"The spotlight interviews and gallery are so rich, beautiful and thought-provoking that it's hard to stop until you've seen everything. What's really great is that they're essentially letting their product sell itself—what you see is what you're going to get." —juror Rachel Pasqua
"Speakvisual.com takes a great concept and brings it to life, creating a more engaging experience while showcasing the product's actual benefits. I just want to keep looking at what all the art directors did!" —juror Brooke Nanberg
Overview: To gamers, Nvidia is a household name. To everyone else, it's the greatest company they've never heard of, powering high-end graphics on screens around the world. Aimed at educating the creative class about Nvidia graphics processors, and how they enable people to get their creative thoughts out of their heads and into the world, this audience hub was a central part of the Speak Visual campaign. The site embodies the central theme of the campaign and includes fifteen video profiles that showcase and describe the breadth of work of the featured artists. With a navigation that's intuitive, familiar and dead simple, it allows people to spend time with innovative content rather than an innovative navigation.
• Site visitors were invited to post their own creations in the Gallery, with the prospect of having their work projected on buildings and at events across the country in 2009.
• Significantly easier to use and more straightforward to implement than Papervision3D, FIVe3D was used on the Gallery search page; it allowed for a greater number of objects to be displayed onscreen compared to Papervision3D—a framework with a greater overhead. Papervision3D was used on the home page (Spotlight) to achieve depth, geometry, perspective and camera movement.
Comments by Fabio Costa:
Is the audience you were targeting a particularly difficult one to reach? "The creative community took immediate notice posting the site, and stories found on it, to design, art and photography blogs. It also won the People's Choice Award at SXSW, proving it was a message that resonated with the exact audience Nvidia wanted."
What most influenced the visual language of the site? "The site was at the center of this much larger campaign—cinema, TV, print, outdoor wild postings, online contests, blog and interactive banners—that encouraged the creative class to Speak Visual with Nvidia graphics processors and pointed them to the site. The central theme of the campaign consisted of speech bubbles superimposed over the mouths of creative people. On the site, the creators and their speech bubbles come to life in a large-scale video portrait; when they enter the frame and touch the bubble it activates a video introduction to their work, narrated in their own words."
How did the content affect the structure of the site? "Because of the nature of the content, and because we wanted visitors to be able to access the content as easily and as fast as possible, the structure of this particular site is rather flat. We have five content buckets on the site and some go another level deep for detail pages. For example on the Spotlight section (home) we have artist detail pages nested under that level but in general we tried to find a balance between folder depth and content, so even in this case, our folders only go a couple of levels deep."
