COMA

The Story of Yeh Chi Wei

Leader, teacher, mentor and experimenter, Yeh Chi Wei was a mover and shaker of Singapore’s early art scene. Members of the artistic community would know how this quiet artist worked laboriously and played significant roles in shaping visual art during the 1960s and 70s. Yeh created some of the most distinctive oil paintings, and defined a unique Southeast Asian style.

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.

The Chandran Tharoor Foundation

Shashi Tharoor, a senior minister in India and a noted humanitarian activist founded the Chandran Tharoor Foundation to promote the social advancement and development of marginalized individuals and groups in the Indian state of Kerala. The foundation needed a brand and communication strategy to proliferate the foundation’s message and to extend it’s reach to potential contributors and donors.

We created a brand identity consisting of the letters of C and T (Chandran and Tharoor) in the form of an umbrella as a representation of a reliable organization in times of difficulty. We also developed an online communication strategy which encapsulates the goals of the foundation and actions people can take to contribute. We crafted the narrative to inspire others to support, and perhaps join, Shashi Tharoor in his movement.

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor who currently serves as senior minister for Indian foreign policy and a former United Nations Under-Secretary General. With his new political responsibilities, he needed a communication strategy to engage his people, community and supporters.

We worked with the initiatives to develop the content strategy and information architecture for a new web portal which combine the best of his previous two sites into one which offers simple access to information and provides an easy way to connect with Shashi Tharoor and his office. We also devised a social strategy which included the use of Twitter and his website to nurture conversations between himself and his community which in turn multiplied his popularity exponentially. To date he has more than 650,000 followers on Twitter.

The Miele Guide

The Miele Guide, the first independent and authoritative restaurant guide in Asia which celebrates Asia’s best chefs and restaurants. Ate Media needed a website to attract food aficionados to cast votes on their favorite restaurants which would be featured in the restaurant guide.

We created an easy to use website which serves as a information resource on The Miele Guide and to collect votes from users. We have iterated and improved the user interface over the past two editions and have increase the votes collected in 2009 over 2008 by more than 46% with 98,000 votes casted for 400 restaurants.