The Barbarian Group - Projects Feed

Pepsi NEXT

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:17:12 -0400

We're super excited to announce the launch of a project we've been working on with Pepsi's newest product: Pepsi NEXT, a cola with real cola taste and 60% less sugar. We built the world's first Internet Taste Test proving the product premise, “Drink It To Believe It." By clicking through the Facebook app experience, you are entered for the chance for noted LA improv actors do their best impression of you trying Pepsi NEXT for the first time, using information from your Facebook profile. The Barbarian Group, in partnership with our friends over at Funny or Die, produced the real-time campaign that features Rob Riggle, with humorous (and sanctioned) impressions of notable pop culture figures like Internet mogul "Gary Vaynerchuk(Gary Vaynerchuk)":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv357mxpOAA&list=PLE3A99310E24A612A&index=8&feature=plpp_video, BuzzFeed CEO "Jonah Peretti(Jonah Peretti)":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DkPqu9dbOU&list=PLE3A99310E24A612A&index=6&feature=plpp_video and a favorite internet meme here at TBG, "Scumbag Steve(Scumbag Steve)":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUp9CXcw_-4&list=PLE3A99310E24A612A&index=7&feature=plpp_video. The team here is so excited about this launch as it's an example of how a big digital creative concept, rooted in social media, can launch a new brand to the masses. It's a highly ambitious idea that, at its core, depends on spontaneous, on-set invention and large-scale video production in near real time. We're excited that Pepsi NEXT came on this wild ride with us. It's Gonna Be Awesome.

Boosted Secret Sites

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:45:52 -0400

Our latest project in the ongoing Boosted Series was "Secret Sites(http://www.boostedsecretsites.com)":http://www.boostedsecretsites.com, a scavenger hunt through the furthest corners of Internet culture. Our partners, Samsung and Intel, wanted the third installment of our Boosted campaign to retain the clue-based riddles of our last game, "Tweetcracker(http://www.tweetcracker.com)":http://www.tweetcracker.com. So, we created several hidden sites as easter eggs around the Internet and created a clue-based, Hangman-inspired quest to find them. Every few days the Boosted Secret Sites hub page revealed a challenge consisting of a URL full of numbered blanks. We posted clues on Facebook and Twitter to help players find them. The prize? The first, eligible person who visited a Secret Site won a Samsung Series 7 with 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 Processors. !http://www.barbariangroup.com/assets/users/anthony/images/0001/1098/SPLASH_02.jpg! Each secret site was a tribute embracing the knock-knock-jokes of Internet culture: "the single-serving site(http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/single-serving-site)":http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/single-serving-site. We were not only informing our target of tech-savvy folks that Samsung makes laptops with Intel processors, we were letting them know that together, these brands 'get' the internet. The first challenge led users to "www.ScratchAndSniffWebsite.com(http://www.scratchandsniffwebsite.com)":http://www.scratchandsniffwebsite.com. !http://www.barbariangroup.com/assets/users/anthony/images/0001/1095/SCRATCH.jpg! We didn’t need to bury the message about the Series 7 within the execution. We created ads that were inherently fun and enjoyable to experience. And luckily, Samsung and Intel were on board. How couldn't they be when we had a 312px tall Intel logo on "www.ClientDreamWebsite.com(http://www.clientdreamwebsite.com)":http://www.clientdreamwebsite.com. !http://www.barbariangroup.com/assets/users/anthony/images/0001/1092/CLIENT_2.jpg! Check out "www.BoostedSecretSites.com(http://www.boostedsecretsites.com)":http://www.boostedsecretsites.com now!

Boosted Tweetcracker

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:34:33 -0400

The Samsung Series 7 laptop is a sleek machine fit for James Bond, and we wanted to give the audience a taste of being a spy. What better way then letting them try to crack a safe using twitter? The main objectives were to build buzz in social networks around the Series 7, and grow their social media audience. The project lived on a campaign microsite, but the promotion itself played out almost entirely on Twitter and Facebook. We doled out clues to our growing audience on our Facebook and Twitter pages, and people could guess with our #tweetcracker hashtag.

