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.

SupportTharoor.org

In the wake of Shashi Tharoor’s seemingly unjust resignation as Indian Minister of State for External Affairs following the widely-reported Indian Premier League controversy, ardent supporters and old friends of Shashi Tharoor sat together over coffee in Dubai and pondered over the fate of a Member of Parliament and Union Minister who had taken efforts to reach out to the people of India. SupporTharoor.org was thus born as a gift to Shashi Tharoor with a collection of beautiful thoughts and comments by people who wished to reach out to him.

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.

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.

Mutiny Media Group

Mutiny is the go-to destination for all things, Indian—from witty banter about sports and entertainment to the more serious political discussions and social issues. Mutiny needed to meet the demands of its hungry and intellectual audience, and to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

We created an identity with a modern and avant garde typographical form. The “MTNY” letterforms are custom-made using compound geometric shapes subtracted from and added to each other, to form an interesting symmetry. Using this precise approach, we attempt to express invisible mathematical forces in typographical form and produce a wordmark that speaks of a smart, savvy and cutting-edge media company.

Almost Famous

Anyone longing to be famous should be able to do so online—this, in essence, sums up Sputnik Media’s latest project, almost-famous.tv. In light of the burgeoning social media scene and its trendy trail of self-shot clips and viral videos, this project seeks to put the spotlight on new talents emerging from the film, fashion, arts and design industries, promising them their fifteen minutes of online fame. With this in mind, Sputnik Media approached COMA to create an interesting and visually striking vault of content that would fuse together their vision with the latter’s design capabilities and expertise in web development; a celebrity circus for those who truly seek stardom.

almost-famous.tv is a modern, eye-popping website that features splashes of white text against hot pink caption bubbles, banners and buttons. The loud and vibrant hue perfectly complements its accompanying tongue-in-cheek video content, injecting a tone of playfulness, spunk and energy that’s true to its ethos: captivating and capturing the attention of those who seek fame.

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.

normal bookmark

The normal bookmark is a plain, simple bookmark of high-quality paper made from trees from renewable forests. The corners of the bookmark are rounded with a radius of approximately 3 mm to make them less susceptible to knocks and to feel comfortable in the hand.

When you insert a normal bookmark into a book, it begins to do its job quietly, with few distractions. Its natural color blends humbly into a book; the slightly textured surface keeps it from falling out. Because the length of a normal bookmark is cut along the grain of the paper, when slotted, parallel, into a book, it curves subtly with the flipping of pages.

Renowned Japanese designer Kenya Hara once said, “Emptiness is itself the possibility of it being filled”. You can fill the emptiness of a normal bookmark with writing and drawing, or leave it empty and humble for your contemplation.

Website

The bookmarks are sold online on a micro-site cleverly designed with high resolution photography, smooth transitions and a enhanced browsing experience powered by Ajax and JavaScript. Care has been taken to ensure usability and accessibility are maintained by means of progressive enhancement. The website will work, albeit without the bells and whistles, even with JavaScript turned off.

Ate Consulting

Singapore is a country of food aficionados. Aun Koh and Tan Su-Lyn, two writer-publishers, took the passion further and created Ate Consulting in 2006. The launch of Ate Consulting was a resounding success, and with that, the consultancy has expanded to include Ate Media, which publishes the first authoritative restaurant guide for Asia — the Miele Guide. Both Ate Consulting and Ate Media now provide a wide range of services in the lifestyle industry, from concept development in the food and beverage industry to implementation of products in hospitality to brand development and strategic marketing to publishing.

With the growth, Ate Consulting decided that an online presence is critical. COMA’s Design Director, Aen Tan, was approached to create a website to augment the corporate presence of the consultancy. Both Aun Koh and Tan Su-Lyn are partial to minimalism, and with due consideration of the diverse membership, the website had to reflect simplicity and effect usability.

With a nod to Aun Koh and Tan Su-Lyn’s style, the website is engineered on two key elements — simplicity and minimalism. The minimalistic site is built on WordPress, which is a blog software that has a smaller, leaner and cleaner architecture and code base. It serves as an effective, low-cost content management system with full publishing capabilities.

The site is designed in a simple, clear and appealing way. Users are given clear direction in how to navigate the site and to access information they need.

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.

Wedding Fashion

SingaporeBrides.com is a one-stop resource for everything wedding-from selecting the perfect wedding ring to finding a romantic honeymoon destination. SingaporeBrides.com conceived of the idea of creating an interactive media platform to showcase wedding gowns created by local designers. An online gallery was proposed.

We created Wedding Fashion Showcase which demonstrates a simple, interactive user interface and a slideshow gallery of sumptuous wedding gowns. The gowns can be viewed individually in detail and added to a wish list which can be forwarded to boutiques for subsequent follow-up.