1. Our creative process is driven by collaboration and cross-pollination.

Our process is collaborative from the start, and there is no formal hierarchy among the teams. Sure, we have our Global Directors at the top, but there’s no attitude, and everybody works side-by-side each day with one goal in mind: Deliver the absolute best experience possible, for the user and the client. Right from kickoff, Production, Account, UX, Visual Design and Tech teams all work collaboratively throughout the process to ensure we’re incorporating the very best ideas, no matter from whom they came.

2. Our work makes a difference on the broader web.

These days, launching a digital project is becoming standard for most companies. What really gets us out of bed in the morning is the opportunity to create something truly meaningful; an experience that informs, delights and excites the audience, and the world at large. Sometimes it’s partnering with a startup like Pulse, pushing them to reach beyond the status quo and deliver a transformative experience. In this case adding value and propelling them toward their eventual acquisition by LinkedIn. Most times we’re working with household names in a similar fashion, constantly stretching the boundaries of what’s possible in the digital space. When the end result is a net improvement in the user’s digital quality of life, that’s a win-win.

3. Quality over quantity.

This is our mantra, and we apply it to our work, the clients we choose to work with, and our staff as well. Our ideal target employee is someone who has paid their dues, and brings a skill set second to none. You’ve studied hard, perfected your methods, and are ready to be a part of something truly amazing. This is not about beefing up your portfolio to make a quick jump elsewhere, this is about transforming ‘work’ into a career that you truly love and enjoy.

4. Home is where the Mac is.

Passion and dedication are not ruled by the clock, so we offer workspaces that are warm and comfortable, regardless of how long the day might get. It starts with the shoes coming off at the door, and extends to the lighting, furnishings, and well-stocked refrigerators. Weekly Fikas (Swedish for ‘coffee/tea break’) bring each office together for snacks, treats, and often some spirited trivia competition. When your office feels like a second home, ‘going to work’ takes on new meaning.

5. Our clients are truly partners.

Regardless of our size, we bring a boutique mindset to client relationships. We seek out and work with those clients that respect our process, and are ready to create something meaningful and long-lasting. A mutual exchange of ideas brings us closer, but it’s the mutual trust and respect that deepens the relationship and drives us toward truly evolving their business in the digital realm. We’re proud to call some of the biggest household names, like Google, Microsoft, MTV and USA Today, not just clients but truly partners in our shared success.

6. We’re fiercely independent.

Never beholden to a parent company, or shareholders strictly focused on the bottom line, we have the freedom and flexibility to do whatever we choose, creatively. We experiment, explore, stretch and push every boundary, constantly searching for the next big innovation or approach that will truly reshape what digital means in our everyday lives.

So there you have it. We’re collaborative and comfortable, innovative and independent. But above all, we’re collectively enhancing and elevating one another simply by working together within a system that supports growth and accomplishment, one project at a time. If you can’t sincerely say the same thing about your current situation, we should talk.

We’re growing quickly to meet our client demands and are looking for candidates up for the challenge. Current open positions include Creative Directors, Art Directors, UX Designers, Senior Producers and Lead Developers in both our NYC and SF offices. Please send your portfolios and resumes to Fi’s Director of Talent Acquisition Nick Saricopoulos. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for new positions that open up.

BACKGROUND

Newspaper readership is in decline. In fact, print media in general is gasping for air, in a desperate search for the path back toward relevancy in our increasingly digital world. It’s not that our appetites for news and information have faded; they certainly have not. The core challenge for publishers is to somehow evolve along with the preferences of their audience. This evolution has been from paper to pixels, and it shows no signs of slowing. In fact, a Pew Center Research 2012 news consumption survey shows that fully 39% of Americans polled prefer to receive their news digitally vs. more traditional offline sources. From fourth place in 2008, digital news consumption is now second only to televised news programming.

Gannett Company, Inc. keenly observed this trend earlier than most, and began to embrace the new paradigm by investing in their own digital evolution, specifically with USA Today. After turning inward for several months of workshops, they began the search for the ideal partner to shepherd along the course they had charted. Out of twelve world-class competitors, Fi was the clear favorite, and we eagerly embarked on the journey with one of the most prolific and familiar news sources in publishing.