Mozilla Mark Up

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:39:45 -0400

Much like Mozilla, we believe that the Web is the greatest tool available to us. It connects and empowers us, and allows for the open sharing of ideas. Mozilla Mark Up is about celebrating this resource and making a statement that an open Web is an essential part of our future. Mark Up's message is that we are all authors of the Web, and by leaving our Mark we are supporting a Web that is open and in the hands of the people. Besides making a kick-ass browser, people love Mozilla for their commitment to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, and we wanted to do them justice. From the beginning, we aimed to make something more than just another technical showcase - we wanted to connect on an emotional level with the Web. Collaborating with talented artist Evan Roth (yet another reason for us to get excited about this project), Mark Up was born - at once both a beautifully visualized metaphor of everyone's contributions to the Web and a call for support to keep it open and collaborative. !https://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/hlai/images/0001/0219/screen1.jpg! At its most basic level, Mark Up is a collection of user-submitted marks, all connected in a continuous line in 3D space that is symbolic of our message. Using Evan's Graffiti Markup Language (GML) as the data storage for our Marks, Adam Miller, the lead developer on the team, created the drawing input system that we would use to capture users' Marks. From there we started experimenting with visualizing the Marks in 3D. !https://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/hlai/images/0001/0222/write.jpg! One of the first challenges we had to address was making the experience accessible to as many as possible - a mandate from Mozilla's mission statement. This meant that we couldn't use WebGL (due to the issues with certain Intel processors), a major setback for any website creating a 3D experience. Adam dove right into addressing this problem, and was able to create a bespoke visual engine that simulated 3D while maintaining an optimized framerate on slower computers. !https://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/hlai/images/0001/0204/indev.jpg! After we had the prototype up and running we added the capability for special marks that could have a quote attached. These would be for notable guest contributors such as Lawrence Lessig, a well-known Internet advocate who also contributed to the Mark Up manifesto. Additionally, we are making the source code and data set available to the public, enabling anyone to make their own visualizations. A future community section will showcase these projects. The launch of Mark Up is the culmination of an exciting collaboration between Mozilla, Evan Roth, and the Barbarian Group, and we're proud to be part of a project that not only has its roots in the open web, but also seeks to foster and cultivate its future.

Skeletons and The DoT

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:36:22 -0400

The "New York City DOT(New York City DOT)":http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/home/home.shtml came to us with a startling statistic: When a pedestrian is struck at 30mph by a vehicle, there is an 80% chance they will survive. If a pedestrian is struck at 40mph, there is a 70% chance they will die. 10mph, a seemingly subtle difference while you are behind the wheel, is the difference between life and death as a pedestrian. As part of the DOT's 'that's why it's 30' campaign, the barbarians took it to the streets.Using the DOT's wanco matrix sign, a speed radar, and 48x27 dot matrix (think microsoft paint), we created a speed board to remind New Yorkers to slow down. The speed board displays a graphic of the familiar pedestrian walking man, with the posted speed limit of 30mph. !https://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/philip/images/0001/0110/skeleton_comp.jpg! The on board radar detects passing cars speed, and if a car breaks the limit, the pedestrian changes to a skeleton, with SLOW DOWN in giant letters. !https://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/philip/images/0001/0107/person_comp.jpg! "Henry Lai(Henry Lai)":http://www.barbariangroup.com/employees/henry_lai came up with the skeleton graphic. This was an exercise in classic video game illustration, adhering to just a simple dot-matrix with lit or non-lit pixels. Originally we had created looping animations for each state of the pedestrian, a walking man, and a walking skeleton. !http://barbariangroup.com/assets/users/philip/images/0001/0113/combined_walk.gif! This not only violated the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices by using rapid flashing and animation... But we also learned that we only had 2-6 seconds of display time, a 48x27 pixel grid, and 2KB of ram to play with. In the end, the two frames were plenty. The boards are starting to roll out around the city, and we are hugely proud to have worked on something that can get drivers to slow down, and keep pedestrians safe.

Screenstagram

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:48:47 -0400

h1. Screenstagram We love photos from our friends and we love APIs. We even like a screen saver every now and then. So when Instagram launched their API, we took the opportunity to play around with all of these things and create Screenstagram, our Instagram driven screen saver. Screenstagram displays photos from Instagram. It can show you your friends' photos or photos from the Instagram popular feed, which contains highly rated photos from across the Instagram community. We built this screen saver with the help of our favorite graphics tool, Cinder. Once you enter your Instagram credentials it'll show photos from your Instagram feed. It's not rocket science, but it's nice! Download. Read the full blog post.

