I invented the wheel

I didn’t do it on my own, a couple of people came and went, but essentially it was just a core team of two – Dug and myself, and of course a creative director who had the vision to believe in us and just let us go crazy with it. And it wasn’t a wheel we invented it was a website. Its form and function was so well crafted the next agency that came along couldn’t help but precisely replicate it.

And that’s okay. Some creatives in the industry find it shocking, it’s the buzz of the city right now, how could they? But what choice did we leave them? The guy after the guy who invented the wheel didn’t scratch his head and say “fuck me that’s perfect but just cos he’s thought of it first I’m gonna have to give this square thing another try”. Hell no he went with the wheel and invented the unicycle. Debatable as to whether it went down exactly like that, depends on what history book you read, but you get the point. Frankly it’s flattering. But more than that it’s the ultimate measure for success – we fuckin nailed it. We set out to build something timeless, which obviously isn’t forever on the web, but three years is a long time in cyberspace. And all that time has passed yet another agency feels they can’t beat what we created, that’s the ultimate acid test. And passing it is the ultimate complement.

Those were great times creating that website. Cos it wasn’t just about what we created it was also how we did it. There were haters, there always are. Negative people that think anything other than the status quo is scary. Really dudes? You probably wanna change industries cos this is the web and it changes every fuckin minute of every fuckin day and every single nano second in between. We had seriously wacky ideas – like not building the site in flash, and building for larger screen resolutions, and maximizing all the space with hidden layers and collapsed states, and mega drop-downs, and allowing each section of the website to have its own aesthetic while the core navigation elements remained constant, just to name a few. But perhaps our wackiest idea was considered to be what we didn’t do, which was take the existing site and update it. We threw everything out. We walked into a room armed with nothing more than a pen and some post-it notes. And emerged three months later with a wireframe that we sent to the designers to comp up.

And that was just the start. Build clickable wireframes they said, that’s how we’ll sell it to the client. But with another agency hovering at the time we took it upon ourselves to build-out a fully functioning working version of the site, and not just one but four, A-B-C-D test versions, about 15 fully interactive pages each. We worked day and night for six weeks on that Dug and I, working our asses off around the clock whilst simultaneously dealing with management emailing us about how they didn’t have warm fuzzy feelings about what we were doing. Despite all the hate we pulled it off. Took a whole morning to present our work to the client. You could literally see jaws dropping, of course they were, they were looking into the future. Three years later and it’s still the best that this industry can produce. Well done Dug. Thanks for the compliment. Goodbye!