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Number
56: June 9, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
Stealing
Great Design
When you're looking for creative ideas in web design, you have to be
willing to go to strange places. If you only look to your industry and
competitors, you're only contributing to the homogeneity. When I'm
developing information architecture or content for a high tech firm, I
look at their competitors, but I also look at different industries to
get ideas that break away.
When I need something creative, then I look to the artists
themselves. When the web was new, every development company had a
showcase website. The only drawback was that the design worked great if
you were a designer, but it was lousy if you were a finance company.
However, you can work from creative sites and dial down the cute
games, and dial up the information. A case in point is the site of a
band called The
Polyphonic Spree.
The Spree had a terrific year last year as they surfaced from the
underground to mainstream success. They did it largely on the back of
the "Pods
Unite" campaign for the Volkswagen New
Beetle and the iPod that featured their song, "Light and Day
(Reach for the Sun)."
The group has approximately twenty members including a choir, flute,
harp, and various other traditional instruments (or non-traditional rock
instruments) and their music evokes a retro-hippie vibe. Whether or not
their music is your cup of tea, they have excellent marketing, and give
their fans many different ways to interact with the band, and to tell
their story.
When you visit
their site, you see an opening splash page. Normally, this is
something I discourage, and I don't see much point for it here except
that they are preparing to launch a new site design and this may be a
placeholder. It does set a tone visually and is easy to click through.
If you're not careful, you may find yourself swirling the mouse around
the screen suddenly feeling
like a raver. (Just breathe, man and click through. It's all good).
Then you get a second entry screen. Again, not a good idea for a
corporate site, but it offers something for the fan who is presumably
coming here because they have an interest in the music.
If you click the flower on the left, you will enter the main site.
(The other flower is to reserve their new album, which comes out in
July.)
So, it took us two clicks to get to their
main site. Don't try this in a mainstream business site. (Rather,
include animated elements on your home page.) Now you have a terrific
Flash-based site design. The "fun" navigation begins to draw
itself, but you have the ability to skip the development and click I'm
Impatient in the lower, right corner.
Now you have the full illustration that looks like a stained glass
window. You can mouse over the different colored panels to navigate the
site, or you can use the more convenient (but less fun) text links at
the bottom of the screen.
Part of the buzz on this group is their creativity and sense of
discovery. The first album was essentially a demo - an experiment that
ended up being successful. The site does a great job of emphasizing
those elements. For example, for those of us who only take the
left-brained, analytical approach and use the text links are missing out
on some of the links in the stained-glass panels. Now, the links in the
graphical portion of the site are for more creative, time-wasting
applications, so it makes sense to include those links only there.
One problem in their site design stems from their use of Flash; you
can't use your browser's back button to navigate. Instead, you must
click the background on the page. More than once, I've missed the item I
was clicking on, only to find myself on the previous page. A better
method would be to have each link point to its own HTML page with Flash
content. That way you could use the browser buttons to navigate and you
could send someone directly to a specific page. The downside of this
method is that page load is longer.
The Polyphonic Spree makes it very easy for their fans to spread the
message by word of mouth. They include banners for fan web sites,
stickers you can print out and presumably slap illegally on lampposts,
screensavers, e-cards you can send to your friends, as well as the usual
community-development tools such as bulletin boards (BBs). Additionally,
they have a grassroots recruitment program they call the Street Team.
Their rapid growth can be attributed entirely to their successful
ideavirus. Principally, their underground success led them to be
featured in the "Pods Unite" campaign. The customers for iPods
and Beetles may not be a true part of the underground, but they identify
with it strongly.
The Polyphonic Spree seems so far to have avoided the appearance of
selling out to corporate interests by staying close to their fans. By
giving insiders advance knowledge of tickets, early download of songs,
and lots of fun methods to participate, the band can keep their truest
fans in the know (and so superior to the wannabes).
One very clever method they use to introduce their new music is a puzzle
titled, "Quest for the Rest." (If you're on the site, the
link is at the top, right corner of each page.) This puzzle comes with
no introduction. One could open it, look around for instructions and
after awhile simply give up, and leave.
If you choose to stick around, however, and click some of the flora
and fauna, you will soon discover that you can do things in this world.
If you get the sequence correct, you will be transported from this world
to another one (and another). Try it for yourself. If you'd like hints,
I'll include them at the end of this newsletter.
What makes this such a great marketing tool is that the soundtrack
includes songs from their new album. The ten to twenty seconds of music
you get to sample of the group on Amazon aren't usually sufficient to
generate a purchase except for the fan who doesn't need them. However,
the act of working on the puzzle forces the music into the background,
where it hits you at more of a subconscious level. Plus, you get to
spend a little more time with it and let it develop.
The designer of the puzzle is Jakub
Dvorsky of Amanita Design located in the Czech Republic. He has a
street artist appeal similar to Shepard
Fairey of Studio
Number One. He's also done a number of these Flash
games for himself and for commercial work. Click Flash Games in the
top menu on his web site to see more.
Creative departures like these are essential to get your own creative
innovations going. It's always much easier to come down from a big idea
than to try to build up from a little one. The web site for The
Polyphonic Spree is replete with ideas you can adapt for your own
grassroots campaigns. Just don't slap any stickers on my bumper.
Hints
Desert: Try to give the tortoise a reason to move. Maybe just
a bit farther?
Forest: Find a way to get rid of the fox. The spores can help.
Then trip through the daisies.
Ocean: That octopus has to get indigestion eating all those
fish.
Finale: Congratulations. You have been infected with an ideavirus.
To get their music out of your head, purchase their album July 15.
Repeat ad naseum.
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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