The GE Show Episode 5: Solar

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:27:26 -0400

What began as a journey to sxsw to build a solar powered carousel, has ended with "Episode 5 of the GE Show: Solar.(Episode 5 of the GE Show: Solar.)":http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/solar/ In this episode we are looking at the future of solar technology, and the ways in which we can harness the energy of the sun. This comes on the heels of GE's release of their new "CdTe thin film panels. (CdTe thin film panels.)":http://cleantechnica.com/2011/04/11/ge-invests-600-million-into-manufacturing-solar-pv-breakthrough-technology-most-efficient-solar-cell-on-market/ The panels represent new breakthroughs in affordability and scale. The idea is to put thousands of these solar panels into arrays to power things like factories and cities, not just your refrigerator. We used these panels to power our carousel at sxsw, and the idea that 100sq miles of these panels could power the national grid got us thinking about the power of the sun. For our first module, _Power of the Sun_, we took the basic make-up of the sun: _71% Hydrogen, 21.7% Helium_ , and used that recipe by filling a weather balloon with that mixture of gas. We ignited it and captured the chemical reaction with 24 cameras shooting the explosion in a full circle, creating a 360 degree portrait of our miniature sun. <notextile>

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Our second module is about GE's solar powered carousel, a 1926 antique carousel modernized with an electric motor, over 2000ft of GE's tetra contour LED lights, and painted all white. !/assets/users/philip/images/0000/9735/carousel.jpg! The carousel ran off of 76 Solar CDTE Panels at sxsw, which captured over 5KW to run the motor. This module makes use of the new HTML5 video object, it's an interactive video where you can spin through a couple days of the carousel at sxsw. "Check it out!(Check it out!)":http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/solar/index.html#ch2 !/assets/users/philip/images/0000/9741/yeah.jpg! That's not all, our final module is a curation of some awesome stuff people are doing around the world with solar. You can visit the rest of the show "here(here)":http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/solar !/assets/users/philip/images/0000/9738/page.jpg!

Firefox Spark

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:26 -0400

Have you ever wanted to see how something you used, something you liked or shared, spread around the world as it went from person to person? We did. We had the privilege of working with Mozilla to launch their first ever mobile browser: Firefox for Android. We needed something compelling, global, beautiful, slightly addictive, and well, mobile, to spread the word. We concepted and designed and The Little Workshop built Spark, a sharing game that celebrates the release of Firefox’s first mobile browser, as much as it celebrates the global community for whom it was designed. Sign up to get your own virtual “Spark” and then pass it to your social network to watch it change, grow and travel around the world. Real-time visualizations of your personal statistics show you how far your Spark has traveled. And as you play, you can choose to meet challenges, which provide the opportunity to earn over forty virtual badges. The real fun comes in being a part of something larger than yourself. A colorful interactive global data visualization of the full community’s progress allows you to watch Spark spread throughout the world.

Get Your Game On

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:03:35 -0500

It’s not very often we get the privilege to think about cocktails as part of our jobs, but with our most recent campaign for SKYY Vodka, we were lucky to do just that. We crafted the engaging, flirty and curious Get Your Game On application for SKYY Vodka. More fun and intimate than your typical online personality quiz, we brought SKYY’s sexy sensibility alive online with a little help from Facebook and Hunch. We used Facebook’s inherently social environment to get people’s attention and paired that with Hunch’s clever “taste graph” API to create a neat social experience that’s fun, intimate and addictive. After answering a series of saucy questions, you, the user, get your Game Name along with a bevy of tips and tricks to help them ramp up your nightlife game. You can even identify your Facebook friends that might be your social “best bets.” You can continue to compare yourself to and find out a little bit more about your friends on Facebook thanks to Hunch knowing secrets that we only wish we were privy to. Beyond that, you get custom tips helping you select the perfect outfit to wear out, a slick pick-up line tailored just for you and your very own SKYY Vodka cocktail.