Narrated by Fi’s creative leads, Irene Pereyra, Global Director of UX & Strategy and Anton Repponen, Global Creative Director, this video is a look at Fi’s story and strategy of redesigning one of America’s most popular news site. Please note that all of the imagery featured in the video was work-in-progress during the lifecycle of the project. Obviously, the end result turned out quite differently.

GETTING STARTED

The centerpiece of the USA Today evolution strategy was a comprehensive rebranding across all of their properties, timed to coincide with their 30th anniversary. Print, digital, even the iconic logo, were all in line for a full makeover. While Wolff Olins set out to craft the new branding guidelines, logo and identity, our teams dove into research and discovery toward the next generation of USA Today online.

Defined by bold decisions, and the challenge to fully disrupt news consumption in the digital space, the plan for the new USA Today was aggressive, and that’s the way we like it. The new experience had to be like nothing before it, paving new ground toward the future of digital publishing. This was familiar territory for both partners involved. USA Today has always been on the forefront of innovation with their bold use of color, and headline-driven editorial approach uncommon in their marketplace. Similarly, Fi has continually pushed the bleeding edge of innovation for many iconic brands in the digital space. Staying true to our shared heritage, and unconcerned with what the competition was doing, we set out to fully reset the bar for a news site in the twenty-first century.

DISCOVERY 

So the course was set, and now we took the deep dive into what it really means to be a trusted source of news, and defining the true wishes and desires of a modern news consumer. There was no doubt we needed a feature-rich and engaging experience that aligned to the updated USA Today brand, but what we were really after were the pivotal insights into the industry and its audience that would inform our architecture and design.

The targeted Discovery phase included four core components, working together by sequentially layering key insights from one phase onto the next.

1. Discovery Research: Very simply, this phase is all about defining the market, the needs, and the opportunities. What are the core mechanics and drivers of the business? What are the existing pain points for news consumers? How can we better serve the needs of journalists and contributors and help them reach the widest possible audience? How can we offer a superior ad experience for both advertisers and audience?

2. Innovation Discovery: Informed by the previous phase, now it’s time to define our approach toward relieving pain points, serving needs, and delivering on identified opportunities. Beyond that, how do we do this in a way that is truly unique and groundbreaking?

3. Experience Strategy: Herein we map user flows and journeys ad infinitum. Continuing to modify and iterate until we reach a state where every rendition of the end experience is sensible, efficient, and delivers on the charted objectives from prior phases.

4. Creative Concepts: With every critical component of the foundation clearly documented, now we do what we do best: design. Organically iterating in a continuous feedback loop with the team at USA Today, we began to conceptualize the framework for an experience built on said foundation, and rapidly come away with a clear vision for the end result.

Here’s a quick glance at one of the Discovery Research documents – a snapshot of user behavior.  

While personas are common and often useful, our approach toward user definition is focused on archetype development. Creating these archetypes based on a set of specific questions defines our approach from a behavioral perspective, as opposed to inventing personas in a vacuum.

When are people coming to the site? From whence are they coming? What are their objectives? How much time are they willing to spend? Are they coming from mobile devices? Which ones? What is their level of comfort and savvy with the Internet in general?

Once we truly and deeply understand the natural behaviors and preferences of our user groups, and in this case how they consume mixed-media news content, then the products of our subsequent phases are sure to be productive. This exercise lays the foundation for the architecture, framework, and creative vision and overall experience.

UX & DESIGN

Fully informed by the research and analysis from the prior phase, now teams of subject-matter experts from both UX and Visual Design come together to begin the heavy lifting toward manifesting the vision.

Many weeks spent in discovery yielded a series of insights that equated to a world-class primer on how people read the news. Informed by natural behaviors – Mom starts with the Life section, Dad with Sports, for example – one key insight was that it’s very rare for any reader to consume the entire newspaper from front to back. Any UX or Visual designer could pick up our comprehensive analysis and within hours be an expert ready to deliver on the designated vision established. Very quickly the framework took shape, and a brilliant disruption of the section-by-section analog convention was the basis of our philosophy.

Most people don’t end up at a news site on the home page. Instead, they’ve likely landed via organic search, social media, or an email forward. This led our architecture to serve those habits and patterns. Our solution involved a radical simplification of a typically very deep framework, essentially providing a two-level structure, with individual articles being the primary focus. Assigning each a unique URL, and layering them directly over the main section page behind it, allowed users to easily share or link to a particular article, and continue reading from article to article without ever having to hit the home page.

