Hypergiant Webpage
Why is this project worthy of an award?
A cutting-edge company needs a cutting-edge brand to arrest the attention of Fortune 500 companies. Hypergiant, the office of machine intelligence, shook up the tired AI enterprise world through radical branding and bold intent. Founder Ben Lamm only creates brand-first companies, viewing brand as the lifeblood of the company. In his eyes, a successful brand equals a successful company, no matter the industry. After a quick glance at Hypergiant’s website and collateral, you’re confronted with vivid turquoise, bright yellow, and starkly retro-futuristic visuals. Hypergiants’ copy, colors, typography, graphics, and images are perfectly coordinated around their focus: developing future-forward technologies and delivering the tomorrow we were promised, today. Based on the core idea of retrofuturism, Ben Lamm wanted to create an ambitious, thought-provoking website that spoke to the late 50’s when America was transfixed with UFOs and secretive space-related investigations. Hypergiant’s biggest inspiration for their brand was the US Air Force’s 1957 investigation, Project Blue Book, undertaken to determine the veracity of UFO claims. From this inspiration, we see brand elements playing out across familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways: abstracted images of data, perplexing charts, and, most notable, blatant redactions and omissions. The brand’s redactions are an alluring and frustrating feature that makes viewers feel like they are seeing glimpses of the future. Of course, Ben also speaks directly to his customers with his brand. Hypergiant’s allusions to the ‘40s and ‘50s and grand schemes for our future society all speak to the massive letdown that AI has been so far. Where are our flying cars? Where is the future we were promised? The Hypergiant brand is all about picking up the baton and delivering on the unfulfilled promises that capture the imagination. For comparison, Avaamo, who’s also in the AI sector with Hypergiant, has a slideshow of abstract, muted images of data on their front page; Hypergiant has a woman in a spacesuit staring into your soul. Element AI, another company in AI enterprise, features a minimalist design with a clear-cut illustration; Hypergiant screams character and provocation through its bold color scheme and perplexing layers. The approach was to be an ode to the past, a preferred service in the present, but living in the future.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
At launch, Hypergiant was featured in well over 30 national and local publications - from Techcrunch and Venturebeat to AdWeek and The Houston Chronicle. Additionally, Hypergiant’s brand collateral was recently featured in Communication Arts, under their Webpicks category - representing a high-level of international acclaim for the creative. Why is it unique and innovative? Hypergiant’s design is intentionally cluttered, ultra-complex, and often times misleading. Most people wouldn’t call that a recipe for success. And they’re right. It’s a recipe for Hypergiant’s website and the brand launch has eclipsed mere success. Already featured on multiple design websites, the site breaks most molds in both design and copy. But as any creative will tell you, you must first know and master the rules, before you know how to break them properly. Ultimately, the site more than delivers on the promise of valuable content and case studies. The navigation is novel yet user-friendly. The design and programming provide seamless scalability of display without sacrifice in aesthetic. And the intricacies of the creative serve to further depth of brand - leading to longer and more exploratory user site visits.
Who worked on the project?
Ben Lamm, Founder and CEO, Hypergiant
View the project video:
Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
Company Hyundai
Introduction Date November 1, 2017
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Beijing has long struggled with pollution, with particulate levels regularly up to six times the EPA-approved level. Within this context, how can a car company demonstrate its commitment to improving the environment through technology and culture? To create Hyundai's Beijing Motorstudio, we transformed a former factory building into a center for creative energy: first as a literal living machine for cleaning the air through passive air purification, vegetation and geothermal heating and cooling, and secondly as a cultural center with exhibitions, programming, lounge and café. Situated in the city’s 798 Art Zone — a historic former industrial district that has been reinvented as a cultural and artistic hub — the Motorstudio is a neighborhood gathering space, with communal areas, a garden, and an outdoor art commission. As a trans-disciplinary space and crossroads of the environmental and creative industries, the Motorstudio’s 798 location encourages a synergistic approach to programming. The building houses a network of interrelated programs: from air and energy systems and installations of living plants to exhibitions and events. The different types of programming offer multiple points of entry for visitors with different interests. Dynamic data visualization of the building’s clean, low-impact energy consumption communicates how architecture and design impact our environment and quality of life. By integrating these metrics directly onto the building and making them transparent to visitors, our design asserts that sustainability-driven initiatives are living systems subject to constant revision and improvement. For the Motorstudio’s launch, 2x4 organized and designed the inaugural exhibition, “Social Mobility: Envisioning Bodies in Motion.” Comprising thirty-three works at the intersection of art, design, and imagination, the exhibition explores new conceptions of mobility and the visualization of movement beyond conventional modes of representation.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Our design for Hyundai’s Beijing Motorstudio sought to transform a formerly downtrodden and closed-off factory space into something light, clean, and public. But the Motorstudio is ultimately intended to act as a platform: what is most important is how it is used, and how it grows and changes. We hope that this focus on performance, both in terms of how the building works and the kinds of content staged there, will result in a living, sustainable, inspirational space that welcomes everyone and will continue to evolve into the future. The design is truly holistic, an ecosystem of parts — architecture, air and energy systems, environmental design, programming, exhibition and installation design — that are all aligned within the overall vision of creative energy. Combining both didactic and evocative elements, the building is meant to both offer insights and provoke further thinking. The Motorstudio’s air filtration system acts as the building’s centerpiece. The Air Handling Unit is outfitted with sensors to monitor air quality, and the performance of the filter system is revealed on a digital display spanning the building. Sourcing data from sensors inside and outside the Motorstudio, the display tracks concentration of key pollutants through all stages of the filtration process. It cycles through five different modes: an overall view that shows the concentration of all pollutants at each stage of the filter; a single-pollutant focus; a “history view” showing exterior air quality metrics over the past year; a “ticker” of raw data from the sensor; and a transitional mode that shows a timelapse visualization of growing plants. Conceptualized and designed by 2x4, the Motorstudio’s opening exhibition, “Social Mobility: Envisioning Bodies in Motion,” represents data in an engaging way. The works collected reveal new modes of thinking about motion and transportation, a subject germane both to Hyundai and to Beijing, a fast-growing city plagued by congestion. Spanning global, regional, urban, and individual scales, “Social Mobility” is designed to leave visitors with a heightened awareness of the problems and possibilities of how we move as well as to prompt thinking and focus on sustainability in urban design and creative endeavors of all sorts.
