Digital campaigns have come a long way! Promoting up and coming products, services, and/or campaigns is now more readily available through Kickstarter—“a funding platform for creative projects.” At Social Driver, we help clients Get with the Future by supporting both entertaining and revolutionary social projects. Check out 6 of the best Kickstarter video campaigns that caught our attention:
Campaign #1: Kickstarter Open Source Death Star
Pledge: £20,000,000
The force is definitely with the team behind the Kickstarter Open Source Death Star campaign! Based in London, the project has received worldwide recognition & support. While creation of an actual Death Star may be bleak, the Kickstarter Open Source Death Star campaign is momentous. Steadily growing towards it’s goal to gain “more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.”
Campaign #2: Dog Days
Pledge: $30,000
Local directors Laura Waters Hinson and Kasey Kirby set out to document the successes and tribulations of two uncanny hotdog stand owners in the Washington, DC area. Coite, a former industrial engineer, and Siyone, a former East African refugee, join forces to keep street vending alive despite the new popularity of “food truck” vendors. The gain for pledging towards this campaign ranges from donating $5—which will allot you special thanks on the movie website, to $5,000 (or more)—which will grant you the credit of Contributing Associate Producer in the film and more perks. With under a month to go the campaign is almost halfway to their goal!
Campaign #3: LiveCode
Pledge: £350,000
“If you couldn’t code before, LiveCode is the answer.” The application—Live Code—is already available to a fourth of Secondary Schools in Scotland. Of those schools, students using the program for a year have shown a significant increase in computer science interest. LiveCode is produced by RunRev Ltd. (app developers) and is described as the “next generation hyper card” program. The Kickstarter campaign was created to help fund the program to run on every popular device and code in English. By mid-March the program will be available and free to schools and universities globally. The initiative of LiveCode is to encourage digital literacy by helping young minds write interactive software.
Campaign #4: /Crowdring
Pledge: $15,000
Through /Crowdring, Deepa Gupta, Adriana Valdez Young, Carina Molnar, and Leonardo Eloi planned to unite the world on social justice issues. In 2011, a movement in India gained 35 million petition phone calls from supporters to a local number. However, the supportive phone calls did not suffice because there was no system maintain and organize the data. /Crowdring is an application that is developed to allow those supporting any movement around the world to use their phone call as a petition signature. These “mobile signatures” will then be presented to politicians and lawmakers as encouragement for change. With developing partnerships in Rio, Nairobi, and Bangalore, /Crowdring is on it’s way to revolutionizing involvement in social movements.
Campaign #5: GPS Art Poster
Pledge: $500
This non-traditional art form has caught the attention of many. Although the campaign isn’t over the poster art exceeded its goal by over $7,000 dollars. Collected from thousands of impressions from GPS users around any city, each piece embodies layers of traveled routes. When finished the artistry shows a layout of a city with interconnected lines, some denser than others, which conveys areas highly traveled. The finished product, a frame-able poster, can be made from any area in the USA as well as the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark.
Campaign #6: Embrace+
Pledge: $220,000
Say goodbye to interrupting meetings or movies with phone alerts! Described as a “fashion accessory with true functionality,” Embrace+ (for androids and Iphones) is a bracelet which alerts it’s wearer with color coded alerts. From incoming calls and texts to email, Facebook, or Twitter notifications, Embrace+ keeps you in sync without having the phone directly in your hand. Each notification has the possibility of being to be color coded letting you know exactly which type of notification your receiving. Even down to your girlfriend/boyfriend or boss calling you. The campaign for the sleek notification design is still underway to release the final product of the Embrace+ with the 5ATM waterproof grade.
Share in the comments below your favorite Kickstarter campaign!
To find out more how Social Driver can aid your upcoming campaign contact us at Info@SocialDriver.com.
This is the third post in a series about Responsive Web Design, described in plain language from a front end designer.
Ok, so we’ve discussed why responsive web design is an excellent solution for our websites. Then we dug a little deeper into how it actually works. Today we want to share our 20 favorite responsively designed websites and why we think they’re so great.
The largest responsive website to date, The Boston Globe handles loads of content effortlessly, keeping the site intuitive and the content easily accessible on the device of your choice.
You should talk to us. Social Driver is now hiring both part-time and full-time front-end developers to help bring our responsive designs to life. We have free Nespresso and lots of fun!
I love this site. I really do. Smashing takes advantage of horizontal screen real estate like few responsive sites do. Go ahead expand your browser window out as far as your screen allows and it just maximizes the space without feeling cluttered. Furthermore, the strength of the layout and menu structure does not degrade at smaller screen sizes. Nicely done.
Clean layout, beautiful photography and playful iconography made me like this site immediately on my first visit. It’s a joy to look at and navigate on any device and if you’re a foody looking for scrumptious, healthy recipes it may be love at first site.
