Sunday, December 28, 2008
Hyper Island Interactive Art Director 2008 students Namroud Gorguis and Nadia El-Imam won Xtraworks' competition for Swedish Rescue Services Agency website Skyddsnätet.se.
During 3 short weeks in October/November, the Swedish Rescue Services Agency website Skyddsnätet.se advertised a competition through Xtraworks, where the request was for ideas on how to create an interactive and educational website for Skyddsnätet.se aimed at the hard-to-get target group young people and children, ages 4-18.
Eight great proposals were received, but only one of them instantly stood out as the clear winner.
“The choice of Namroud Gorguis and Nadia El-Imam's proposal was immediate, as it contained all the ingredients we were looking for alongside with some unexpected and great new ideas. In their proposal we saw an unusual graphic solution, a beautiful and very creative, comprehensive and easily adaptable design which attracts kids and youngsters, as well as the older part of our audience - something we did not at all expect. They came up with very creative ideas on how to adapt and divide the site in proactive and reactive, a website strategy that we’re missing today. The focus on attractive, interactive parts, mobile content and the educational way to structure the features impressed us in a big way,” says Victoria Egler, head of marketing at Skyddsnätet.se.
Namroud Gorguis and Nadia El-Imam both graduated from Hyper Islands Interactive Art Director program in June of this year and are now working as conceptual Interactive Art Directors. Sometimes on their own, sometimes side by side. Namroud Gorguis explains:
“Me and Nadia as a team, play very well together. This is not the first assignment we do together, and it won’t be the last. We both live and work in Stockholm and previous to Hyper Island we both have a few years in the business, but our experience at Hyper Island made us what we are today.”
The brief from Skyddsnätet.se was short and clear; they wanted to accomplish a comprehensive change to the existing website material in order to better communicate with the specified target group, with focus on interaction, design, search ways and mobile content.
“Our need for an effective way to communicate with the target group is acute, and because of this we chose to skip the traditional advertising pitch in order to save time and to get input from more liberal minds, and that’s why we chose Xtraworks as our partner in this mission. We are very happy with the outcome and believe that we got more out of working with Xtraworks creative minds than we would have gotten from the traditional agency during such a short time span,” Victoria Egler adds.
She continues, “In Namroud and Nadias proposal we identified a new graphical way of adapting a website design, a close to revolutionary and very compelling strategy which I believe would be very hard to match even for the most established agencies that we normally work with.”
We congratulate Namroud and Nadia on a fantastic job!