Pepcid Max My Dream

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:03:10 -0500

For almost a year we have been hard at work alongside JWT to create an awesome experience Pepcid Max: ‘Max My Dream,’ which visualizes the sweet dreams you have after a peaceful night’s sleep with Pecid Max. Wether you are dreaming about puppies in space or political discourse ‘Max My Dream’ visualizes everything - yes, everything. We were thrilled with the challenge and really pushed the tech and visual design to achieve our goal. We first curated themes, visuals, animations and styles that covered the most common dreams using extensive real world dream research. Our matrix of approximately 1 billion animations, sub animations, modifiers, settings, illustrations and keywords allowed us the flexibility to visualize everything. But we wanted to get the real meaning of your dreams - the actions, the main characters, the mood, and the passive bystanders - so, we added language processing logic to all the assets we had gathered. Barbarians built a natural language processor focused on parsing the grammar of short sentences, with an eye towards common Internet slang - essentially a database containing as many items as we could think of and illustrate. This aggregation of media was then handed off to Flash for rendering to the visitor. Processing the language of dreams and building out the animations were complex, computationally expensive processes. Dreams are submitted to a central database, and a pool of language processor servers work through the submission. This allows us to scale horizontally as demand requires. We can add new processor servers in minutes as needed - and yes, it’s some crazy tech we are super proud of. Extracting meaning from free text is no small feat, and we’re very pleased with our results. Then it came down to opening it up to the user. Giving them the outlet and open-ended environment to visualize their dreams. Upon simply typing in whatever they want and clicking, “Max My Dream,” the curtain of the night sky parts and you are engulfed by your dream. Suddenly you are back to walking through a field of dinosaurs on your way to Grandma’s house. As with all dreams, the moment is fleeting. Almost as quickly as you entered, the dream melts away. Although we had amazing support from JWT, and Pepcid wasn’t afraid to do something this bold and interesting, the process was long, demanding and presented a lot of problems that have never been tackled before. Pepcid Max My Dream is no doubt a huge progress in how people can and do break down language for something artistic, and we are excited to see where language processing goes next.

GE Santa's Toy Lab

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:52:34 -0400

As we approached the 2010 holiday season, we helped futuristic jetpack-riding elves make some kick-butt toys enhanced with the latest tech from GE - of course on the Internet, that is. You might remember when we redesigned Santa’s Sleigh last year incorporating all of GE’s sweet new innovations. Well, this year we’re taking it to the workshop! Earn points by pairing up each GE technology with its matching toy. Once they’re GE-enhanced, they get sent off to Santa to deliver. We’re featuring six of GE’s coolest new technologies in the game, and while they may seem futuristic, these things really exist! You’ve gotta see the stuff they’ve been working on, it really is mind-blowing. And of course, you can flaunt your high scores - challenge your Facebook friends, print a certificate of completion and hang it above your desk, send an email to your mum - but we’ll leave that part up to you. So grab your carbon fiber hoverboards and fly on over to play the game! It’s catchy. And once you’ve finished, post your score up on the Edison’s Desk Facebook page. GE is donating $5 to Toys for Tots for every post. If that doesn’t make you feel all warm and Christmasy inside, we don’t know what will. Plus, we love seeing who’s the first to beat our high scores.

Sears iAd: Be The Santa!

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:45:36 -0400

When Apple announced its new iAd platform, we saw it as an opportunity to create a fully immersive, interactive mobile ad that used all the latest iPhone 4 technology - we were excited, to say the least. Sears had the same idea, so naturally they reached out to us to create their first ever iAd for their holiday 2010 campaign. We concepting the iAd as a series of mobile digital tools to meet a busy Santa’s needs. The iAd enables you to personalize your experience by selecting a video-animated guide, choosing between several gift suggestion tools and playing games to uncover coupons and special offers. Coupons can be saved to the iPhone camera roll for later redemption, and viewers could even download Sears shopping apps or save personalized gift suggestions and links without leaving the experience. The design reflected the Sears’ “Be The Santa” messaging and we wanted to make the best use of the fun and unique interface opportunities offered by the touchscreen. For example, shaking the phone revealed the contents of wrapped gifts, tracing a circle spun ornaments around a wreath and swiping across the screen changed the view into a panoramic winter wonderland. Lush backgrounds, animations and character photography combined with dimensional iconography, illustrations and interface elements created a stylish and inviting holiday-themed environment. A cohesive, modern approach to the visual design tied the iAd together and reinforced the Sears branding as well as the “Be The Santa” campaign. We learned a lot about iAd development along the way, and we’re very happy with the end result.

