2011 was a banner year for Lenovo. This international tech company was crowned the #3 global PC maker, rolled out a snazzy new brand campaign (have you seen its For Those Who Do ads?), and partnered with Viget to launch the new Lenovo Blogs and Social pages.
The new Lenovo Social homepage
Our goal for this redesign was to centralize Lenovo's existing blogs and social media in an engaging, navigable, and branded way, using one easily maintainable CMS. This would solve a few of the old sites' big problems:
Continue reading "Lenovo Blogs and Social: A New Connection for Those Who “Do”"
I've been bursting at the seams trying to keep this one a secret, but the time has finally come to announce the new upenn.edu!
This site serves as the primary web portal for the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution in Philadelphia. Founded by Benjamin Franklin more than 250 years ago, Penn has rich historical roots and a modern, forward-thinking philosophy that has helped it grow into one of the world's premier centers for education, scholarship, and research. It's also the best school in the world (although, as an alum, I am clearly biased).
Penn's previous site had been around since my freshman year (a long time ago, especially by web standards) and no longer accurately reflected the University's evolving personality and standing in the global community. UPenn.edu needed a modern design that showcased the University's friendly culture, top academics, and commitment to service ... And, that's where Viget came in.
Continue reading "The Red and Blue, Reimagined: the New UPenn.edu"
It's always great to see an existing client take big steps toward growing its business -- but, it's even more exciting when we get to help!
Viget continued our ongoing partnership with MetaMetrics, a Durham-based company whose mission is to improve education through linking assessment with instruction, to expand its Engaging English® reading service. Engaging English uses the Lexile® framework to measure the reading skill levels of English-language learners, connect them to reading resources that match their level, and then track their progress.
We teamed up on the Engaging English product not too long ago, providing UX, visual design, and front-end development services. However, at the time, the "marketing" arm of the site was simply a one-page login screen with a brief product tour. Memberships were only available through a partnership with Educational Testing Service (ETS), so on-site marketing outreach and e-commerce weren't needed.
But, the time has finally come for Engaging English to expand and offer its own e-commerce! Now that users can join directly through the site, the Engaging English landing page needed to transform into a full-fledged marketing experience.
Continue reading "Engaging English Goes E-commerce"
The world has had the pleasure of diving into the legendary ocean adventures of Jacques-Yves Cousteau for decades, but Viget had the opportunity to dive into a more rare Cousteau exploration -- defining their web presence for the next generation.
Continue reading "An Uncharted Exploration, Cousteau Style"
For more than a year, we've fulfilled our promise to bring the best elements of a startup culture into a company that is anything but. PUMA was founded in 1948, has more than 9,000 employees, and earned nearly $4B in revenue last year. I'd call that pretty well-established. Its web presence, though, was in disarray. Dozens of outdated, Flash-heavy, disconnected sites sat on disparate platforms without shared data sources, marketing focus, or analytics data. It was outdated and inefficient, and it was costing PUMA, big time.
No more.
Continue reading "Relaunching PUMA.com, Startup-Style"
Opower was founded in 2007 and secured an additional $50 million in funding last November. In 2010, the company doubled in size and by then had abated nearly 500 million lbs of CO2. And President Obama during a visit to their offices called the company "a model of what we want to be seeing all across the country." You couldn’t fully appreciate these accomplishments by looking at Opower.com a week ago. Like most companies who experience accelerated success, some aspects of the business play catch-up. Viget partnered with the energy-efficiency start-up to completely re-imagine Opower.com and elevate the site to a position reflective of the company’s continuing accomplishments and growth.
Continue reading "Launching Opower.com: Refreshing the Face of Energy Efficiency"
Video game heroes win extra life all the time, but what about video gaming web sites? We recently worked with Epic Games, a pioneer in cutting-edge gaming technology, to give a "1-up" to the marketing site for the "Unreal Technology" cross-platform game engine. The original site was 10 years old and didn't accurately showcase Unreal Engine's industry-leading technology -- a technology that was featured on stage by Steve Jobs during the iPhone 4 launch.
To tell Unreal Engine's compelling story, we started with an initial engagement to create mood boards and set the visual design direction. We had fun with three game-inspired boards, including this one, which was ultimately chosen to inform the site's design.
Next, we took the site through our full redesign process -- starting with user experience research and strategy, moving through visual design compositions based on the selected mood board, and culminating in front-end build-out of the page designs. Through our UX and marketing work, we revised the site's architecture and page layouts to better emphasize Unreal's capabilities and success stories, while also encouraging users to get in touch with the Epic sales team. We then brought these layouts to life with sleek, functional visual designs that mirror the experience of a high-tech video game and emphasize Unreal's vivid imagery.
Continue reading "An Unreal Redesign: Epic Games Advances to the Next Level"
When we sat down with the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network in early January, we walked away from the table both excited about their mission and energized with ideas for their new site. Today, we are proud to announce the launch of the redesigned www.think2040.org.
A project of the Roosevelt Campus Network, Think 2040 "empowers millennials to take an active, visionary role in re-imagining and building America's future." Viget partnered with Think 2040 to complete a five-week engagement, which included user experience design, visual design, front-end development, and custom Ruby on Rails development.
The Before
The original Think 2040 page was pretty basic, and didn't include a lot of interactivity, as you can see.
Continue reading "Redesigning Think2040.org"
Viget doesn't just do web sites -- we also design all sorts of other cool products and applications, from mobile to Facebook.
As an example, we worked with ReverbNation, a start-up that's become one of the biggest musician sites on the web, to redesign the user interface for its MyBand Facebook application. With 2.5 million active users, including musicians from Sean Kingston and Tenacious D to the garage band down the street, MyBand aims to keep fans engaged with an artist's latest songs, photos, videos, and tour dates. It also provides a path to purchase merchandise or sign up for a mailing list.
The MyBand application displays a great amount of diverse information -- so we needed to create a visual hierarchy that reduces clutter while making all this information easy to digest.
Continue reading "Designing for Facebook: the MyBand Application Redesign"
Here at Viget, we love working with young start-ups to help them establish their identities and express a personality that really stands out.
Recently we worked with our friends at MoreBetterLabs to design a new marketing homepage for Ruzuku.com. Ruzuku is an online social learning community, and it needed a more compelling homepage design to coincide with the launch of user registration.
As you can see, the original page was pretty basic ...
Continue reading "Giving a new face to Ruzuku.com"