Who worked on the project?
2x4: Michael Rock, Partner, Executive Creative Director Susan Sellers, Partner, Executive Creative Director Sung Joong Kim, Creative Director Christopher Kupsi, Design Director, Architecture Tim Gambell, Design Director, Interactive Kumar Atre, Design Director, Architecture Elsa Ponce, Associate Design Director, Architecture Amber Foo, Associate Design Director, Architecture Melanie Malkin, Project Manager Scott Reinhard, Senior Designer, Interactive Yenwei Liu, Senior Designer, Branding Kyong Kim, Designer, Architecture Tomas Markevicius, Designer, Branding Partners: Approach Architecture Studio, Local Architect Vogt Landscape Architects, Landscape Transsolar, Sustainability Consultant IEN Consultants, Mechanical Consultant TECHFREE Air Conditioning, Air Filtration System Studio NOWHERE, Media Integration
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/270779465/bfecf3213a
IBM Hybrid Cloud Design Internal Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
This internal IBM site was designed and built as part of a wider effort within the Hybrid Cloud Design organization to bring visibility to the work of the design team and to educate the engineering and management leadership about the design practice and the benefits it can bring to software development. The site functions as an educational site raising awareness about the design process, its various deliverables and the lines of work within the design organization (user research, UX and visual design and prototyping). The site also functions as a management tool to track the progress of the various design initiatives and to share the design deliverables with stakeholders in the engineering and management organizations. It acts as a tracking tool for the research and design artifacts generated as part of a project (such as personas, user studies, empathy maps, etc.) and tracks the final designs through the evaluation and implementation by engineering, design quality reviews and ultimately product release. The site is used on daily basis by various groups of users who have various needs for their daily work activities. Engineering and management stakeholders visit the site to learn more about the design practice and to track the progress of the design effort surrounding their products. Members of the design organization itself visit the site to gain access to the resources they need to get their day to day work done. Researchers access their research best practices, study collateral and report templates. Similarly, designers access the design system and the various design libraries and guidelines they need. The site is designed in a way that allows each category of users to focus on their goals and be productive. For example, designers have access to all the design resources they need available to them in the design section of the site. The same is true for researchers and prototypes. Engineering and management stakeholders can find everything pertaining to the designs of their products in the projects section. Each section is designed with its primary audience in mind. Yet, any user can visit any section of the site and find useful information that can inform them about the respective design practice and what it entails. Each section seamlessly combines specialized productivity for a primary audience with informative content for other groups of users who would benefit from learning more about the practice. The site also incorporates strong branding that reflects the various practices within the design organization and the domain of focus for the Hybrid Cloud Organization, enterprise software products that enable cloud and on-premise solutions. Beautiful graphics and animations add joy to the experience of using the site.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
For the second part, I just made some changes at the end. I don't think we should focus too much on the things that we're planning on doing for the website. I added a paragraph to it, let me know what you think: One of the key aspects of this project is that it is part of not only a larger design promotion effort but also an ongoing process of designing and evolving the organization's workflows and processes. Parts of the site are regularly re-evaluated to assess how they can serve and facilitate the work team members need to accomplish. For example, the site is currently being integrated into the workflows of user researchers enabling their latest research findings to be surfaced and distributed automatically to the various projects to which they pertain without requiring any additional intervention on the part of the researchers or site admin. Similarly, the organization is in the process of expanding its design review and evaluation processes and various integration points with the site are being added to enable these processes. From adding the capability of management and engineering stakeholders to request design reviews, to automatically logging and tracking review requests and their outcomes, to integrating notification capabilities via email and slack conversations to reach all parties involved in the planning and coordination of reviews; the site is constantly in the process of evolving and adapting to the needs of the organization and its operations. In summary, this site is not merely an exercise in web design but also a vital iterative exercise in process design and evolution. The nature of this website is innovative as it enables a connection and transparency between designers and engineers or managers in the enterprise software environment. A challenge that we face is how to integrate the role of design and user experience at a large scale into our organization. This website as part of the overall effort is a great example of fostering that integration by inviting everyone at IBM to find out about the ongoings of the designers in the Hybrid Cloud org.
