The future’s bright…

Dean Vipond will be speaking at the Leeds leg of Carsonified’s “Future Of Web Design” tour. The title of the talk is “Totally original, I swear!” – how personality can improve user experience.

FOWD tour

 
How can a site, app or service be improved by employing a stronger personality? Dean Vipond will be examining how being more ‘human’ can foster emotional engagement, increase brand equity and improve usability. This session will look at a number of examples, both successful and less successful, where tone of voice, design and interaction combine to change the way a user interacts. 
 
The event is at The Rosebowl in Leeds, on Wednesday 16th September.

To find out more about the event, and to book tickets, visit the Future Of Web Design tour page.

Amusing the Masses

Dean Vipond creates visual style for Muse’s latest viral campaign.

Dean Vipond was recently appointed by the lovely people at Six To Start to provide design support for a viral campaign to promote the forthcoming album by rock band Muse.

Muse's map of Eurasia - click pic to enlarge

The campaign took the form of a game, which took place both online, and in the real world. Clues were planted on a microsite, which once solved, gave the location of USB sticks hidden in a number of locations around the world, the contents of which unlocked a segment of a new song online. It required the online collaboration of fans, to solve the puzzles, and co-ordinate globally to arrange collection of the USB sticks.

The status of the game was communicated via a cool, 1980s ‘Wargames’-style updating map (produced by Dean Vipond), which showed which geographical territories had been ‘unlocked’.

The game had close to 50,000 registered users and generated a huge buzz ahead of launch.

The game is now finished, but check out this write-up by Six To Start to find out more about the project.

Big Win for StreamThru

Congratulations to Mantic Point - their StreamThru service has won an industry award! StreamThru won the ‘Best Mobile Technology’ category in the TravelMole Web Awards 2009. Other winners included P&O Cruises, BMI, Warner Leisure and Yorkshire Tourist Board. Travel Mole is the world’s largest online community for the travel and tourism industry, so this is quite a feather in Mantic Point’s cap!

Get some culture

Dean Vipond has designed the header for the June edition of culture blog The Culture Vulture. Taking the overall theme of ‘ideas and creativity’ which covers much of this month’s content, the header was designed around the notion that ‘everyone has a good idea’.

Go and take a look.