabelle's finished artwork.

This is obviously a time consuming way to work, but not massively slower and the exercise of swapping thing around benefitted the ad immensely, looking through an issue of the magazine, this will surely stand out, although this is very much an attempt to promote the work we do and ultimately to get more work, we decided not to put our name on the ad. Working under the name a secret club obviously makes that decision easier, but our experience with memory work also suggests that although fewer people who will have looked at the ad will know our name, the ones that have checked out the website following the ad will have a much clearer memory of us - spoon-feeding is not good for your memory, exploration is. Furthermore, this effectively filters out the less passionate and curious members of our target audience, the ones that wouldn't be interested in working with us anyway.



See the finished ad and make the thaumatrope here. (pdf)

luddite web design

This post could be seen as a shameless plug of the new website of a secret club



But it's also an exploration of an idea born from a mistake: When I made the first in incarnation of the website, it was merely a splash, but I wanted a minimum of content so I added a pdf paper kit that you could download, but made a typo thereby creating a broken link, A secret club is about play and creativity, so this broken link became a riddle and I warmed to the idea of designing in this "wrong" way - you could easily figure out that "downolads" would mean "downloads", in fact, you might go one further and have a peak inside the "downloads" folder - you could add content here that would only be accessible to curious souls.

The idea of designing riddles that were based on very basic functions in the browser instead of clever flash could easily be expanded, URLs would not be clickable, you'd have to type them in, you could have QR codes that directed your mobile device to a site with instructions for you to type into your computer's browser - leading somewhere not accessible by smartphone, you could have text the same colour as the background, you could have several windows that would have to be placed next to each other in order to make sense. This would make the web more manuel, it would be walking by asking directions instead of by sat nav. It would be going to the library instead of googling. Not that I don't like sat nav or google, in the same way I don't dislike beer, I just like to drink other things every now and again.



When I designed the story for a secret club I thought I'd use these tricks, but it didn't fit in. The story is a fighting fantasy style mini-adventure that had been tested on Twitter and it involved you embracing a setting where you walked around a flat. Adding difficult luddite navigation would take you out of the fantasy, there are still some hidden features and harder to work out tricks, but they all fit within the concept of the story.



Furthermore, I was worried about the user, whether he/she/it would be able to figure it out and that's the really dangerous bit, something in me wanted to make this accessible to everybody, cater to the lowest denominator and that is a horrible thing. If we are are so obsessed with things having to be easy, we are going to be spoiled, if you're spoiled, you get lazy and ultimately you'll forget how to solve problems.