Essentially creating one long page for each section, the hovering articles became the heroes, and this philosophy became the basis for the entire experience. An added benefit to this simplified approach is that the resulting flat architecture made for massive efficiencies in the development of UX and Design templates. This modular approach offered economies of time, effort, and total costs as well. Instead of unique layouts for each and every section, we found the critical path toward most sensible delivery of a vastly diverse set of information. This offered a streamlined and flexible format that catered to user needs, as well as the swift evolution of ever-changing news cycles.  

Typically a massive evolutionary redesign like this would be designed in a fully-responsive manner, offering a tailored desktop experience specific to the device on which it was consumed (e.g. tablet, smartphone, etc.). In this case however, USA Today already had a quite robust offering via iPad and iPhone apps, so we took a singular focus toward making the desktop experience be the very best it could be, as a standalone environment yet still fully accessible via device-based browsers.

We invite you to dive in and get familiar with all of the opportunities the new usatoday.com offers for discovering and consuming news in a way that’s custom-tailored for today’s digital landscape and habits.  Here’s a quick look at the highlights of the final result.

IMPACT

Even in its beta state, the new USA Today site was fully embraced by users and industry colleagues alike. The AIGA design community lauded the experience as “impressive” and “unprecedented.” Fast Company touted the full-page ad experiences as “luxury“, and the leading educational voice of journalism, The Poynter Institute, reviewed the site as “a digital re-envisioning” that may “elevate its importance in this time of transition for journalism.“

The site has gone on to receive an FWA Site of the Day followed by The Cutting Edge Award by Adobe which highlights the best work and capabilities of the modern web.

Now that usatoday.com has officially gone live and matured with time, the work has been featured in the design press as a case study example for the next generation of digital publishing. Web Designer Magazine wrote a 5 page spread on the new design in Issue 207 and titled the story USA Today: A New Frontier in Digital Publishing.

In the March 2013 issue of .net Magazine, USA Today’s simple page app structure was the topic of discussion in the publication’s How We Built section.

Like the music and broadcast industries before it, digital has forever disrupted business as usual for print publishing. The grand takeaway from this project, for Fi, was that no matter how much content you have to offer, no matter how disparate, less is most definitely more in terms of presentation. Today’s savvy readers/consumers no longer simply skim above-the-fold and move on. Instead, they come with a specific purpose, a mission if you will, and our job is to offer an experience designed to help them fulfill those missions on a regular basis, in the most efficient way possible. Similarly, for the publishers and advertisers, we meet their end objectives by providing an innately shareable experience that lends itself to the broadest organic reach available. In sum, the new usatoday.com delivers a news site that serves the core business needs of those involved in the production and delivery of the content, while catering specifically to the needs and objectives of its rapidly expanding digitally-native audience. If we make it easy to consume and share content in a way that’s natural and familiar to the reader, we provide a winning proposition for all involved.

ABOUT FI

If you think about it, digital is a daily touchpoint in almost everyone’s lives. And for the most part, we rely on it… crave it, even. And when digital experiences surprise, delight, and simplify life for the end user, it’s a beautiful thing. That’s what Fi is, an agency producing beautiful digital experiences.

Boutique. Nimble. Bespoke. Describe us as you please. The fact is we operate as a smaller agency compared to others by design despite our global footprints in London, New York, San Francisco and Stockholm. Our size allows us to stay ahead of the disruptions digital brings. And our clients understand the type of results they’ll get from us. We don’t just get the job done. We help fix the inherent problem.

To check out the latest Fi projects, visit here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and G+.

Go ‘behind the scenes’ with the team responsible for the publisher’s digital rebrand and walk through the timeline of work. Follow our strategy, design and development of how we took a content-heavy publishing site and re-engineered it to make online news reading simple, intuitive and usable.

We love how the editor colorfully displays the story in the same fashion the USA Today site experience delivers.

Get to know two nuances that helped define the work: the design and launch date.

For the full digital March 2013 issue, you can purchase and download it here.

So just what is this app all about? The Nick app is an endless stream of Nickelodeon content, or as the New York Times describes “a noisy, colorful smorgasbord of animated clips, irreverent music videos and the occasional deluge of the network’s trademark green slime.” (Don’t you just love saying that word? Smorgasbord?) The content boasts humorous original videos, animated shorts, games, full episodes of popular shows, insider access to Nick celebrities and, what everyone expects, a whole lot of slime. Kids and kids-at-heart must be keeping themselves entertained swiping left and right.

