Down to the Wire

Down to the Wire is the digital project we created to celebrate our 10th birthday and relaunch our business as Heyday. We challenged ourselves to be ‘our own client’, to create the project entirely in-house, to show our capability across disciplines and to share our passion for digital. Here’s the story of Down to the Wire.

Insight

To celebrate the 10th birthday of Doubleclique (our former name), we wanted to create a digital project we could be proud of. We wanted to use this to prove our ability to deliver excellence across a wide range of ‘digital agency’ services and relaunch our business as ‘Heyday’.

We started with a few simple insights. Our project should avoid pretence and gimmickry and deliver instead something that was genuine and authentic. And perhaps our project could be a long-lasting resource for New Zealand.

Ideas

We’re the first to admit that serendipity played a part in finding ‘the big idea’. Go to our blog for the full story, but let’s just say that a couple of lovely binary date coincidences (10.10.10 and 01.11.10) led us to the discovery that New Zealand’s connection

to the Internet was made 21 years ago. And no one had celebrated it.

Here was an idea that fitted beautifully with all of our objectives. A project to tell the story of how the Internet has shaped our lives and which we could deliver as a long-term resource for our nation.

The idea of ‘resource’ lends authenticity and genuineness but it requires extensive content to be credible. We decided our story had to be told through video, words, statistics and related links to other material and in a way that would encourage visitors to explore and contribute content themselves.

We were also aware that we needed a light touch to deliver contextual insights to a broad audience. To get people in the mood, we’d need a bit of irreverent humour in our editorial, an engaging ‘presenter’ and perhaps some ‘musical accompaniment’.

Lights, camera, action and a few Flying Nuns

Our team filmed hours of video for Down to the Wire, capturing the thoughts of over 60 Internet personalities and players.

Free downloads – an iconic Kiwi track
every day for 21 days

Design

Down to the Wire was a challenging test of Heyday's philosophy of 'Simplicity'. Rich in media, there was a danger that it could look and feel complicated. How could users navigate easily, read, listen, watch and tell us their stories effectively with so much happening on the site? And wrap this in a beautiful design.

A quote from 1993. It’s still not all on the web

The solution came partly through the time constraints we were working under. We would add a year's content to the site each day for 21 days, starting in 1989. This meant that we only had to worry about a single page template or design and then upload all content to it the same way for those 21 days.

The team at Heyday was incredibly excited about the project. Our designers screamed for the right to play with headline typefaces, our Digital Strategist was scheming a top blog and Social Media campaign and, in the background, developers were creating a beautiful three column trick…

The new dial-up modem speed while waiting for DSL
Dial-up modem speeds are now 56kbit/s - the fastest they will ever get. Everyone’s waiting for Telecom’s digital subscriber line (DSL) copper network enhancement technology to roll out.

Delivery

When developing a digital project and getting it out there for the world to see, you are bound by certain protocols and standards. Developers
simply have to know them. But the trick is
Geared scrolling knowing them well enough to be able to incorporate new things in compelling ways.

Our wireframe (design schematic) called for a three-column page layout on a long scrolling page. Easy. But because they were different lengths, we wanted the three columns to scroll in a variable or ‘geared’ way, independent of each other.

We can't be sure whether this had ever been done before, but to be confronted by it for the first time is to be bewitched. It only works in ‘webkit’ browsers (that’s Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome), so if you have one of these, check it out.

'Geared Scrolling' has developed its own mini fan base – several keen-eyed visitors to the site started tweeting about it. So we put an explanation of it in our Blog and released the code on GitHub.