Type designer, Jan Tschichold once said, ‘Simplicity of form is never a poverty, it is a great virtue.’ The simple layout and understated menu and graphic elements juxtaposed against beautiful fluid images communicate that excellence in form and function are givens when working with this architecture studio. This site just says ‘good design’ whether I’m viewing it on my iPhone or my iMac.
If you haven’t check out Sphero, you should. It’s an amazing robotic ball gaming system for IOS and Android devices. But I’m not reviewing their product, just there site. A recent web design trend is the use of background photos that flood the browser window. Sphero does this well. The abstract product photos with a grid overlay don’t distract from the important content. I like the permanent menu and footer bars on my desktop, but appreciate how the footer moves to make room for more important content on my iPhone. Overall, the site is intuitive and attractive. An excellent example that responsive design done well looks great on any size screen.
It might be the conspicuous green frog that causes me love this site. Either way, it’s worth resizing your browser window just to see him change size, shape and color. But seriously, this is a polished responsive site. The breakpoints correspond well with the layout requirements and the result is a sharp looking site that does not degrade at any size. The main menu always looks good even when those sweet little icons go away to make room on smaller screens.
The Grey Goose site shows that designing responsively does not limit our designs to columns of fluid text and images on solid backgrounds. The sky is still the limit with what we can do responsively. Beautiful photography, parallax scrolling, intuitive navigation and refined typography combine to create a site that is as equally functional and attractive on my smart iPhone as it is my iMac. This list is not in order of our preference, but if it was I think Grey Goose would be at the top.
With a name like “New Adventures In Web Design,” one would expect a responsive site for this web design conference. I think my favorite aspect of this site is the use of fluid typography. Notice how the menu, headline and body text resize subtly to achieve optimal legibility on all devices. Good design is all about the details and this site has the details dialed in.
Websites in the higher education space are not necessarily known for being on the leading edge of design trends. So discovering the Lancaster site was a nice surprise. I appreciate its simple, modern, non-trendy look and feel. In spite of it’s large amount of content, it’s as easy to navigate on my iPhone as it is on my iMac.
The spacious layout, bold typography and simple icons make fundraise.com easy to look at and navigate.
Nick La’s blog is a wealth of information and resources for any designer or front end developer. But that’s not why it’s in our list. The great content is accompanied by subtle texture, beautiful illustration and–thanks to its responsive nature–is easily accessible no matter what device you fancy.
Heathlife celebrates the heritage of one of London’s largest parks. Though maybe not quite as stunning as the park itself, this website is a beauty on screens large and small.
Though this site is not fluid, it has well structured layouts for any device class. Where many large responsive websites omit content for smaller screen sizes, London & Partners keeps it all, maximizing accessibility for mobile users. This is a good reminder that responsive design is an excellent solution for large and small site alike.
Oliver Russell has done a good job of building a site that responds well on mobile devices while keeping the integrity of the design in tact. I appreciate the shallow and straight forward content structure. My eyes are drawn to the most important sales points and I can access nearly all that I want to know without leaving the homepage. Refreshingly simple compared to the laborious, text heavy website of other marketing firms. One complaint: I would like to see the site expand beyond width of 960 pixels on larger monitors.
Ryan is product designer at Facebook, but has invested in a personal portfolio site that is a cut above the norm. Well branded and brilliantly responsive, Ryan’s site is a thing of beauty on any screen.
Jessica’s lettering and illustration rocks and so does her site. Seriously, I can’t help but smile when I look at it. It is simple and elegant and delightfully fluid. Oh, and for good measure she through in three additional themes. One of which is “Teen Girl Mode”, replete with rediculously distracting animated gifs and a hideous cat illustration (Just click on the little heart in the upper right corner).
Maybe it’s the friendly King Trident mascot, but this happy little site makes me want to download the Fork cms straightaway, or at least “try the demo”. To increase mobile load times the CSS omits the fun header illustrations at smaller sizes. Overall, site reformats and displays nicely on a variety of display ports.
Ethan coined the phrase, ‘Responsive Web Design’ in 2010, so it comes without surprise that his website is responsive. Ethan’s belief in articulate and intelligent design is expressed in a site that is straight and to the point without extraneous decoration.
This t-shirt shop site stretches and shrinks to fill any size view port with photos of their hip graphic t’s. Fluid images and type make this site a joy to browse on any size device. One complaint: I think the menu could be smaller for use on smartphones. Currently it takes up an unnecessary amount of valuable screen space on my iPhone.
Trent’s site is an excellent example of fluid type. On a large monitor the text size is slightly bigger for increased readability, whereas the text shrinks to achieve comfortable line lengths and legibility on my iPhone. I also really like the simple block print style illustrations Trent includes in his articles.
