“Your Best Work”—Graphic Design Award Winners 2011

Hot Studio, San Francisco; www.hotstudio.com

“Hot Studio is a people-centered experience design company. Dedicated to creating elegant solutions for complex design challenges, we collaborate with business leaders, innovative organizations, and emerging companies to create breakthrough products and services that have global reach and local impact. We combine our expertise with your knowledge and work with you to create compelling and meaningful experiences for people.

“Founded in 1997 in San Francisco by Maria Giudice, a pioneer in the field of information design, we started out small. Growing from a two-person outfit into a full-service creative agency, there are now more than 80 seasoned professionals working in Hot’s offices in San Francisco and New York City. We are a diverse team of visual designers, user experience architects, strategists, technologists and producers—all committed to creating award-winning experiences.”

ENTRY TITLE: PopTech iPad Application

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:   
PopTech unites the world’s most inspiring leaders, thinkers, and doers to improve how people live. For their 2011 annual conference, “The World Rebalancing,” PopTech asked sponsor Hot Studio to collaborate with PwC, the UN Global Pulse, Jana and The New York Times R&D Lab to create an iPad experience. The final app relays facts and meaning through data visualizations. Because the content ranged from PopTech fellows’ inspirational videos to newspaper “memory maps,” the team created a format combining gallery, magazine, and playground. And layering the lens of past, present, and future over it all transformed individual interactions into a cohesive story about who we are. The final app lets users discover surprising information whose implications are paving the way for how we live—and could live.

CREATIVE TEAM:
Principal, Creative Director – Jennifer Kilian 
Senior Producer – Maureen Costello
Director, Program Planning – Alison Rand
Director, Social Innovation – Sarah Brooks
User Experience – John Butterfield
Visual Design – Eric Grant, Brian van Veen
Director of Technology – Jason Punzalan
Senior Design Engineers – Anthony Bovasso, Oksana Timonina, Scott Tran
Executive Director (PopTech) – Andrew Zolli
VP, Strategic Partnerships  (PopTech) – Dan Barasch
Director of Technology  (PopTech) – Louis Juska
Project Manager (PopTech) – Jan Burdick

CLIENT: PopTech

ENTRY TITLE: Evri iPad Application

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
When Evri approached Hot Studio about developing an iPad app, the field was already crowded with popular news readers. But Evri, a personalized news reader that makes it easy to track topics of interest, knew it had a key advantage: a robust semantic database that trans-forms data from more than 15,000 news sources into topics relevant to users. Working together, Evri and Hot created an app that leveraged Evri’s backend technology. Designed to function like a kind of Google Maps for the news, the app helps users discover, navigate, and better understand the things that matter to them. Functionality was bolstered by an intuitive navigational structure that seamlessly surfaces traditional newsroom categories, like Business and Sports, as well as trending and relevant content. Add to that a clean, colorful visual design, and the result is an Evri app that certainly stands out from the pack.

CREATIVE TEAM:
Executive Sponsor – Chris Jones
Producer – Kristy LaFollette
User Experience – Joanie McCollum
Visual Design – Paul Smith, Cathy Lo, Holger Struppek

CLIENT: Evri

ENTRY TITLE: Gilt Groupe’s Park & Bond Website

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Equal parts GQ and Bergdorf Goodman, Park & Bond, the new high-end men’s shopping site from Gilt Groupe, combines distinct merchandise and a unique editorial voice. Coordinating Park & Bond’s product and content was no easy task, so Gilt turned to Hot Studio’s design team to pull together the whole ensemble. Gilt wanted to create an experience that matched the same high levels of service shoppers expect in better stores. Hot responded with a clean, intuitive website that behaves like a personal shopper, suggesting and matching different items. The site’s “Shop the Look” function quickly pulls together outfits while incorporating the site’s editorial voice to explain when and why each outfit works. It’s a hard look to pull off, seamlessly matching content and commerce, but, working together, Hot and Gilt made it happen. So well, in fact, the site won The Golden Turban for “Best New E-Commerce Site of the Year” at the 2011 Racked Awards—less than three months after launching.

CREATIVE TEAM:
Principal, Creative Director – Jennifer Kilian
Principal, Strategy – Phil Lam
Director, Program Planning – Alison Rand
User Experience – John Butterfield, Shalin Amin
Creative Lead – Eric Grant
Visual Design – Brian van Veen, Blake Olmstead, Victor Brunetti, Balin Brandt
President  (Gilt Groupe) – John Auerbach
GM (Gilt Groupe) – Chris Ventry
Head of Men’s Editorial & Creative (Gilt Groupe) – Tyler Thorenson
Sr. Director of User Experience (Gilt Groupe) – Brian Kalma

CLIENT: Gilt Groupe  

ENTRY TITLE: Kiva Website Redesign

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Innovative non-profit Kiva introduced web micro-lending, inviting users to help individuals in 59 countries build self-sufficiency, through loans as small as $25. Since 2005, nearly 600,000 lenders have loaned more than $222 mil-lion through Kiva’s site. Hot Studio has worked with organizations like GlobalGiving and United Religions Initiative in our commitment to making a difference worldwide so we were excited to help Kiva improve their online lending experience. A redesign introduced the opportunity to improve lender-borrower connections, better articulate Kiva’s mission and purpose, and educate the lending community. To internalize Kiva’s mission, culture, and values, the Hot team worked in their San Francisco office. During an intensive, four-month process marked by passionate discussion and debate, Hot helped unite the Kiva staff behind an updated design. Today Kiva is thriving—with a fresh site, improved navigation and a new email strategy—and enhancing the micro-lending experience they brought to the web and the world.

CREATIVE TEAM:
Producer – David Paige
Creative Director – Maria Giudice
User Experience – Tanya Herrgott
Visual Design – Jisun Suh
VP of Product  (Kiva) – Katherine Woo
Director of Development (Kiva) – Cailin Nelson
Designer (Kiva) – Samantha Tripodi
Developers (Kiva) – Paul Ericksen, Gabriel Castillo

CLIENT: Kiva

ENTRY TITLE: Zinio iPad Application Design

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Shortly before the first iPad was announced, Zinio, the world’s largest digital magazine, approached Hot Studio with an auda-cious challenge: Design and build an iPad app for Zinio in six weeks—without ever having seen an iPad. The challenge was met, and the results proved extraordinary. Zinio’s iPad app has since become the third highest-grossing app in iTunes, and one of PC Magazine’s top 100 iPad apps. Working in partner-ship with Zinio and Pervasent, a leading mobile developer, Hot’s design team created a reader that was intuitive and fun to use—the perfect complement to the magazines themselves. The experience was augmented with a built-in store that made it easy to browse and shop. Behind the scenes, the app was bolstered by a prioritized product roadmap that allowed Zinio to quickly improve upon its app following the iPad’s actual release. All in all, not too shabby for six weeks’ work.

CREATIVE TEAM:
Producer – Kyre Osborn
Creative Director – Matthew Carlson
User Experience – Renee Anderson
User Experience and Visual Design Lead – Paul Smith
iPad UX Lead  (Zinio) – Matthew Davis
iPad Product Manager (Zinio) – Brian Yu
Development Firm – Pervasent

CLIENT: Zinio