We think that featuring extras like polls and games in the app is a smart move from the authoritative voice in children’s entertainment.

And it looks like it’s not just kids who have embraced the Nick app. The press have already called it “a game changer in the kids’ TV world.” Sarah Boehler, Fi’s Associate Director of Production says “The Fi team put everything we had into this app and I’m extremely proud to see it doing so well.” Fi’s Global CD Anton Repponen also comments “All the hard work that we put into the app for the past year has paid off. There’s something incredible in helping to create a large product for iPad rather than a small game. This Nick app is more extensive than some of the web projects we’ve done.”

The news of how well the Nick app is ranking definitely helps start our week off on the right foot. And get excited for the next Nick app release when it becomes available on the iPhone and iPod.

]]> http://blog.f-i.com/nick-app-ranks-1-in-free-ipad-entertainment-apps/feed/ 8 http://blog.f-i.com/fi-microsoft-cool-html5-experiences/ http://blog.f-i.com/fi-microsoft-cool-html5-experiences/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:23:18 +0000 Stephanie Yang http://blog.f-i.com/?p=2221 Lately, our output with HTML5 experiences has come through some of our recent work with Microsoft. We’ve built a trusted partnership with them to create useful web apps. It goes to show that with bold clients, an agency is empowered to create beautiful, meaningful work. Check out the ‘everyday activities’ we’ve transformed with HTML5.

1. Reading 

Pulse is a news reading experience for mobile devices and the web that allows readers to easily access traditional media, blogs, websites, and social networks.

In partnership with Microsoft, Fi was tapped to design Pulse’s HTML5 web app and deliver a beautiful interface and intuitive UX in which Pulse’s co-founder and CEO Akshay Kothari has since described as “content consumption that is a visual delight.” The beautiful and interactive mosaic of news was named one of TIME’s top 50 apps in 2011. Today, 25 million people use Pulse across all devices and over 10 million stories are read each day. We’re proud to have helped increase engagement and score another win in our wheelhouse of news clients which includes previous projects with Al Jazerra, CBS, CNN and USA Today.

Here are a few screen shots from the Pulse experience starting with the web app’s landing page.

Readers can customize their news feeds by selecting from preferred catalog publications.

After personalizing settings, the user’s news feed displays as an interactive mosaic of streaming images.

Reading an article delivers a clean, uncluttered experience where users can swipe left or right to move to the next article.

2. Shopping 

Shopping is inherently social. But with today’s advanced web technologies, shopping is taken to a new playing field at the ease of the consumer. Microsoft tasked Fi to design Glimpse by the popular social shopping company TheFind. The idea was to create an HTML5 site experience consolidating paper catalogues into digital look books in one easy-to-use place. Glimpse is a shopping discovery app that curates shopping pages for users based on their Facebook ‘Like’ data.

Shopping becomes even more social with new ways to discover, browse and explore your favorite clothes and accessories. Of course, here at Fi, we’ve always been stylish. That is, we’ve had a long history in working with fashion and e-commerce clients like Acne, Desigual, IKEA and Nordstrom. And social is in our nature with aficionado brands like Ducati and Porsche. What can we say? We like to be ahead of the trends.

3. Playing 

With a focus on promoting Internet Explorer 10 and touch browsing, Fi had a lot of fun creating Explore Touch, an HTML5 site that lets consumers use touch gestures to mix audio files and create custom sound tracks with their fingers. Time to release your inner DJ. Accessible from any new Windows 8 touch device with IE10, intuitive UI like swiping left and right, pinching in and out, and rotating full circles with your fingers controls the experience.

Our work with Xbox, EA Sports and Nintendo proved to be good sources of valuable inspiration as we put this one together. As always, check out the latest Fi projects here and keep up with us on Facebook.

Look what happens when we let Fi’s own COO Stephen Carpi at the controls of this site. Scratching, two touch drags, rotations, and a light-filled explosion. HTML5′ing it like a boss.

Check out the slick spot Microsoft, Blake Lewis and filmmaker Keith Rivers created to showcase what’s possible on a new Windows 8 touch device with IE10.

Bonus points! Blake’s new track Your Touch is available for streaming for a one-week exclusive at ExploreTouch.ie and as a free download from Xbox Music.

Want to know more about the spot? Check out this behind-the-scenes video.

