Background
As A Brand Evolution Agency™, Hyperquake is constantly striving to bridge the gaps between creative professionals, artists, students, educators and employers in Cincinnati. As such, Hyperquake has eagerly awaited the right opportunity to partner with the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) to collaboratively bring the creative community in Cincinnati together.
Hyperquake was awarded the designation of creative and strategic partner for OFFF Cincinnati by the CAC in July of 2011. The OFFF festival would serve as a catalyst for creative professionals, educators and students to work hand in hand with the CAC, the regions premier art center.
As the creative and strategic partner assigned to OFFF Cincinnati, Hyperquake was tasked with the creation of the brand equity, brand positioning and digital campaign for OFFF Cincinnati. The festival attracted thought leaders within the local, regional and national creative design community.
Designers, inventors, filmmakers, artists, illustrators & technologists, students and professionals alike joined together to listen, learn and partake in a creative festival like no other. The two-day festival took place from October 26-27 with a kick-off event that included an introduction of the installations created by Hyperquake on display in the CAC lobby. Hyperquake presented the mobile app and the tasks displayed on a wall-sized installation throughout OFFF. Hyperquake demonstrated and explained the wind installation that can now be viewed in Hyperquake’s OFFF Cincinnati video. Thursday also included the Partner Titles video presentation by Lauren Edwards & Joshua Mattie, followed by the presentation of the speakers and a presentation by Hector Aryuso, founder of OFFF. Friday the 27th included an all-day event of speakers followed by an after-party. One main idea overarched the entire event: Collaborate. We all want to make amazing and beautiful things. By working together and using the CAC as our stage, we can show the rest of the world that Cincinnati has amazing creative talent.
Brand Evolution Solution
The Evolution of the OFFF Logo

offfcincinnati.com



OFFF Collaboration Project App for Android and iPhone

After a few internal brainstorms, we landed on an iPhone/Android mobile app collaboration project as well as an interactive installation within the CAC lobby. The collaboration app project started off rather grandiose with individual displays or even iPads arranged in a giant matrix, each representing an attendee or speaker. With budget, timeline and concerns about participation, we scrapped the individual display idea and went with large projection instead. The apps launched two weeks before the festival. Over those two weeks we pushed out notifications that directed participants to perform some kind of task and take a picture of it. For example, the first task was: “Find a Letter ‘F’: The F can be part of a sign or something that occurs in nature or your environment.” A total of 21 tasks were pushed out prior to and during the event. Some of the tasks were just to get interesting or creative pictures. Submissions were actually paired with others to create a unique display, which we projected on a large screen in the CAC lobby. The third task we pushed out: “Find a Letter ’O’: The O can be part of a sign or something that occurs in nature or your environment,” was combined with the first task to create unique OFFF logos that Cincinnati creatives collaborated on together. The app also allowed users to post their task results to twitter and see what other participants were doing with a live Twitter stream in the app. We collected nearly 2,000 photos.
Installations



The second part of our contribution was the interactive wind installation in the CAC lobby. The idea started simply as a way for people to interact with the “dust particles” in the OFFF Cincinnati logo. We could have done a motion-based interaction where people walking by disturb the dust, but that seemed too typical. We had yet to see a wind powered interaction so we ran with it. As ideas usually do, it evolved from just the logo to try to figure out how to incorporate video “reacting” to the particles. Another Cincinnati based company Lightborne, stepped in and helped us out with the videos of over 20 people getting hit with wind from a fan at various speeds. We then wrote software to take input from someone blowing on an anemometer, which displayed how the particles and the videos react to how hard or soft the person blew.
Results
Offfcincinnati.com had nearly 6,500 visits and 17,500 page views from 70 different countries. The app was downloaded by almost 300 people, with a total of 2,000 photos submitted. With OFFF Cincinnati as an outstanding success, Cincinnati continues to prove itself as the creative hub for great design.