Twenty-two years ago, Gladeye’s cofounder and chief executive officer Tarver Graham was working for a film production company in Auckland, New Zealand, when he found himself transfixed by the power of Flash, then the most powerful web animation tool on the market. Not letting a formal design education slow him down, Tarver dove in and designed the film company’s website, attracted a few photography clients and, after launching a dozen websites, realized he had a company.

“In New Zealand, we’re known for trying things,” Tarver says. “I just got started and was so passionate about what I was doing, I would wake and the first thing I’d think about was jumping into a project. Together with designer Guy Trowbridge, I founded Gladeye. In those days, people were looking for original work. We began each project thinking, ‘How can we do something that hasn’t existed before?’” As for the company name, which is a slightly out-of-date word for a sexually provocative, come-hither glance, Tarver “borrowed” the name from a friend who had the idea for it but wasn’t using it. “I guess I owe him a beer,” Tarver says with a laugh.

Two decades later, Gladeye continues to break new ground. Housed in a 4,100-square-foot 150-year-old former mansion across from Auckland’s central city park, where Gladeye’s team takes lunch on sunny days, the agency is home to 23 designers, digital storytellers and engineers. Its work blends experiential design with boundary-pushing engineering showcased in projects such as its AI-powered, personalized media production pipeline HyperCinema; immersive storytelling for National Geographic; and a motion-driven brand identity for film production company Sweetshop.

But it was Gladeye’s award-winning work for HuffPost’s “Highline” section, which started in 2015, that solidified its reputation as a digital storytelling agency. This was the invention of longform journalism for the digital age—deep dives into topics like the opioid crisis, immigration and Trump’s border wall—designed to plunge readers into an emotionally experiential territory. “We began [by developing] a deep understanding of each topic until we could find an emotional truth,” Tarver says. “Facts don’t change minds, but emotional connections might.” Soon, A-list clients like activist organization Emerson Collective and French multinational bank BNP Paribas came calling. Gladeye never looked back.

Today, Gladeye’s roster of work is diverse and wide ranging. There’s no discernible house style beyond an adventurous approach to each new project. “Every piece of work we do frames the design around the story,” says Tarver. “We work to find a clear throughline of the story. Then, we ask ourselves, ‘How can we build a design system to support it?’ You can put these pieces of work together, and they all feel quite different. The look and feel comes from the story, not a house style.”

A deep dive into the think tank

For L’Atelier BNP Paribas, a forecasting arm of the bank, Gladeye created “Social Mobility in the Digital Age,” an investigation into how digital tech affects economic mobility. A striking visual metaphor depicts a businesswoman falling off a ladder and down through a rabbit hole of economic precarity. As the site makes clear, social mobility moves both ways. Visitors scroll down and find themselves plunged into a 16,000-word-long critique of late-stage capitalism and its discontents.

In a TL;DR world, how do you enliven a white paper on wealth inequality for an audience of global thought leaders? Gladeye answers with a vibrant blend of typography, animation and illustrations that creates an emotionally evocative experience. Scrolling through “Social Mobility in the Digital Age” delivers a breathless tour of industrial, digital and virtual revolutions. Displayed against a pixelated background of imagery that constantly forms, dissolves and reforms in zooming 3-D, the text lives in an atomized world of constant change.

Follow the Water: Into the Amazon

Adam Wouldes, head of design at Gladeye, describes the creative brief for National Geographic’s digital experience “Into the Amazon” as: “help tell the importance of the water system within the Amazon Basin.” What could have been a dry explanation of the hydrological cycle becomes, in Gladeye’s hands, a tour de force of digital storytelling. The viewer scrolls downward like flowing water, encountering astounding photographs, sobering facts—such as microplastics found in glaciers 21,000 feet above sea level—and storytelling that explains the complexities of the hydrological cycle, starting with a single drop of water in the mountaintops of the Andes.

Wouldes describes the UX watchword as “skim, swim, dive,” a multilayered approach that enables viewers to engage at their preferred depth. For those who tire of scrolling, a button displays a map of the region and offers quick access to in-depth explorations of any of the seventeen National Geographic articles, photo galleries and videos. Wouldes says visitors spend an average of seven minutes on the map alone—an eternity by web standards.

Sweetshop: it’s called motion pictures for a reason

Small but mighty, Sweetshop is a New Zealand–based film production company with six offices around the world. Home to a roster of 40 different commercial directors, Sweetshop’s work includes Academy Award–nominated movies; commercials for American Express, luxury brand Jo Malone and Uber Eats; and mind-blowing experiments with AI.

Burdened by a stale identity and a minimal, sans serif look that screamed “basic,” Sweetshop reached out to Gladeye for a refresh that would “develop a digital experience by creatives for creatives,” according to Kate Forsythe, design director on the project. Gladeye built an elegant, playful design system featuring negative space, bold typography and a restrained color palette.

“For film directors, motion is massive,” Forsythe explains. “Our goal was to create a narrative for motion, whether that’s on hover or basic movements. We wanted to design a striking visual statement that allowed the content to evolve dynamically. We had to put the focus on creative, showcase the new work and develop a timeless aesthetic. And, because the co–chief executive officers are women, we added a feminine aesthetic with a pink background.”

The result is part portfolio, part platform. On the site, videos expand, typography shifts around the screen, and graphics get pushed to the side to create elements of play that draw people into the website and keep them there. Thanks to the Storyblok CMS Gladeye deployed, Sweetshop can continually update the site with its latest commercials, films, photos and monthly drops of fresh work.

Gladeye Ventures: from projects to products

In 2022, Tarver and his team began exploring the storytelling potential of ChatGPT. Prompted with a few of Tarver’s biographical details, ChatGPT delivered a gripping narrative that featured him as a brave guerrilla jungle fighter. It wasn’t long before the team was taking that output and generating imagery in Stable Diffusion. And that’s when the lightbulb went on. “Our insight was to connect personalized storytelling to generative AI to a live event,” Tarver remembers. “No one else in the world was doing this.”

Working with creative director Miles Gregory, Tarver and his team started Gladeye Ventures, an internal startup incubator to turn their experiments in AI into a product. A year later,  Gladeye Ventures released HyperCinema: Enter the Multiverse, the world’s first live-event AI generative immersive storytelling experience. “Having the agency was an absolutely critical asset in getting HyperCinema off the ground,” Tarver says. “Roles shifted, and employees moved from agency to startup and back again. There was real synergy there.”

At HyperCinema, attendees—dubbed Heroes—were photographed and then prompted to undergo a personality assessment that determined their fears, motivations and preferences. Behind the scenes, HyperCinema went to work, creating a personalized short film in near-real-time along with a gallery of images that placed Heroes in epic moments ranging from World War I to Burning Man.

Launched in 2023, HyperCinema was a sensation, attracting 27,000 people in Auckland. Now, Gladeye Ventures is partnering with brands, museums and theme parks to turn HyperCinema into a storytelling platform that deepens visitor engagement. At the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, HyperCinema: Game On! enables up to 3,000 visitors to virtually suit up and get in the game themselves.

Asked to predict where Gladeye Ventures will be five years into the future, Tarver hesitates. “It’s crazy to predict,” he says. “It’s hard to know how AI will change the world. But we can be sure it will change it. AI is a bull in a china shop. Right now, we’re just trying to get on top and ride the bull.” With a penchant for creating groundbreaking work fueled by AI-driven R&D from its startup incubator, Gladeye is well positioned to ride that bull into the future. ca