Making up the bulk of my work over the past 4 weeks, Microsoft’s #SurfaceCreate on Huffington Post has been a bit of a beast and it’s not over yet. To showcase the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft has challenged three of London’s brightest design studios to use the tablet on a project they have always wanted to do.
In the words of James Hayr, Aol’s Head of Branded Content and my boss, ‘It’s a miracle that Microsoft are letting us design anything, let alone design and build an entire campaign’, but that is indeed what was occurring. I was given the task of creating a range of high impact display units and an interactive splash that would feature the journey of each studio.
Safe to say it was a pretty big deal for Huff Post. I needed to do a good job and keep the client happy. The initial mocks for the splash and display units went down a treat and we were given the green light to build. The splash features video, a collection of image galleries illustrating each studio’s journey, and links to the various bits of editorial content created for the campaign.
To drive traffic to the page from Aol’s other Tech related properties, I created a reactive skin that worked with the billboard on the same page. The billboard’s design was split between the 3 studios and when the user hovered over each, the skin changed revealing hero images of the current studio’s work.
Their is a planned update next week that includes an overhaul of the splash, it’s going to be a busy week.