Responses by FF Paris

Background: The Unknown Face is a universal symbol of peace and hope, in memory of all the lives shattered by the Great War, regardless of their nationalities, origins or gender. The target audience ranges from young users with technologic approaches to older users with contextual approaches. With help from Merci Michel, the website is the masterpiece of our ecosystem. We’ve got a very strong PR and social strategy to sponsor it, and hopefully, users will love the idea and help us to spread the message.

Highlights: The introduction of this website is really emotional and helps to explain the context. The homepage with the portrait is the main element of the website. The stories section is also a key part of the experience because users can navigate among the 30,000 portraits in the database and can also read some interesting bios. There is also a four-minute behind-the-scenes video that we hope helps users understand how we created the site.

Challenges: We spent a lot of time on the rendering of the unknown face, and finding the best look and feel.

Favorite details: The “stories” part because it is the result of thousands of hours of scanning and uploading, and a lot of FF Paris people worked hard on it.

Navigational features: We created this website like a book, with an introduction, and three chapters. On the “stories” page, we developed two ways of navigating to the main library. The first way is an overview of all the portraits, and the second way is a basic front view of the individual portraits. On mobile, we prioritized the front view, which we felt was more intuitive.

Technical features: Face tracking algorithms, Javascript, PHP, HTML5 canvas and webGL.

Anything new: The algorithm and the way we added all the portraits in the database were all developed from scratch.