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Jordan “Black Cat” Flash Microsite
Jordan Brand approached us to help them promote their latest training shoe–the BCT Low. Unfortunately, we weren’t given much information about the product, other than it was a training shoe that was lightweight. Our first task was to do our best to learn more about the product. Fortunately for us we were lucky enough to be able to interview Tinker Hatfield–Nike’s most famed designer.
Because we had so little information about the product, we knew going in that whatever came out of the interview would be everything we would have to work with. We didn’t want to publish the typical interactive video interview. So we came up with a radical idea–to lose the video all together and instead use just the audio to drive a visual experience.
After hours of brainstorming we settled on a solution involving Kinetic Typography. At the time Kinetic Type was nothing new, but this was the first time where audiences would have a chance to interact with it–dragging the canvas up and down, watching the subtitles on the screen animate in sync with the audio.
Our plan going into the interview was to organize our questions into four distinct buckets–history, trunning, performance, and design–so that later on when we were crafting the experience there would be a sensible structure to guide users throughout.
We had a great deal of time to define the Art Direction and develop a working prototype, but the final design was completely dependent on the edited interview responses. So from the time we got the final interview responses to the day we launched we had only two weeks to clean up the audio, design everything, animate everything, and implement it into the working prototype.
It was a pretty massive undertaking for such a short period of time, but in the end we literally were able to make something awesome out of nothing.
We loved it, the client loved it, and it was well received by the design community as it was featured on most of the major digital publications at the time.
Project Details
Agency: Academy + Blast Radius
Ideation: Per Stenius, Greg Washington, Joerg Merz
Creative Direction: Per Stenius
Art Direction: Greg Washington
Design: Greg Washington
Animation: Greg Washington
Development: James Wright & Daniel Butler
Photography: Sven Boecker
Copywriting: Greg Liburd