Samsung Boosted

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:25:23 -0400

Samsung “Boosted” was a trio of online mini-campaigns with the aim of promoting the Samsung RF510 laptop, which includes an Intel i5 core processor with “turbo boost.” The idea was to “boost” different aspects of individuals’ lives, especially in time for the holidays. This campaign was exciting for us both because it stepped beyond the norm of Samsung’s day to day product-focused advertising and because it leveraged social and earned media to increase the client’s real sales. *Tweet Wrap* Our first boost was tweet wrap - holiday wrapping paper customized with tweets. That was the simple idea behind “Tweet Wrap,” the holiday hit we created for Samsung. And when your tweets get boosted, they appear on customized wrapping paper that you can use to wrap gifts for that special web savvy someone. The site experience was extremely simple. Choose a pattern, pick a twitter address, or a search of key terms on twitter, and your tweet wrap is instantly created. We gave away the first 3,000 rolls for free and after then users could order rolls of their tweet wrap for around $10. The early December launch of the site coincided with the audience getting excited about the holidays, and the site went viral almost immediately. The free rolls were gone in less than a day. The site garnered mentions on dozens of influential blogs, including Time Magazine Techland and Mashable, and was featured in the offline press on CNBC, Canada's Globe and Mail and U.K.'s Metro. *Discount Dash* The third and final boost, Discount Dash, was a campaign that utilized Twitter to increase product sales. For one week, people followed the Boosted Twitter team to collect promo codes and unlock discounts for select Samsung products by two online retailers. *Your Mom’s Computer* There is always one “tech” person in the family who teaches mom how to use the computer and deals with the old machine. This was our target audience, and we wanted to boost their moms’ computers. Your Mom’s Computer was a Facebook based campaign that asked participants to submit pictures of mom’s outdated computer set-up for a chance to win weekly holiday prizes or be one of the three final winners at the end of the campaign.

The GE Show

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:47:30 -0400

About a year-and-a-half ago we set out on an adventure with General Electric. Over the course of a few months we explored GE and blogged our observations and ideas. We called our client discovery process GE Adventure. As we explored the different business units we started to recognize a unifying theme: everyone works on problems that touch a lot of people but can be so large or abstract that they are difficult for individuals to comprehend. It’s pretty hard to get your head around trillion dollar infrastructure projects, but it is really interesting and really important, so we dug in and started thinking about a new context to talk about this stuff. Everyone knows the name GE but few really know its scope and scale - GE needed to tell its story in a digital way and through a truly web-native experience with different interactions to connect with people at all levels. We wanted to highlight the large and abstract problems that GE tables daily because we recognized that these challenges were interesting and important for all of us. While we were on the road we spent time batting around ideas of how to solve this problem. One of the thoughts we had was to launch a “show” to explain all of GE’s big problems. We knew we weren’t interested in repeating what everyone else does -- fitting 30 minutes of content into a three minute ‘show’. As a result, we spent a lot of time thinking about making a truly web-native show, creating modules with various types of interaction in place of the segments that normally make up TV shows. As we slowly developed this idea, it emerged into what is now The GE Show. *Episode 1 Healthy Hospitals* The first episode helps illustrate the size, scale and complexity of the healthcare world and of running a hospital by using a video, games, infographics and polls. The game ‘Patient Shuffle‘ helped visitors understand the difficulties of allocating resources inside a hospital and was a huge success with over 93,000 hits and with average play time of 8:28 minutes. Because the game was so popular, we even made it into an iPad and iPhone game that’s now been downloaded over 7,500 times. (Patient Shuffle for iPad for iPad is now available at the iTunes App Store.) *Episode 2 Electric Vehicles* Electric vehicles have been around for about a hundred years but only in the last decade have they become a viable alternative to gas-guzzling internal combustion engines. Recognizing that overhauling the automotive industry for a sustainable future is a gigantic challenge, we made electric vehicles our subject for the second episode of The GE Show. In four weeks we developed the second episode, which includes a tool to calculate your daily driving mileage, a driving game, some stunning data predictions projected out to year 2030 and several fantastic videos to tie the whole thing together. We are hoping to make each episode better than the last, so this was definitely a step in the right direction for us. Each new episode gets more ambitious than the last, and we are pushing our storytelling in new directions. *Episode 3 ‘Flight!’* We have been chasing the dream of flight for hundreds of years. As we have conquered this frontier flying has become mundane, almost an annoyance. It has become about being groped and strip searched in security lines. In this episode we hoped to reconnect people with the magic of flying. It’s really pretty awesome that 450-ton metal tubes can zip across the sky everyday carrying thousands of people. With a new format, this third episode features a short film about the hidden intricacies of take-offs and landings, a plane design simulator, some of the craziest planes and plane photos you’ve ever seen, the possibilities of electric flight and the future of super efficient engines. And be sure to watch the highly acclaimed path of flight video. *Episode 4 ‘The Rebirth of Rails’* Trains are awesome. Did you know that people who are obsessed with trains are called “foamers?” It’s true. Over the course of the few weeks it took to produce The Rebirth of Rails, we all became little honorary foamers. Highlights of the fourth episode include a train switching game, a visually stunning slow-motion video that breaks down the idea of regenerative braking at a zillion frames per second and an interactive word problem that gives visitors a glimpse of the potential future of rails.

