"A simple, fun idea executed brilliantly. I'm a fan, I've had this as my screensaver for awhile." —juror Gabrielle Weinman
"A simple idea executed really well. Provokes a reaction with every click." —juror Jon McVey
Overview: When Minneapolis ad agency mono began thinking about a holiday card that was a bit "different," they had no idea that this is what they would end-up with. Using the faces of the agency's fifteen employees and exchanging features, they created newer, stranger (some might call them disturbing) visages. It's a clickable, seemingly endless mashup and a seamless, engaging presentation—supplemented by a scrollable gallery of images (for anyone who doesn't have the time, or energy to shuffle for themselves) and a downloadable screensaver version.
• The site consists of 759,375 different faces.
• Within one month of launch monoface tracked over 20 million page views.
• The site is currently being used as a teaching tool in a high school math class.
Comments by mono:
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "Our goal was simple, but also a bit of a conundrum: How could we do a holiday card without doing a holiday card? You know, a take-off on the family photo where the whole company gathers for a single photograph. Being big believers in simplicity, the idea of one face to represent all seemed to us the perfect solution.
"While the idea was simple, the execution wasn't. To create the desired effect of seamlessly merging different faces meant a photo shoot that was more like a math problem—and hours and hours of retouching. At the end of all that complexity, though, developing the site seemed utterly simple.
"We had about one month to produce the project from beginning to end. Not a lot of time. We dedicated five people to the project including our talented programmer Jim Park and an equally talented, and patient, photographer. (Without their passion we never would have pulled it off.)
"When we finished, we sent it to a few hundred folks we knew who we thought would enjoy it. Turns out that a few million folks we didn't know liked it too. Eventually it ended-up being posted to hundreds of blogs all over the world and our ISP had to limit traffic because we took down one of their shared servers. Probably our favorite comment came from the bookmarking site del.icio.us who said simply: 'The Internet has reached its pinnacle. Now everything is downhill.'"
