The holidays are just around the corner and you know what that means?
That’s right, FCV’s digital Christmas cards for our awesome clients, partners and friends! :)
After some brainstorming with the team, we came up with a simplified mathematical equation to help add a twist to our card…
Being a technology company, it’s always fun to try something a little different.
We decided to create a card that combines some new technologies and a traditional and festive kind of way.
The physical card consists of a QR code readable by scanner apps, like Quickmark, available on modern mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. You can check out a list of QR readers. The QR code is encoded with a URL that once scanned, brings the reader to our Christmas themed micro site on their smartphone.
Given that Christmas seems to show up faster every year, we started early, and kept things focused to deliver a fun experience – Christmas Day isn’t a movable deadline!
The digital card draws on Christmas themed tweets from popular social networking site, Twitter. We're interested in sharing trending topics, aka hashtags, related to the holidays… more on that later.
The Card
On the front of the card we'll have a few selected words, in this case, #MerryChristmas. For the growing number of our clients who are familiar with Twitter’s hashtags and trending topics, the idea should start to become clear…
After a round of discussions with the team, we needed to adjust the design of the card to help tie in both the card and the micro-site together. So, we decided to bring in an element of the micro-site without revealing too much about the surprise, a teaser if you will.
When you open up the card we'll have the QR code.
At the back, we have Jadyn's illustrated Vancouver high rises, once thought would only be used for internal purposes only. Thankfully, Christmas allowed them to be revealed to the public! Oh they're so cute.
The Site
The site combines a range of technologies to create a snow scene over our great city of Vancouver, including:
- HTML5 & CSS3 to support desktops and Webkit mobile browsers
- Twitter’s search API, with our own cache to avoid the ever-present Fail Whale!
- QR Codes
Festive tweets are snowing down on the city, and the more people are talking about Christmas, the more it snows. The most popular words are larger, based on the trends from the last hour or so – varying from light flurries to a full on powder day!
Originally, the first concept was to have a live webcam shot of Vancouver in the background with Tweets snowing over top of it. However, we figured it'd be awkward to have snow on a clear beautiful day.
Check out todays’ social snow-cast, and follow us on Twitter for daily updates.
Seasons Greetings from everyone at FCV.