The site was recently recognized as The Cutting Edge Project of the Week, an award curated by Adobe and FWA as work that best highlights the newest capabilities of the modern web.

Here are a few screen shots of the site experience. The Explorer logo flashes and loads before the big reveal.

Touch gestures like pinching the smaller rings in and out controls the flow of music.

Explore Touch can be accessed on any new Windows 8 touch device with IE10.

Individual music components like vocals, strings and bass can be mixed and experimented with just a swipe of the finger.

Working on Explore Touch icons. You know we love our icons around here.

Like all of our work, Explore Touch was made possible by the amazing talent at Fi. Thank you all for your hard work. Now everyone at the office can’t stop unleashing their inner DJ on Explore Touch.

Follow Fi on Facebook.com/Fi

]]> http://blog.f-i.com/explore-touch-with-internet-explorer/feed/ 20 http://blog.f-i.com/so-youre-interested-in-attack/ http://blog.f-i.com/so-youre-interested-in-attack/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 02:11:20 +0000 Stephanie Yang http://blog.f-i.com/?p=2029 You’re familiar with our work. You know our strong background in both design and technology. You may have even met a few of our executives. But you keep hearing about this event we host called ‘Attack’ and want to know “What is this thing all about?!”

Fair question.

‘Attack’ is short for its full title ‘Attack of the Creative Process.’ It started out as small lunch-and-learn sessions first held internally for any employees interested in passion projects that others wanted to discuss or share. When topics became too interesting to contain within Fi’s offices, ‘Attack’ opened the knowledge-sharing to the public and quickly evolved into a popular hosted event that the creative community continues to look forward to hearing year-round. ‘Attack’ is now Fi’s signature speaking series in examining creative processes within actual project life cycles from recent Fi examples. Because who wants to hear about work that’s passed its prime? It’s an opportunity to listen to the ideas that worked and others that failed miserably. It’s the behind-the-scenes stories about the real-life challenges faced by digital agencies as told in the same refreshingly candid manner as those early brown-bag days.

A lot of people are interested in having us present ‘Attack,’ but the demand is greater than our time. Unfortunately, we can’t respond to everyone’s request for Fi to present. The company that is most applicable for an Attack presentation is of a certain size. This is a company with an audience of 20-50 creatives and perhaps 30-200 digital practitioners overall. Large media companies reliant on beautiful design and UX, hot starts-ups offering emerging technologies as a solutions-provider and bleeding-edge creatives looking to find inspiration – these are all appropriate audiences. Fi has given ‘Attack’ presentations at previous companies like Yahoo, top design academies and other large institutions all around the world, from London, Moscow and New York, to Rzeszow, San Francisco and Stockholm.

‘Attack’ is geared for those creative professionals who want an insider look at ‘best practices.’ The art and science of getting creative, if you will. Since we switch our topics according to the work, the start of a new quarter calls for fresh content. This season’s ‘Attack’ focuses on our year-long work on USA Today’s site redesign. This is a project in which we didn’t just get the job done; we helped fix the underlying problem. The USA Today site re-imagines user behavior for publishers and the news business altogether.

To get a glimpse of where we’ve been, check out the images below. Here we are presenting ‘Attack’ to a full house in London.

Here we are on the Yahoo! campus, moments away from presenting to a packed room full of employees.

We presented ‘Attack’ at OFFF in Barcelona, Spain to the world’s leading creatives.

And most recently, we debuted our new ‘Attack’ presentation discussing our work with USA Today in The Netherlands to a sold out crowd.

For those interested in having Fi present ‘Attack’ at your company, school or conference, please contact Fi’s Director of PR & Communications, Stephanie Yang, at stephanie.yang@f-i.com. Please note that appearances include a fee to cover speaker’s travel costs and incidentals, if applicable. Contact us to discuss custom content and tailored messaging to fit the right audience. We hope to ‘Attack’ you soon.

Here is the 2012 Attack of The Creative Process presentation (not professionally) filmed at Fi’s NYC office in October 2012. This previous “Attack” featured 3 award-winning projects: Google Ramayana, Google Chrome Store,  and The History Channel’s Civil War microsite.

