2004 – Great clients, great projects.
Working as a team again. With clients.

For five years we worked at different companies, sometimes in different cities, collecting different experiences. In 2003 we regrouped, compared notes and looked for a few projects to sink our recombined talents into.

LeapFrog

2004 started with LeapFrog, makers of amazing educational toys. If you have young kids, you’ve probably heard of the LeapPad, an inexpensive, and highly educational interactive toy. What you may not know is that the LeapPad has been adapted for use in schools. Teachers use them to measure progress in core skills, and assign just the right activity to challenge each individual student.

Smackerel’s mission was to envision a future state for the teachers’ interface, which allows teachers to manage each student’s customized learning path, and review how they’re doing.

Smackerel facilitated brainstorming sessions with LeapFrog’s internal team, and maintained day to day contact via a project blog. After a number of weeks, we presented LeapFrog with a new way of looking at their product: new features, cleaner visual metaphors, and most importantly, a simplified experience for busy teachers. We’d love to show this work, but it’s still secret!

TV Ontario

Again on the education front, smackerel executed a learning module for TVOntario’s ‘Ask a Teacher’ web site. Following TVO’s art direction guidelines, we created this module to help high school students with their physics homework, in this case, how to calculate the force of gravity.

Blast Radius

In a world of specialization, it will surprise some that we spent much of 2004 working on major e-commerce and corporate sites. How can we bounce between disperate projects? Isn't it better to focus, and be an expert at one thing? In a word, no. As Robert Heinlein said, specialization is for insects.
A Man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Blast Radius called on Dave and Kevin to lead the creative strategy on a number of pitches. We’re proud to say that we scored several solid wins with our client, most notably, chapters-indigo.ca and aeroplan.ca.

Indigo

We stayed on with Blast to creative direct Indigo’s new web site, which launched in November of 2004. Our goal with this project was to create a more efficient user experience architecture. Or, as we say in English, tell the story better. Simply put, we made it easier to find the book you want, and buy it. The results are here. If the process of buying a book is a little easier than the Chapters-Indigo you remember, then we’ve done our job.

Contact smackerel:	phone 416 588-6466 email dave or kevin@smackerel.net comments