GRADUATION YEARBOOK REIMAGINED – GIF YEARBOOK APP AND WEBSITE FOR TELENOR
About the project
What should a graduation yearbook look like in 2016? Creative, animated, and viewable on mobile, of course! We came up with this in-house idea for Telenor and implemented it with the help of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency. ARworks developed the creative concept and built the app, website and backend system behind it, while Y&R was responsible for the accompanying campaign, organizing the contest and the graphic design. The end result was a creative yearbook competition running on mobile and on the web. Using the mobile app and the web admin interface, graduating classes could create their own digital, 21st-century yearbook, featuring animated, moving gif portraits instead of photos, viewable on mobile and web. A campaign like this requires complex planning and precise execution. First, we had to ensure that yearbooks could only be created in a controlled way, which we solved with a unique code sent to homeroom teachers. Once a class was created, any student (as a Class Admin) could manage the editing interface, and classmates could freely upload their animated clips from their own phones. The finished yearbook can of course be shared and forwarded — and it's worth sharing, since the class that collects the most votes wins a group trip to the EFOTT festival and tablets! In the background, the app continuously communicates with a backend system that updates the data and makes the in-progress yearbooks available to the class's students. The same backend system is responsible for displaying and continuously updating the competing yearbooks in the app and on the website as votes change. To ensure no legally or morally questionable images appear on the yearbooks, every yearbook is reviewed by a Moderator on our side, and feedback is sent to the Class Admin when needed. The biggest challenge was making the yearbook creation process as simple as possible, while running a precisely trackable and complex system in the background. Although at first glance the app doesn't seem complicated — you can upload animated clips, browse other classes' yearbooks, or vote on them — we had to make sure students could see their own classmates but not other classes' yearbooks in progress; that they could log in conveniently while still remaining identifiable. The Class Admin can choose a custom background image and colors for the yearbook, and can even modify the layout, not to mention the individual images themselves, where students could do anything they wanted within the given frame in 4 seconds — and they did! The competition is still ongoing, but there are already no two boring yearbooks alike, and who knows what other ideas are yet to come!