The flyer from Attack in London:

The flyer from Attack in San Francisco:

The flyer from Attack in Moscow:

The flyer from Attack in New York:

We underwent a big makeover with our next round of business cards and went with this slim, rectangular-shaped design infusing our black and white primary colors. It was quite a minimalistic and modern move. The front of the card sparsely displayed our logo, introductions and short URL while the back conveyed the rest of the contact information. When stacked among other business cards, it was hard to ignore Fi’s premium finish.

But a new year calls for a new look. And this season, Fi is switching it up to a bold color. Red is the new black. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you our newest Fi business card designs with our newly-appointed Fi-branded red color. This is now our primary color, the same color as our covetable Moleskines.  The black-facing cover from last year’s card design is turning red. Watch our NYC office manager Peter show the working comps and explain how we’ve retained the high quality behind our new cards.

Taking a cue from Japanese culture, the color red represents energy, vitality, power and love, all feelings we’re inspired by while working here at Fi. And set against our secondary brand colors of black and white, the red makes for a clean, graphic design. Never at a loss for details, our Fi business cards will still carry a high gloss laminated finish with a thick stock feel. The quality will remain premium. Here’s what the finished product will look like just as soon as they come back from the printers. Look at that rich, vibrant red. Is that your heart palpitating or ours?

While our motto is “Quality over quantity,” in this case, don’t be shy in asking for our new business cards when we see you next. We’ve ordered plenty.

The project brief was to redesign and re-architect the entire digital USA Today site experience using only two layers: the category landing pages and the article page itself. Read below on what made this design so special and the technical challenges that lay in front of the team.

USA Today‘s homepage boasts dynamic functionality including left and right arrows inspired by the iPad design, an article overlay enabling readers to stay within the same category of stories, a grid vs. article view and a live feed on the right column that keeps readers updated with breaking news.

Former Fi alum Erik Kallevig even contributed to the technical piece since he was the senior developer who worked on the site before moving over to the client side. Below Erik walks through the site creation process.

Watch the new USAToday.com come to life in this video walkthrough.

The start of a new year always gets us a little nostalgic about the previous one. So let us reminisce and share the best, most engaging Facebook photos from 2012. These are the images that provoked you, that made you lean forward and notice, and yes, that you ‘Liked’ the most.

January – March

2012 started off with us working heads-down on the iOS voting app for the annual Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards. For over 25 years, Nickelodeon has hosted this star-studded event bringing kids – and an inordinate amount of green slime – closer to their favorite celebrities. From our alpha release in January to the app launch in March, a record-breaking 223 million votes were cast for the 2012 KCAs, a 10% increase from last year. And the app held top rank in the iTunes App Store for a week with solid, five-star reviews. Yeah, a great way to kick off the year, we’d say.

An added perk was attending the orange-carpet event and hanging with the celebrities. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Guten Tag, Heidi Klum.

Halle Berry like you’ve never seen her before.

Satisfying the world over with green slime, Fi’s work here was done.

April – June

The second quarter of the year found ourselves speaking in Barcelona, Spain at OFFF, a three-day festival where notable international artists in graphic design, visual communication, digital arts and electronic music led workshops and presentations to inspire and be inspired. Fi’s Global Director of UX & Strategy Irene Pereyra, Global Creative Director Anton Repponen and former Art Director Claudio Guglieri shared Fi work among cultural tastemakers to push innovation even further.

The conference even used Anton’s headshot to promote this year’s event.

We got a nice surprise in May when we were notified of our Webby award win for our Google Cannes Heatmap app we created.

Another bit of good news arrived in June when we heard we won a Cyber Lion from Cannes for Project Re:Brief.

July – September

At the start of the third quarter, we were on the road traveling across the Atlantic to prepare for Fi London Invasion. We were delighted to see such a great turnout with a full house and even people standing up in the back. Everyone was anxious to hear our case study work featuring Google Ramayana, Chrome Store and The History Channel’s Civil War 150.

CEO David Martin’s parents even got in on the action as well. Who knew invasions could be this much fun?

In August, we moved our speaking series to San Francisco and aptly called it Attack of the Creative Process. The SF turnout was just as successful as London’s. People couldn’t seem to get enough of our case studies.

Our speaking series posters have turned into a collecter’s item. People ask us whether we sell them piece meal. It’s something we’re definitely pondering about now.

In August, drama occurred when a small electrical fire broke out in our NYC office server room. Thankfully, there were no casualties.

The fire could have been a lot worse were it not for Pete, our brave office manager, who contained most of the first even before FDNY arrived on the scene.

