“Great variety without being confusing. Each section has something to offer, and the design and UI really work well with the content.”—juror Grace Stanat

“A beautiful interface that’s fun to use with lots of good information. This site proves that big companies don’t need to sacrifice design to deliver their message.”—juror Sasha Kurtz

Overview: Playing off the tag line that HP products and services make more things possible, this site presents capsule views of a variety of HP offerings. Each presentation is unique, whether one is virtually strolling through a museum gallery, or turning the pages of a book.

• 14 individual presentations
• Average file size 200k
• 3-D animation produced with Maya
• 5 weeks, 10+ people

Comments by Keith Anderson and Mike Geiger:
“HP has successfully leveraged the online environment as a branding and communications tool and it’s an integral part of their marketing mix. The ‘Plus Customer’ brand experiences are part of an integrated campaign that HP launched after its merger with Compaq.

“Each experience showcases the partnership and technology story between HP and one of the company’s customers. The online component, which extends the TV and print campaign, allows for a more in-depth case study to be presented in an immersive, interactive and enjoyable manner. As each new customer is added to the mix, a new experience is added to the site, making it more comprehensive and robust.

“The tight integration of the team allowed for experiences that vary in style, tonality and interactivity but that always manage to be surprising and fresh. They range from creating sound waves in Bang & Olufsen, to bird-watching in BirdLife Finland, to touring famous paintings in the National Gallery, London. Beyond the initial thirteen customers, the site has continued to grow and evolve as new customers are added to the portfolio, and new working partnerships are included.

“Since this was the first large-scale Flash experience to reside on HP.com, there were many self-imposed standards and objectives that had to be determined along the way. The first was establishing a file size limit that would allow us to have some fun, but that was also restrictive enough that it required us to be ingenious with how we used those precious kilobytes. We also had to keep in mind that we had to roll out the experience into fourteen countries worldwide—where we would often be dealing with slower download speeds and less bandwidth.

“The goal behind each piece was to have our viewers feel the excitement of an inventive spark; the interesting thing is that we felt it ourselves through the fabrication of each piece.”