Nestled nicely in the land of 10,000 lakes, the City of Minneapolis says drinking its tap water makes good sense both economically and ecologically. To take their case to the public, the city tapped MPLS-based brand communications agency LaBreche - and we got to be their web development partner in building a waterproof website.
"Given the budget in the RFP - which didn't specifically call for a website, we knew whatever we came up with had to be something cost-effective, and our thoughts turned immediately to interactive;" said Jacob Tripple, CIO and COO at LaBreche. "Ad spending wouldn't have carried the city's budget very far - an ad campaign would have easily been triple the cost."
Conceived and designed by LaBreche, TapMpls.com uses video both as narrative (with some funny short films) and backdrop (with cool waves sloshing and icky/smoky carbon swirling) to illustrate the pros of drinking local tap water and the cons of bottled water.
"We chose to use ActionScript 3 for the base animation on the 'Get Water Facts' page so that we could meet the client's goal of creating a 'fluid' site,'" said The Nerdery's Simon Banks, the project's software development manager.
Visitors click "take the pledge" by entering survey data about their water habits, which is submitted to a PHP script that records info in the database and assigns an avatar to the person. Pledge takers add themselves to the dynamically shuffling deck of cards representing Minneapolitans weaned off the bottle. The scrollable grid of pledge avatars has a 3D look not unlike the credits in Star Wars.
"The Nerdery chose to use Papervision3D for the pledge page animation as the client had a specific vision," said Banks. "They presented sample sites as benchmarks they liked, and the goal was to create a truly interactive experience for users to explore other pledges."
Fans and followers can see what's water-blogged by following TapMPLS.com on Facebook and Twitter.
In full conservation mode, The Nerdery is pleased to report that this project came in well under budget - with not a drop of water or snippet of code wasted.
"Our biggest challenge was the timeline, as we only had a short window of time to launch the site - but I must say the LaBreche team was always available when we needed assets or a phone call to go over something being built for the site," said Banks.
"Working with The Nerdery, for us, is a match made in heaven," said LaBreche's Tripple, in reference to this and other ongoing joint efforts. "We bring the creative strategy and design, they throw in their ideas and we bake them a bit, and The Nerdery builds our vision. It's fun having multiple creatives at the table throughout the planning and development process - and I'm definitely including Nerdery programmers in that creative mix."
LaBreche was highly involved throughout the project from the initial site discussion to development reviews, and their design for the site was truly awesome, very clean and soothing, which matched the site's goal.
software development manager, The Nerdery