October – December

After some great nights in London, Stockholm, Moscow, Rzeszow and San Francisco, our creative speaking series came to New York City.

Our entire NYC office was preparing for the arrival of our guests. Additional chairs were rented. Over 350 pieces of sushi were ordered. And an Fi-branded candy bar was on display for people to take home sweet treats.

In addition to Irene and Anton speaking about our creative process within a project lifecycle, guest speaker Stephen Burgess, Fi developer, gave a lively presentation about WebRTC, one of the latest HTML5 features to hit the Chrome browser.

Tragedy struck the east coast in late October when Hurricane Sandy reigned down, causing all those affected to band together during this time of national disaster.

Fi did its small part by donating to the Food Bank for New York City.

As the holidays drew near, it was a reflective time to look back at another exciting, accomplished year and look forward to the promise and delight that 2013 would bring. Our offices began to get into the festive spirit.

All the work we achieved and all the awards won don’t mean much without the people we work with day-in and day-out.  Even if that does means we end up dressing the same at our office holiday party.

Here’s to many more memories and images captured in 2013!

What’s even more exciting than winning this award was hearing the real-life application of the site being experienced by children. On the second Saturday in January every year, Thailand celebrates their youth by hosting National Children’s Day. This year, a Google-hosted exhibition displayed our Ramayana work proudly for the more than 10,000 children who attended. Even the guest of honor, Thailand’s Prime Minister, walked away impressed with Ramayana, stating that this type of interactive media should be used across more government-funded educational initiatives.

The tale of Ramayana is an ancient epic in Asia Pacific that carries deep lessons that reflect the region’s cultural consciousness. When Chrome launched in Asia, Google chose this story of Ramayana as the vehicle to introduce one of the most robust web browsers to a new market. The website tells the ancient story of Ramayana in a modern way using new technology that showcases the power and ability of Google Chrome.

“After a decade of being recognized by The FWA for our creativity in design and engineering, it’s humbling to know Fi has stood the test of time and stood by its founding principals.” David Martin, CEO, Fi

“One of the greatest achievements in the creative industry is to be recognized by your peers. With this award, we had the privilege of enjoying this experience. Great teamwork, great clients and great partners like Fi – that’s what made the Ramayana Chrome Experiment, magic.” Melvyn Lim, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyOne Singapore

“It was fascinating to see all the different passions come together from illustrators, designers, HTML5 developers, and even sound guys working simultaneously and witness each Ramayana chapter come to life like a puzzle being completed. It almost felt magical because every new piece would always make for a perfect fit to the larger project.” - Anton Repponen, Global Creative Director, Fi

“The Ramayana project gave us the opportunity to push the boundaries of Chrome’s implementation of both Canvas and WebGL technologies. Our digital physics implementations were challenging and it was satisfying to see the particle systems, spring-based tail physics, 3D ray casting, collision detection, and inverse kinematics all come together seamlessly to create an engaging and beautiful storytelling experience.” - Karl Herkt, Senior Technical Producer, Fi

Experience again the making of how Fi and our partner OgilvyOne brought an ancient epic to life and launched Chrome in Asia. Check out this promotional video OgilvyOne created as well.

We want to thank the amazing Fi team who worked on the site with such dedication, our partner OgilvyOne and client Google for the opportunity to dream big, and the fans that believed in and voted for Google Ramayana.

Upon arrival, and after taking their shoes off, guests were greeted with a bountiful spread of food and drinks. The 350 pieces of sushi we ordered were gone in a New York minute. And in the spirit of Halloween, we displayed a candy bar stocked with red, black and white sweets, encouraging everyone to take a bag home. (That’s over 50 lbs. of candy!)

Fi developer Stephen Burgess opened up with a well-received presentation on his latest experiments with WebRTC that included demonstrations with facial recognition and motion detection. Afterward, Global Director of UX & Strategy Irene Pereyra and Global CD Anton Reponnen closed the last hour with their case study walkthrough of three award-winning projects: Google Ramayana, Chrome Store and The History Channel. The humorous story they shared of how they showed up to client meeting dressed exactly alike – white shirt, black pants and red shoes – made for a great time.

Armed with inspirations of beautiful design, digital innovation and a small bag of candy, guests walked away with nothing but treats. No tricks here.

That wraps up “Attack” in 2012. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @F_i to stay informed of new dates and cities. See you next year with more new case studies to share!