Bloomberg.com Redesign

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:33:53 -0400

The redesign of Bloomberg.com went live after almost a year of work. At first glance, the combination of Bloomberg and Barbarian might seem like an odd fit. How could the same group that created the Subservient Chicken get along with the company that keeps the financial and business worlds moving forward? On the surface, it might not seem like we’d get along but it was actually quite awesome. Bloomberg is a dynamic, forward thinking company with a great culture and a focus on innovation. Just looking at the building and stepping into the main lobby is proof of that. They are also the world’s largest private network and one of the first providers of email to their customers. And they came to us with the type of challenges we love. Internally, the folks at Bloomberg wanted to think about what their website would be in three to five years, and they came to us to bring what they imagined to life. Bloomberg.com delivers 500 news stories a day, aggregates content from relevant third parties and has a different global audience from the Bloomberg Terminal users. Bloomberg.com needed it’s own identity. We started by evaluating the user experience: focusing on legibility and scanability, enhancing search, reducing the navigation and clutter and trying to improve the overall quality of the experience. Bloomberg was really satisfied with the ideas and thinking we showed them for a future site. There was a need to bridge the gap between what we presented to them for the future and the old amber on black Bloomberg.com. So we came up with what you see today. Also as part of the process we got to collaborate closely with the marketing team at Bloomberg on the About section of the new site, helping bring the Bloomberg story to life. All this is to say Bloomberg has been busy and so have we and we’re both excited for the outcome.

Roush Fenway Racing Redesign

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:06:16 -0400

Roush Fenway came to us with an interesting request - they were looking to reposition themselves as an entertainment and marketing entity and not just a race team. So, at the beginning of our eight month engagement, we helped Roush get to the core of what they stood for and break down what performance and success meant on the track and on the web. This approach was a change not only for Roush but also for everyone in the industry and it was clear that their repositioning would have to start with their website. We wanted to channel the incredible energy and vigor of the racetrack to the site with color and photography. The site was to also recognize the devotion of fans by keeping drivers front and center. All content was organized so that it was both easy to search and easy to navigate. In addition to the race and team information, we featured their current sponsors as well as case studies to highlight their successful marketing programs. Overall, the warm and enthusiasm of the Roush team converted us into NASCAR fans and we couldn’t have had a better experience.

Red Pyramid Puzzle

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:41:19 -0400

Rick Riordan, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, asked us to create a digital, interactive experience to promote the release of the first book in his latest series The Kane Chronicles. _The Red Pyramid_, the new book being released, was packed with Pharaohs, estranged siblings, family drama, Egyptian mythology, so we designed and built a site to reflect these particular themes. Red Pyramid Puzzle launched as part of a multi-tiered marketing campaign that included a special mailing event that sent mystery packs with audio clips and hieroglyphic codes to help readers solve the online puzzle and immersive experience that features a series of five puzzles based on Egyptian mythology and this first book in The Kane Chronicles. Readers who successfully completed all five puzzles were entered for a chance to win an all expense paid trip for two to meet the author during his book tour. The site engaged readers by integrating digital with the other non-digital parts of the marketing campaign. Along with _The Red Pyramid,_ which was a huge success, becoming #1 on the New York Times children’s hardcover bestseller list within the first weeks after its release, Red Pyramid Puzzle was a successful marketing effort and one that is engaging Riordan fans even today.

