brunobergher::blog

A friend sent me today a link to the just-redesigned website of Boston, Massachusetts base advertising agency Modernista.

All of the content of their website is actually off-site: text in Wikipedia, videos in You Tube, stills in flickr; the site is just a tiny red JavaScript-based menu with an iframe behind it.

Creative director Gary Koepke says in an interview to Creativity:

“There’s such a challenge for ad agencies to be known as digitally savvy and understand what’s going on the medium. We wanted to prove to people that we understand a way that we can have a transparent, open source and highly successful site.”

Well, I think they nailed it.

This approach has at least two great qualities:

• It absolutely expresses how up-to-date the company is, not in terms of visual communication (which should be a commodity in their playing field), but in respect to deeply understanding the way information finds it’s way around nowadays and how open to comments and participation any enterprise must be to succeed in this community-driven world.
• This is a unique solution to their problem, which can’t quite be ‘borrowed’ or ‘be of inspiration’ to the competition. I mean: there’s nothing that can be similar to it: it’ll be either exactly the same or something entirely different. Anything in the middle would be seen as a blatant rip-off. Achieving this in an environment in which stuff is copied all over fast and easily is quite an accomplishment.

I look forward to see how this echoes around the web.

Wenetus Interactive, a brazilian web development company reversed the usual order of fields in a contact form:

Instead of the usual name, e-mail, message order, the form first asks what the visitor wants to say (something that is in her mind, for sure) to only later ask for contact information.

It’s a really simple point, but I believe it makes a big difference on how the visitor perceives the interest the company has on what she has to say.

Matt at signal vs. noise noted the sliding images that explain how the Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion system, works.

I find that interesting, but what really caught my attention was the simplicity of the sign-up process: they only offer you the option of signing up for a free account. That way you don’t feel that the service is being sold to you, but rather that they’re offering you an opportunity to enjoy something good.

THAT is user-friendliness and inviting for business, because we have to be realistic: there’s no way someone is going to choose a paid option without checking out the free one first, standing right next to it.