Global Premium Brands

Last fall we helped Spain’s Global Premium Brands, a distributor and marketer of upscale liqueurs and bottled waters, completely redesign their site from scratch.  The end result is a dark and luxurious experience that aims to capture the depth and quality of GPB’s selection of products. Do you dare to enter…

Global Premium Brands' Spanish site

TravelPod Blog Redesign

Back in November TravelPod debuted a long overdue redesign of their blogger page. As you might have guessed, Relish worked with the fine folks at TravelPod to come up with a new look and feel from the ground up — from wireframes to finished designs. If you’re a Relish enthusiast, you might remember that we helped TravelPod with a logo redesign in 2008.

Before: This is how the blogs used to look... 2001-alicious!

After: A much-needed facelift

The Seven Sins of Greenwashing

In partnership with Standard Media Services, Relish was asked to help TerraChoice Marketing to develop an online presence for their “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” report.  If you’re not as West coast as this Vancouverite to know what Greenwashing is, you can learn about it here.  It’s a practice that’s becoming all too common in the age of marketing everything as “green” this and “enviro” that, so we were especially pleased to be involved in a project that shed some light on this important issue.

I think all of us at Relish would agree that important issues are important… but so are games. To help inject some fun into learning how to spot Greenwashing sins in the wild, we developed the Name That Sin! game to test your ability to spot phony and false green claims.  Test your Greenwashing IQ to see how enviro-savvy you are as a consumer.

Name That Sin! Game

We’re now being represented by Executive Producer Amy Miranda of lunch inc.  Amy has worked extensively in the digital space.  She’s worked as an editor, designer, technology manager, technical services director, project manager and interactive consultant.  She’s been at companies including iXL, CNN, U8TV/Alliance Atlantis, Activate, Henderson Bas and TAXI.

Not only are we working with Amy now, but we’re a part of the Lunch family.  The roster is made up of incredibly talented group designers, production and post production companies, developers and artists.  These folks have mad skill sets ranging from web to motion design to technical services to illustration and sound design.

The digital media's version of the Brady Bunch

You should definitely check out the work of our lunch mates:

Alchemy – http://www.helloalchemy.com
Alex McLeod – http://www.alxclub.com
Bijou – http://www.bijoueditorial.com
Broader Than Broadway – http://www.broader.com
Element – http://www.el-e-ment.ca
Fatbox – http://www.fatbox.ca
Mark Gervais – http://www.markgervais.com
Nick Goso – http://www.planetgoso.com
Imported Artists – http://www.importedartists.com
Indusblue – http://www.indusblue.com
Magic Pony – http://www.magic-pony.com
Narwhal – http://www.narwhalartprojects.com
PixelPusher – http://www.pixelpusher.ca
The Radke Film Group – http://www.radke.tv
Six Degrees – http://www.sixdegrees.ca
sociMedia – http://www.socimedia.com
STEM – http://stemlimited.com
Studio Dialog – http://www.studiodialog.com
Tool of North America – http://www.toolofna.com

That should keep you busy for a while… you should definitely eat Lunch at your desk today…

Late last year we were approached by the fine folks at Xenophile to build an online presence for a new kids’ show called RollBots that was going to be airing on YTV in early 2009.  Naturally we were thrilled at the opportunity to work on a big site chocked full of games and geared totally at kids.  None of us had worked on anything quite like this, so we eagerly accepted the challenge.

Meet Spin, our hero

A bit of background: RollBots are robots that can roll (hence the name) by coiling into a ball.  They live in the clouds in Flip City and roll around on tracks to get from place to place.  There are 11 different tribes a bot can belong to and each tribe has a different role in helping to run the city.  The show centres around a special (and speedy) bot named Spin who mysteriously doesn’t belong to any of the tribes.

Our goal early on was to capture the high energy level of the show and create an online extension of what kids would experience in the episodes — a world where they could explore, learn and uncover new secrets with Spin’s help.

Duking it out with Manx in the "RollBot Rumble" game

How was it accomplished?  Working with Xenophile, we developed a plan to launch with an initial site when the first episode aired in February and then build on that by adding new content on a weekly basis for the entire first season of the show.  Basically we timed it so that the site gets updated late on Friday night so that when the episode airs on Saturday morning kids can immediately go check out what’s been added that week.  All in all, that included 12 standalone games built from scratch, a video mashup tool to make your own RollBots video, a tool to build your own RollBot, a Danuga (the RollBots written language) translator and countless other features to help you rise through the ranks as a cadet at FCPD (Flip City Police Department — where Spin works).