Cinder

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:01:42 -0400

Cinder provides a powerful, intuitive toolbox for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. Cinder is cross-platform, and in general the exact same code works under Mac OS X, Windows and a growing list of other platforms — most recently the iPhone and iPad. Cinder is designed to take advantage of platforms’ native capabilities whenever it’s possible, and relies on a minimum of 3rd party libraries. This makes for much lighter, faster applications, and means Cinder apps get free performance, security and capability upgrades whenever the operating system does. We also have worked hard to create a library that feels familiar and intuitive to C++ programmers, building on the idioms and techniques the C++ community has developed over its long history. Cinder’s modern internal memory management virtually eliminates leaks, not only of memory but also of resources like OpenGL textures. We make use of the exceptional Boost libraries to fill in any gaps, and always favor techniques built on features which are currently or soon will be standard C++ (such as std::thread or std::shared_ptr). We are proud of Cinder, and while we think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more powerful environment for creative coding, we’re just getting started. We hope you’ll take the time to experiment with Cinder yourself, and if you like what you see, come join our community. To learn more about cinder check it out at http://libcinder.org.

Aquent E-Fail

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:38:07 -0500

Sometimes, just sometimes, a project you’re working on might run into some problems. Snags. Roadblocks. Hiccups. Things like that. You might find that you’re totally understaffed or that you need a skill set you thought you had but didn’t. Or your hotshot designer might have walked out on you, leaving you, well, effed. Don’t be ashamed – it happens to everyone. In times like these, the best thing to do is let those who need to know, know. You, my friend, need to send an E-Fail. Riding on the success of InternetOnlineWebsite.com, The Barbarian Group and Aquent have teamed up yet again to provide our friends and colleagues with a way to get the word out that things aren’t going so well. Utilizing one of the internet’s most cutting edge technologies, E-Cards, we’ve designed a site that lets you take control of your sinking ship of a project. IAmEffed.com is a free resource to help you get the help you need, fast. What’s more, E-Fails are completely customizable to your current situation and level of distress. Within a matter of seconds, 41 different captions combined with 7 different illustrations provide more than 287 possible combinations. Well-placed humor is used to disarm your recipient, getting them on YOUR side. Thanks, E-Fail! Even better, E-Fail can be sent completely anonymously, allowing you to let your producer, ECD or HR representative know about problems on the project without singling you out as the pariah. So try an E-Fail today! E-Fail, when you care enough to send the very effed.

Rockhall.com

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:21:55 -0400

For almost a year, we had the great pleasure of working with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to redesign its website. It didn’t take more than a second after meeting everyone at Rock Hall to see that they were extremely passionate about the preservation of rock and roll. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum shares an immersive, interactive experience complete with sound, video, and lights, not to mention all kinds of stuff from your favorite rock and roll artists. The music nerd in all of us wet our collective pants over Mick Jagger’s Union Jack cape (from the Stones’ 81-82 world tour), the larger than life-size photography of Jimmy Page in mid-backbend, or the phone in the Annex’s John Lennon exhibit. We were blown away by the hand written lyrics to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division and David Byrne’s original polaroid artwork for the cover of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” But all this needed some help translating to the web. That’s where we came into the picture. We introduced new content initiatives to drive lots of interest from those interested in rock and roll. The homepage summarizes the mission of the museum and the events surrounding it, pushing the user to content deeper within the site. Almost every aspect of the homepage is under editorial control, allowing an editor to promote the most relevant content at any given time. The site's media-rich Inductee pages solidify the Rock Hall’s position of authority on its inductees. There is content here you can’t find anywhere else – induction videos, photo galleries from the ceremony, songs, transcripts of induction speeches, quotes, and links to explore the world around your favorite artist (both inside and outside the Rock Hall). The Events and Exhibits pages captures the history created at the museum and give them life in the online world. All of this content distribution and promotion is fueled by a flexible, super-powerful and intuitive CMS. No lie, this thing is HOT. An editor can control just about every aspect of the content area of the page from one interface, authoring content and relating reusable objects to each other (editorially or through automation) and it is so easy to use that we trained over 30 people in three days on the inner workings of the tool. Each department now has the ability to create and manage its content. That’s quite an improvement over having one person responsible for everything published on the site. Rock Hall is now positioned to create and promote deep, rich pages that assist with the Museum’s mission of preservation and education in a way they weren’t able to accomplish previously. And the Story of Rock is not only captured but also told in the way it should be. We are excited about the work we did in partnership with the Rock Hall and loved having the opportunity to work with the great people in Cleveland.

