Good Dog Design

We recently had the opportunity to collaborate on an ambitious project with Vallarta Adventures, the largest, safest and most professional tour operator on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

We were joined in this great undertaking by Vertebrae, a Bay Area-based branding company extraordinaire (and our next-door neighbors). The endeavor spanned more than a year, and Vertebrae’s team deserves enormous credit for arriving at a vigorous new identity that is in keeping with VA’s No. 1 standing in its marketplace.

Good Dog’s role was to define objectives for VA’s new website, as well as to develop the site’s structure and layout, create its information architecture, implement a more intuitive user experience, and engineer a back-end database system.

VA’s new tagline is “Inspired By Nature,” which leant itself to a great visual presentation. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so we chose to keep copy to a minimum, opting instead for broad panoramic images and plenty of white space to let them breathe. To create a more visceral feel, each photo features a person or group participating in an adventure.

 

In terms of the user experience, we streamlined the site’s architecture to provide intuitive and consistent navigation. We also employed rich media like video brochures, offline chats with agency representatives, third-party social networking, and blogs.

The breadth of activities VA offers is truly remarkable, so much so they once devoted a separate site to each individual experience. We opted to put the various adventures under one roof, with “Learn More” buttons taking the user to individualized landing pages with information on available dates, activity level, what to bring, and testimonials from past visitors.

Integrating an onsite reservation system was an enormous priority and challenge. VA wants more clients to book travel online, so designing an easy-to-use checkout process was crucial. The new site intergrates with VA's SAP reservation system via a customized series of data hooks.

Over the course of this venture, the travel industry was beset by a global economic downturn and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus. But VA remained committed to the project, for which they will always have our heartfelt respect. We ultimately created two sites:  Vallarta Adventures and another for Cabo Adventures.

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For many years we've designed and developed interactive projects for consumer packaged food companies. We enjoy working with food and beverage companies, and love to exploring online brand expression.

We started brainstorming food and beverage products with usage that can be emulated on the phone. We focused on developing game concepts that took advantage of the iPhone's multitouch interface.

After developing some mockups we pitched a few clients, and soon found a brand who was looking to take the plunge into the world of apps. We leveraged their product's core usage characteristics with fun and simple gameplay, which in turn supported the product's key marketing messages. At the end of each game, users are given the chance to post their score to social networks, driving traffic back to the game

We see mobile apps as a great way to expand reach and provide consumers with fun and useful applications that engage them in a brand in new ways. With good apps, there's a strong viral opportunity that lets brands get their message out of their websites and into the hands of the end user (literally).

There are lot more iPhone apps in the pipeline, so follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more updates.

We recently launched a redesign site for Peter Belanger. Peter is one of the top studio photographers in the US; he's done amazing work for clients like Apple, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, Dwell Magazine and Macworld.

I met Peter on the first day at RISD (we were in the same dorm). Even though he should have known better, we became great friends, and it's been an honor to watch his business develop and grow. I really enjoyed working on his site, and we tried a number of interesting techniques to develop a strong platform to present his stunning work.

Right off the bat, we knew we had to create a full screen, scalable site that could show the work as a large as possible. Mark Martin, our talented developer worked to create a canvas-based system that seamlessly scales images to virtually any window size. This was all done without a single bit of Flash, a rarity for photographers' websites. The custom back-end was built in Ruby on Rails.

Beyond the portfolio, we also created a Blog and refreshed the stock site to work within the new design. So head on over and check out peterbelanger.com

St.Mark's has been South Australia's premier residential college since its founding in 1925. Good Dog Design was very pleased to be selected to revitalise the College's website.  We developed a custom built CMS to handle the vibrant new design we created. The new site is bundled full of exciting new features including full integration with twitter, a customised photo gallery system run via email and MMS uploads, flash driven statistics and more!

Tickle Monster is Good Dog's latest iPhone application.  This is our first iPhone application that we have developed just for ourselves rather than a client. It is designed to bring a smile to your face and a song in your heart.  It is a fun and simple little app that lets you tickle and shake the Tickle Monster to your heart's content.  In these times of Global Economic Crisis the world is crying out for cuteness! So we have delivered an application that delivers a whopping 50g of Cute-ateratin* with every dose.

 Tickle Monster can be purchased for US 99cents via the iTunes app store by Click Here

 * note that cute-ateratin is likely to not exist and is something we just made up.