What interests you about the program you’re applying for [Interactive Design]?

I consider myself lucky that even at 26 years old, I’ve already got a good idea about my purpose in life. My role is to empower others with knowledge; to take complicated information and clarify it and make it accessible to a broad swath of the population, so that they may use that information as tools to improve their lives. I chose to fulfill this purpose through journalism, specifically by becoming an editor.

I started off as a proofreader and fact checker in the on-campus housing office at The University of Georgia. When I got a job on the copy desk at the Red & Black, the student newspaper for the university, I learned about the wonderfully frenetic world of pagination, and soon I had cut my teeth on InDesign and Photoshop. I was hooked. After I graduated (and spent a brief stint in tech support), I landed a job on the copy desk at The Beaufort Gazette, a McClatchy-owned daily in the beautiful South Carolina Lowcountry. I slept until 3 p.m., then wrote headlines and designed front pages and features sections for an audience of 26,000 readers. On the weekends, I went to the beach. Life was good.

In April 2007, I got the opportunity to take over content management for BeaufortGazette.com. The position was pitched as the marriage of journalism news sense and Web 2.0 sensibility, a chance to flex my geek muscle, put my New Media Institute training to good use and speak to the readers in the language of my generation. Plus I could play with shiny, expensive A/V toys to produce Web videos. Sweet.

But it didn’t quite work out that way. There was very little money in the budget for training, so I was largely left to my own devices to figure out the content management systems, site hierarchy and equipment. My boss knew the Web was important but didn’t understand it, and he balked (and doubted me) when I told him it was impractical, nay, impossible to stream 45 minutes uncut of a town council candidate forum live over public WiFi. The Director of New Media for the paper is actually located at The Island Packet, our sister paper serving Hilton Head Island some 40 minutes away, and it tends to be difficult to troubleshoot remotely whenever I run into technical problems. Much work remains to be done with the site, but by myself I’m just not strong enough to carry the department in the direction it needs to go. So instead of driving site development and creating rich media projects, I wait for stories to come in so I can copy and paste them into story templates. I also still pick up a few pages to design for the perpetually-overloaded copy desk. This is not what I signed up for.

And that is where Brainco’s Interactive Design program fits in. Right now, I’m spinning my wheels without a lot of opportunities for advancement or professional growth. Positions at larger newspapers are looking for the well-rounded portfolio of the exact type of projects I would love to be working on. I’m hoping to take a step back from papers to gain a little perspective on the Web in general: what works, what doesn’t, where is the technology headed, and how does one best communicate an idea through an interactive medium. I came of age during the advent of America Online, and I was a high-school student during the heyday of the Dot-com bubble. The Internet is an extraordinary tool, able to provide so much information to so many people, and we’ve likely only scratched the surface of potential carried in the medium.

I still firmly believe in newspapers. They’ve survived radio and television, and they WILL survive the Internet. But right now, we’re in the middle of a revolution. I want to make sure I have the knowledge, skills and experience to lead the industry gently into the 21st century.

Choose an ad campaign, design piece or Web site you like. Why?

Cloverfield Movie Viral Marketing Campaign

Sites:

* http://www.1-18-08.com/
* http://slusho.jp/
* http://www.tagruato.jp/
* http://tidowave.com/blog/
* http://www.myspace.com/hudsonplatt
* http://www.myspace.com/jamielascano
* http://www.myspace.com/robbyhawkins

The most successful ad campaigns are the ones which reflect the ego of their target markets. Generation Y notoriously resists being pitched to; advertisements are typically viewed as something that influences somebody else, never one’s self. So how would a mid-January movie with no A-list star billing drum up the necessary hype to stand out from the crowd? By creating a monster, concealing its identity, and leaking a slow-to-unravel mystery plot which audience members are free to explore online, filling in gaps and providing a context to a cryptic movie trailer. The movie “Cloverfield” positioned itself to draw in these Web-savvy users through carefully coordinated viral marketing.

“Cloverfield” is produced by J.J. Abrams, the brainchild behind ABC’s wildly successful drama “Lost.” Many of the same promotional tactics used to create a backstory for “Lost” have been employed by “Cloverfield,” specifically the creation of fictional entities into real-world spaces. Most of the principle characters in the movie have fully fleshed-out profiles on MySpace.com (complete with all the trappings: music that automatically plays, backgrounds which render text unreadable, banter between friends). There is far more information contained on these pages than can ever be revealed in a 2-hour film. The MySpace pages reinforce the idea that these people are just like the Everyday Joe members of the audience, and the events they experience could very well happen to any of us.

The puzzles began with a cryptic trailer leading audience members to 1-18-08.com, which contained photos of parties and chaos. From there, audience members could deduce links to a fictitious product, Slusho, which is manufactured from “sea nectar” by a Japanese corporation called Tagruato. In November, the Tagruato site was “hacked” by an environmental group angry about the company’s oil drilling operations. Grainy news footage shows a purported terrorist attack on one of Tagruato’s oil rigs, but careful scrutiny reveals a deep, gutteral growl that might just be some sort of deep-sea monster.