"My RollBot" tool to customize and build your very own bot

We’re nearing the end of season one and it’s been a total blast to be involved in such a visually rich and technically complex project. We’re all looking forward to seeing how the rest of the season plays out — specifically finding out how Spin came to be and what the heck that nasty Vertex is up to… he’s such a meanie!

A leader in Applied Health Sciences education—with an emphasis on hands-on learning—the Michener Institute quickly saw the benefits of what’s turning out to be a natural marriage between the medical applications in use by the industry today and some of the more tactile and er, “hands-on”  interfaces of tomorrow, like touchscreens.

Relish was asked to help build a prototype that showcased a hypothetical Electronic Patient Record that featured new ways of presenting and manipulating existing data as well as new interaction models for integrating some of their existing vendor applications. Using Adobe AIR, (and some fancy DLL modding from the Michener team) we were able to tie everything together into one visually-rich, fullscreen, multitouch experience.

Check out some footage of the demo here:

http://www.relishinteractive.com/snacks/michener/

::

In addition to the award, we were also amazed—and a little overwhelmed—by the positive response we got to the new FITC website we designed and built and also to Relish in general! So thanks to everyone who came to the Get-A-Job event and those who stopped us just to say “hi” over the last 4 days. It really made us remember why we relish what we do.

Who is Sammy?

Does Relish hire robots?

I’m a robot; can I work at Relish?

What is an SVN bot?

Alright, alright — let me quell some of the confusion by answering some of these right now.

Let’s start with the only non-ridiculous question…

What is an SVN bot, anyways?

See, when all the Relishers are all working away at our various projects and we commit some files to our subversion (SVN) repository, Sammy sends us notifications to let us know that these files have been committed.  That way the whole team is constantly kept abreast of updates to a project.

But what makes Sammy special is that you can interact with him.  After you add Sammy to your IM buddy list you can type something like “follow choicebot” to be notified of all commits made to the ChoiceBot project.  That way you’re not being inundated with loads of instant messages — you’re only being updated on projects you’re actually working on.

Unsubscribing is just as easy.  Type “unfollow choicebot” and you won’t receive any more updates.

Now, we developed Sammy for ourselves because we thought it would be useful and fun to build.  Before Sammy came along, we were constantly sending each other one word IMs: “committed?”, “committed”.  When you’re doing this every 5 minutes it gets a bit irritating.  And besides, what else do geeks do when the office shuts down over Christmas?  They write code!

When we were pulling together the various bits of code to build Sammy we were rather astounded at how user-unfriendly the few SVN bots were that we encountered during our Googling.  Sometimes I felt like I needed an advance degree in Computer Engineering from MIT just to open the readme files. Not good.  I knew we could do better.

And being the generous guys that we are, we’d like to share Sammy with the community at large. Sammy is a bit more user-friendly than the other SVN bots we found but you’ll still need a basic knowledge of PHP, FTP (specifically how to change file persmissions) and a bit of SVN smarts.  We’re releasing it under the GNU General Public License, so feel free to carve it up and make it your own.

What makes Sammy tick

There are detailed installation instructions included in the download below but here’s how Sammy works in a nutshell:

1. Sammy exists as a collection of PHP files on a web server that have been bot-ified by imified.  Imified is a really cool service that makes this all possible, but unfortunately it does go offline occasionally so don’t be alarmed if your bot doesn’t work immediately.  Imified might be on the fritz.
2. Sammy listens to the SVN repository via “SVN hooks“.  Hooks are built directly into every SVN repository and allow you to execute scripts when the repository is modified (i.e. files are added, removed, changed, etc). So when a commit is completed, the “post-commit” hook fires and runs a PHP script.
3. Sammy keeps all of the subscriptions (which is what users subscribe to with “follow” commands) in a mySQL database.  That way when a commit happens, it’s easy for Sammy to check the database to see if anybody is subscribing to that particular project and then send out the appropriate instant messages.
4. The commands that Sammy understands (“follow”, “unfollow”, “enable”, “disable”) are defined in a plugin-like method so that it’s easy to add/remove functionality.  We’ve provided what we consider to be “core”commands but we’d love to see where this can go with your great ideas.

Hopefully there are a few ubergeeks out there who a) understand what this is and b) are curious enough to check it out.  Give it a spin and tell us what you think.

And say hi to the van Noistroms for us!

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.

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:

…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!