Danny (CEO of foound) and our team have been working really hard over the past three weeks to prepare for the event. We wanted to launch foound at the event but due to various difficulties, mostly technical, we decided to hold off the launch and went ahead with a slide-based demo instead. The presentation was planned and designed over the past one week. The slides were deliberately kept simple to reflect the values and messages of the foound brand, which was also developed at COMA. Danny and the rest of the team practically camped in our office for weeks working closely and intensely with us. My role as the head of UX (User Experience) and Branding is to ensure the app is a joy to use and own.

foound will be released some time late June as we iron out the remaining bugs and make more performance tweaks. The team has done a great job preparing for yesterday but there is a bumpy road ahead as we push hard for the launch of foound on the iPhone and subsequently on other mobile platforms. Meanwhile please visit foound.com to sign up for the newsletter and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Pics from yesterday courtesy of Kris Krüg

foound + Geeks on a Plane in foound T-shirts

Danny and I with Dave McClure in the background

The slide which got the loudest applause!

Drawing inspiration from many cultural sources, ranging from ancient Chinese rubbings, carvings to Javanese batik, Yeh’s works powerfully interweaves these cultural elements with both Asian and Western art techniques. As an art teacher and leader of the Ten Men Art Group, he guided and mentored many Singapore artists. He was also a tremendous source of inspiration and encouragement to many others.

The Story of Yeh Chi Wei celebrates the life of such an artist. The National Art Gallery, Singapore commissioned COMA, as part of a broader online and social marketing initiative which will take place throughout the year, to design an online microsite with the challenge of making the site accessible and useful to both adults and children. We developed three educational and interactive mini games which children can have fun with while on the website, to learn about the artist and his work. The microsite was developed using open-source software and is based on open-standards, thus making the site accessible to more people across a wide range of web-browsing devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

We also designed “Hopper”, an adorable frog character who can be seen on the kids sections in the website and the Creative Play Corner in the exhibition.

At the wee hours of 17 April 2010 the idea was born. Roles were divided and friends pooled together their contacts and resources. As time and quality was of essence, we were brought on board to plan, design and implement the concept. In less than 36 hours, the site was launched and had features for the collection of online pledges.

What started as a discussion and wish for a friend over coffee turned into a roaring success on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, allowing for the number of pledges to cross 1000 in just 7 hours. The site was quickly brought down by a massive onslaught of web traffic. Despite piling on expensive server muscle and rewriting code, traffic which peaked at 40,000 uniques a day even with the site down half the time, proved too overwhelming for a single virtual private server setup. We eventually moved to a Rackspace cloud-based service. As we improved the website incrementally with better features and performance, the word got to various major media outlets and the site was mentioned in a CNN TV news broadcast.

We developed viral and social strategies which are centered around the discovery and creation of viral content based on extensive research made possible by our COMA Sense™ real-time social analytics and sentiment monitoring system. With COMA Sense™ we are able to identify and analyze in real time conversations about the IPL and related keywords around the internet and with this data we develop informed and data-focused strategies. We have also planned and organized a Twitter contest which contributed tremendously to the social engagement between the IPL and its fans and followers on Twitter. Twitter follower count increased over an upwards trend by 260% throughout the period which COMA had serviced the IPL. The number of fans on the official Facebook page has at least tripled.

If you walk into a consumer electronics store today, you will still see lots of boxes like this. This has been around for years thought it’s always good to remind ourselves the dangers of poor design.

As the Design Director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, Scott Thomas led a now-historic political campaign, in which branding, design, and the web played a truly pivotal role. Likening the experience to “building an airplane in flight,” Scott talks about the creative’s need for triage, the crucial role of incremental design improvements, and the importance of getting back to the hand and keeping things simple.

http://the99percent.com/videos/5821/scott-thomas-designing-the-obama-campaign

On working with people

“There are smart people and dumb people. There are people who have energy and people who are lazy. They exist in combinations. If you work with a smart person with energy, that’s your best collaborator. If you work with a smart person who’s lazy, well, that’s a bit of a waste, but it does no harm. If you work with a dumb person who’s lazy, that’s sad but not problematic, because they will simply be ineffectual. But if you work with a dumb person with energy, therein lies the seed of disaster.”

On Helvetica

“I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow responsible for the Vietnam War.”

On 34 years in 1 second

“How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second. it’s done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.”

The unit is located in Cosmo, a condominium at Guillemard Crescent which is connected to Guillemard Road and near to Geylang, the famous red light district of Singapore. We have rented a duplex unit on the eleventh floor which has bay windows all over allowing the place to be naturally illuminated in the day. The wind is terrific too as the condominium is surrounded by only low-rise buildings.

Work area

View from work area

Stairs leading up to 2nd floor

We spent the past two weeks sketching, planning and buying the things we need, like furniture and supplies. We wanted the office to look real good, sophisticated and designed by designers so we spent a lot of effort and time to get things right. We visited a variety of places such as MUJI and IKEA and purchased some really nice stuff.

White desk chair from MUJI

We found the MUJI chair at ION Orchard. They are priced reasonably, looks minimal but are surprisingly comfortable and do not feel tight at all. We got a pair of matching arms for each chair. The MUJI table which was promoted together with the chair is too pricey so we did not go for that one.

MELLTORP table from IKEA

We got the really nice MELLTORP tables from IKEA Tampines which looked really Japanese and could easily pass as a MUJI product. The simple design and straight lines compliments the space perfectly. We got a big and a medium one to fit a comfortable maximum of three persons.

The other stuff we got

We will upload more images once we have moved in and settled down this coming Wednesday.

Who do you think has a stronger brand? Movie star or political messiah?