Aquent InternetOnlineWebsite.com

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:46:19 -0400

Have you ever sat and wondered: “Just how do they make all that Internet? And how do I get me some?” Well, you are not alone. Plenty of folks have struggled with these very questions since the dawn of time, which is why The Barbarian Group teamed up with Aquent, America’s best talent sourcing agency, to create InternetOnlineWebsite.com. “What is InternetOnlineWebsite.com,” you may ask yourself, “besides a catchy URL?” InternetOnlineWebsite.com is a website ABOUT websites. It’s been specially formulated to educate, enlighten and delight those who are looking to add to their online presence and marketing initiatives. Does this sound familiar? “I want this thing on my website, but I don’t know how to get it, or even what it’s called! THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!” Well, fret no more. InternetOnlineWebsite.com knows what it’s called. InternetOnlineWebsite.com is designed with the features of today’s most popular websites, and lets YOU discover more about these features, like what they’re called, why they’re awesome, and who you need to make them. Clicking on almost anything on InternetOnlineWebsite.com will bring up Aquent’s helpful orange box, describing what the thing is for, why you need it, and who you need to hire on to accomplish it. At the bottom of the box, a direct line to those experts at Aquent, who have these people at their disposal and can get you started right away. No fuss, no muss! But wait! There’s more! InternetOnlineWebsite.com isn’t JUST about websites! It also addresses other helpful aspects of anyone’s successful marketing campaign, including: Mobile Internet Online Sites! Send to a friend E-Cards! Sharing on all of the most popular online social places! Flash Videos! Direct Mail Items! Promotional T-Shirts! No more struggling with technical jargon. No more having to explain to your uncle what SEO is. No more Internet Anxiety Disorder. Best of all, InternetOnlineWebsite.com is 100% free, satisfaction guaranteed.

RockHall25.com

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:20:59 -0400

Midway through 2009, we got word that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would be throwing a huge concert event to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The team at the Rock Hall was understandably secretive about the artist list, so when we got the final bill, our jaws dropped. Stevie Wonder. Aretha Franklin. Simon & Garfunkel. All performing together. Metallica with Lou Reed and Ray Davies. U2 performing with Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger. Woah. So we got on the ball and built a fitting site. It was simple and smooth but packed a lot of content into a small space. It featured artist biographies, iTunes playlists hand-picked by the Rock Hall, merchandise, video and unique artist pages. The site was no doubt a reflection of the buzz-worthy celebration.

Digg Labs 365

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:20:15 -0400

To celebrate Digg's five year anniversary, we helped them create a new addition to their Labs project. Digg wanted something that would encapsulate five years of the internet’s most popular stories, allowing them to be sorted and filtered easily, all within an attractive package. Introducing Digg 365: a convenient and stylish repository for all five years of Digg’s most popular stories in one place. Sorting by year, month, day or category means finding the top story from your birthday last year, the biggest entertainment news stories of 2005, or just settling a bar bet about the relative popularity of Obama vs. Megan Fox in 2009. Also, you can check out past stories all the way from Digg's beginning (something that hasn't been available until now).

Nike The AW77 Stories, London

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:24:46 -0400

The AW77 Stories, London started when our friends at Vice came to us very excited about a project for Nike Sportswear. Nike approached Vice in hopes of coming up with an experience to showcase their rockstar products in the high-end NSW line – the AW77 series. Nike wanted something a bit different than their usual traditional sports influenced aesthetic. Something unique, something intense, something Vice + TBG. We collaborated with Vice to come up with a immersive experience, following some of London's hottest talent in a long panoramic view of a foggy london street. Vice recruited an all star cast to come tell the world about their experiences and lifestyles, while sporting Nike's hottest new styles. The Barbarian Group took these stories and laid them out in a seamless environment in which users can flip back and forth between detail views, videos, and the main experience without diving down levels and levels in hierarchy like most product gallery experiences. It's all there, ready to discover, in a new engaging way.