Creative instinct. Curiosity. Deadlines. These are all the things floating around in the creative mind, which Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, brings to life for Adobe with a new Web site touting the release of Adobe Creative Suite 2.3. But the abstract representation of the mental universe inside a designer’s head found at www.adobe.com/creativemind is so visually compelling and whimsical you almost forget the site is promoting something.
There are three colorful worlds spinning around the universe that visitors can click on and explore. The one representing Creative Instinct brings visitors to a forest-like setting inhabited by a leprechaun, abominable snowman, a monkey and dueling hot dogs. Clicking on the characters or vegetation activates different changes, illustrating different features of Adobe Creative Suite 2.3, such as the Live Paint feature in Adobe Illustrator. There are also short films featuring designers talking about how the product is crucial to their work.
Exploring new worlds According to Goodby art director Mark Sikes, the idea started off as a pullout poster featuring different designers and their work that would be placed in various magazines, but the agency and client decided the Web was the perfect medium to engage the Adobe audience. “We wanted to talk about features of Adobe Creative Suite but we also wanted to have designers and art directors, the target audience, engage with something they found stimulating and inspiring visually. I think we were really focused on making sure people had the chance to explore a world that they hadn’t seen through Adobe,” Sikes said. “So what started out as something small–that yes the goal was to sell Creative Suite–became a branding experience for them.”
The hope is that designers will e-mail one another about the site, and that blurbs about it will appear on design and ad blogs. It is being promoted through a banner campaign.
According to Spencer Riviera, one of the agency copywriters, it was a no-brainer to use Adobe Creative Suite 2.3. to create the site and do cool things with it “That would speak to art directors and designers more than anything else could. There was a shift from holding up art directors and designers and their work as poster boys and girls for Adobe to saying, ‘These guys use this, look how cool [it is]. Let’s do what they do and speak to them in their own language.’ That seemed a lot more authentic and to draw everyone in more than putting someone’s picture up in a print ad,” Riviera said.
Creating the site, which was animated using Adobe Flash, was not without its challenges. In contrast to broadcast, Sikes explained that you are still limited with the amount of visual information you can get across via the Web. “As far as we have come with broadband, and Flash 8 is certainly an amazing resource in being able to recreate visual effects on the Web, there’s still limitations in file size and processing speeds and you don’t know what one person’s computer is going to take versus another computer,” Sikes said. “In that sense there is certainly a lot of limitations based on the nature of the medium. That can be frustrating at times because you have a great idea yet it’s still difficult to execute.”
Luckily they chose production company unit9, London, who had a strong sense of Flash. “Unit9 was great at coming up with solutions for that. We knew we wanted to work with a production company that would push boundaries of what had been done in terms of Flash animation on the Web. We would give them an idea and they would take it and run with it and come back with something that was so detailed, beautiful, special and whimsical.” Riviera cited the example of the The Adobe Stock Photos animation, which was originally going to be a flying zeppelin on which photos were projected. Unit 9 took this idea and came back with a flying spaceship that resembled an old viewfinder.”It was the kind we used to play with as kids. It brought a whole new level of playfulness to the scene and seemed like the perfect fit,” Riviera said.
The results even surprised Sikes at times. “I almost started to cry when I first saw this thing come to life,” Sikes said chuckling. “You see it at different stages but when it really started to come together, it really felt so unique. It was great to work with a company that really wanted to push themselves.”
