This project started out as an animated film that we wrote and designed for a client to demonstrate the technology underlying their product. The animation can be viewed on their website to anyone who is willing to part with some personal information. We created a playback interface that gives the viewer maximum control over the content and allows them to view the animation in any order they want.

How do you put emotion into a gigantic software project that people like us will never get to see? And how do you even attempt to explain what it does or what it means? With the help of a client who was wrestling with these exact same issues, it became like The Sky Above, the Mud Below. You’d come out of a meeting with your head spinning after some intense dialogue with a v.c. over a miniscule point of product theology, and then try to figure out today’s overarching version of what it all means.

Here are the first and second generations of the Stoke website. We took radically different approaches because in the first instance we were going after a LIFE magazine feel with the bright red logo and the dramatic black and white photography. We had something important to say and we needed a platform that was very different from all the other high tech stuff currently in vogue. The next time around we had to breathe some new life into the beast and we needed a structure that would carry a lot more content. We decided to work with a Zimbabwean-born British illustrator, Paul Wearing, who allowed us to introduce some color, and scale and humanity into the equation. You can see the whole site here.

We designed this site to provide information and tools for grass roots activists in California. SB 840 is a bill that passed both houses of the legislature and was vetoed by the governator. It creates a single-payer health care system that covers everyone in the state. Health insurance companies are not too fond of this model, which is similar to the very popular Medicare system, because it will end their gravy train.