Who worked on the project?
Sean Stopnik - Front End Developer Stephane Rodet - Front End Developer Rami Alayan - UX Design Peter Perceval - Visual/motion design Natalie Caudell - Visual design David Levinson - Art director Tom Waterton - Content writer Terry Bleizeffer - Project manager Alan Underwood - Front End Developer
View the project video:
IBM Immersive Insights
Company IBM
Introduction Date October 1, 2016
Project Website https://medium.com/@alfredo.ruiz/bringing-data-to-life-with-ibm-immersive-insights-9423687c9ffe
Why is this project worthy of an award?
IBM Immersive Insights is an exciting new tool that is exposing the possibilities of AR/VR in the enterprise software field. Immersive Insights is a data exploration tool that uses AR technology to help users explore their data and communicate findings in new ways. The AR technology takes data visualizations to a new level, making data exploration a more multi-faceted, collaborative process.AR allows users to view their data in 3D, creating more powerful visuals and thus new opportunities for users to make findings in their data that 2D visuals would not present. By visualizing data in 3D and viewing data from new angles and perspectives, data scientists can identify key patterns, relationships, and outliers in seconds, where it would normally take hours of work.IBM Immersive Insights is among the first projects to be exploring the AR space for data and enterprise use, as well as how to design for these uses. Designing for Augmented Reality is a unique challenge as this technology is in a young stage and fast evolving, and designing for a technology that is so underdeveloped is not an easy task. One of the biggest challenges the design team faced was that they had to create their own design resources and guidelines for this project, since Augmented Reality is a relatively new technology. They mostly worked through trial and error to establish a new set of best practices for this type of interface, without any precedent. Along with these design challenges, the design team needed to learn about the workspace of data science in order to design the best tool for their users. Understanding the complicated workflows that data scientists use was a challenge for designers, before even beginning to design a tool for these users. IBM Immersive Insights is a pioneering tool in it’s field, one of the first to be exploring the use of AR for enterprise uses. This technology has all kinds of implications in industries such as science, business, education, and more. The designers of this project are working in uncharted territory and setting new design precedents, and are enabling this tool to revolutionize the AR as well as the data science field.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Immersive Insights has a number of unique properties that make it an exciting for both users and the designers working on it. The AR technology of Immersive Insights allows the user to gather all their data in one place and visualize it in a 3D capacity. They can move and shift data points around, giving them a new and clearer way to understand relationships between data points. The tool features the ability to select and label specific points, preview data values, and alter the visuals in real time. The user can scale the visuals, allowing for total visual immersion in the data. During user research designers found that the target users value direct collaboration and constant communication while working with their data. Immersive Insights allows multiple users worldwide to view the same information at the same time, allowing for efficient and constant collaboration. Users can explore the data and share insights within the same virtual space as each other. Since multiple users can use the tool at once, it allows for a new level of collaboration and data exploration across teams. The AR technology removes physical boundaries of a workspace, creating endless space for users to work and collaborate in. One of the most interesting and challenging aspects about designing for AR/VR is that designers need to take into consideration multidimensionality and the physical aesthetics of every part of the product that is designed. The shift from designing for screens to designing an actual environment is a journey in itself. To create great user experiences with this new technology and space, designers need to learn about the physical objects, 3D sound, haptic feedback, and materials all involved in the product. Most important to consider is how to humanize a world that is a blend of physical and virtual reality in order to create a truly optimal user experience.
Who worked on the project?
Alfredo Ruiz, Ben Resnick, Jenna Goldberg, Christian Fritsche, Dimitri Hoffmann, Jan Hassel, Eddie Rietz, Thomas Grikschas, Linda Webber
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj-m2SItDl4
IDEA
Company fuseproject
Introduction Date September 7, 2017
Project Website https://fuseproject.com/work/idsa/idea/?focus=overview
Why is this project worthy of an award?
IDSA is a significant tool and reference for designers when it comes to getting design news, meet other designers, and applying for IDEA – the International Design Excellence Awards – the design award by designers, for designers. But despite the importance of the organization to the design community, their branding did not carry the modernity or significance that reflects who they are. We worked with IDSA to rebrand IDEA and redesign the trophy to reflect the evolving industry it celebrates.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Differentiating the IDSA from the IDEA means we added weight and structure to the individual letters of IDEA, each representing a different discipline of design. The magic is in how these come together, where each piece can stand on its own, but they work better together. The color scheme is influenced by the built world around us – bright and playful. With the ability to separate and combine the colorful letters, the brand identity is also able to remain flexibility for collateral, such as campaigns and swag, allowing it to fluctuate as the industry would.
Who worked on the project?
Yves Behar - Chief Creative Officer
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/232755381