None of these companies, organizations or people are real, but you’d never suspect it just by checking out their online presence. Never once do any of them break character. The experience is immersive, self-contained, and designed to provide a “You Are There” feeling to the audience. Clever moviegoers are invited to delve deep into the Web to piece together a larger picture that what the movie alone can provide. For those interested in your standard-issue Godzilla-style movie, the movie’s trailer promises to deliver. But those willing to invest the time and brainpower to follow along with the online puzzle are rewarded with a richer experience and a deeper understanding of exactly why the Statue of Liberty’s head is resting in the middle of a Manhattan intersection.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’m putting my money on giant mutated whale angered by the disturbance of its habitat. I only hope it can live up to the hype.

Choose an ad campaign, design piece or Web site your don’t like. Why?

Marietta Daily Journal Online

Site: http://mdjonline.com

Newspaper Web sites strive to be a portal for the community they serve; the papers want readers to come to their site first to find out what’s going on down the street and in the world around them. What fills up 30-plus pages of broadsheet newsprint must be retooled and presented in a way that is accessible to all types of readers, from those seeking national and international headlines to sports fans, entertainment buffs and political junkies. Which is why it boggles the mind that a Web site would contain barriers preventing readers from efficiently reaching the content.

The Marietta Daily Journal is a 17,500-circulation daily newspaper serving Marietta, Ga., just outside of Atlanta. Their printed page design desk is home to many alumni of The Red & Black, the student newspaper for my alma mater. Their Web site, however, breaks a few cardinal sins.

The index page of the site contains very little: The masthead for the Web site, colored buttons corresponding to the different sections offered, and a Javascript photo slideshow. The slideshow is interesting, and it showcases some very pretty photos, but it stops just short of its intended function. The photos have no cutline information apart from the less-than-helpful alt-text “photo1 photo1″, and clicking on each image leads… nowhere. If one were interested in the story behind a photo, one would have to delve deeper into the site to find it manually. A page like this would be useful if it offered readers a choice between high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth versions of the site. But the links featured here are available in clearly-labeled forms in other parts of the site. The splash page just forces another click to get to the actual content.

Each page contains between five to 10 advertisements at the top and right-hand side of the screen. Their position is fine; it’s very clear that they are separate from the editorial content in the middle. But most of them seem to be animated .gifs, and at regular intervals they peel, wipe, sweep and starburst between frames. It comes across not only as cheesy but as extremely distracting. It’s difficult to focus on the text of a story with all that constant motion going on in one’s peripheral vision. Even rendering the ads so that they would animate without the corny effects would greatly reduce their intrusiveness.

Mdjonline.com takes a page from USA Today in their use of color as a branding tool for each section of the paper (a trend, incidentally, which is not carried over in the printed product). The rainbow array of buttons is bright and eye catching but not necessarily well-applied. “Classified” appears as a purple button at the top but as a red banner on the actual Classified page. The section titles in the left navigation rail are presented as white text on a striped, gradient background, which makes the leftmost letters difficult to see. There is also very little contrast on the subsections heads in the main rail, making them all but impossible to read. The topmost banner attempts to create a rounded corner effect, but the mismatched background colors only makes it look amateurish.

Overall, the Marietta Daily Journal’s Web site suffers from a lack of cohesiveness combined with gimmicky presentation which belie it’s status as a respectable news organization. The design decisions only serve to frustrate the reader in their news-gathering endeavor.

Why do you want to come to Brainco?

If all I wanted was to learn a little bit of Flash programming and Javascript tricks, I wouldn’t need to go to school. Peachpit Press publishes some excellent “Visual QuickStart” step-by-step books for learning any programming language or application. But that’s not what I’m looking for. Knowing how to use a tool and knowing what to do with it are two separate things. I could learn everything there is to know about automobiles, but it still wouldn’t make me a great driver.

I completed my undergraduate degree at The University of Georgia alongside 35,000 of my closest friends. The prestigious Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is a wonderful journalism school, but it suffers a bit within the large university setting. The best instructors I had were not always the big-name tenured professors, but rather the adjunct faculty who worked outside of academia and held a wealth of knowledge of what students would encounter in the real world. In pursuing higher education, I prefer a more intimate environment, where the instructors know you by more than just the last four digits of your Social Security Number.

And it’s not just the instructors I hope to learn from. Other students are also coming to Brainco with similar goals and ambitions. Most of us will not perform our jobs in a vacuum, so it’s essential to cultivate a spirit of cooperation and compromise. The best way to do this is through exposure to a variety of creative personalities working toward common goals. I’m eager to see what can come from the blending of talent and experience from my peers.

I grew up in Baltimore, and I’ve been in the South for nearly eight years. Neither place feels like home anymore. The land is beautiful and the weather is like spring year-round, but culturally there is a high value placed on the status quo. In my experience, Southern hospitality applies mainly to short-term visitors, not Yankee carpetbaggers like myself (they have a saying down here: “If your cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn’t call ‘em biscuits”). I want to live in a community that values innovation and diversity. Minneapolis has been lauded as a top tech city, a gateway for new immigrants, a smart place to live and a great city for young professionals. I’m eager to fully uproot myself and start over fresh in an area more in sync with my personal values. I also wouldn’t mind having four distinct seasons again.

I’m not just looking for success. I’m looking for happiness. I’m looking to take pride in the work that I do and the community in which I live. And I’m looking to start that journey in Minneapolis.