Adobe MAX:
Battle of the Hands
BRAND AWARENESS + EXPERIENTAL GAMEIFICATION
THE ASK:
Battle of the Hands was an event created by SapientNitro to promote our company and our skills as a recruiting tool during Adobe MAX; Adobe's annual creativity conference. The ask from Adobe was to create an interactive booth presence with maximum visibility & crowd draw that engages and rewards users with a positive experience around memorable design and our natural competitiveness.
Participation
Art Director Showrunner
UX/UI Design
Client
Adobe
Year
2014
THE CHALLENGE:
Adobe was a bit late in relaying the requirements and announcing the SN partnership. We only had 2 months to build the assets for the booth AND the game structure. We would’ve had more time, but all the booth graphics needed to be sent to the venue approved vendors far ahead of schedule in order to avoid any production delays.
It was important that we had as much draw as possible to help attract potential design/creative candidates and craft content that helps support the SN Brand. We needed to figure out what game show we were doing and how we needed the booth to look ASAP.
THE PROCESS:
As we got to work on the visuals and it’s concept, we needed to divide & conquer on how the show was going to be run. We narrowed the field down to “movie posters” and decided that this would be a simple and familiar way (especially in LA) to participate in a fast-paced design-off: we would select 2 volunteers from the convention floor and ask them to create themed movie posters with randomly selected assets & theme criteria in under 8 minutes using Adobe Photoshop & WACOM tablets.
We built a “Randomizer” app that gave our battlers a movie title, a genre, and a “crazy” art direction to follow. During the event, their laptops were mirrored on large screens for the spectators to get a good view. We tested this event at SN HQ and got incredible feedback on how to adapt the show to a larger audience.
However, in order to create such a game, we would need a massive collection of pre-selected assets for participants to choose from depending on the Randomizer’s display. On delivery, we sourced and organized over 2000+ assets & fonts organized into folders that would be given to each contestant. As the game rules were explained, the production team would setup on the fly prior to each match to ensure the correct assets were visible to each contestant.
We created all of the booth graphics in-house and used 3D texture mapping to simulate how it would look before we sent proofs to the vendor. As Posterpocalypse was the theme, we gave it a bleak and decayed feel to further the potential stress & anxiety and garner more intense reactions from our viewers & participants.
Case Study Video
THE RESULTS:
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20,000+ Attendees
160 Battlers
1 Awesome Winner
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1.15 Million Twitter Impressions
2K Organic Posts from 1.7k Unique IDs
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3 Creative Designers
5 UXers
2 Social Media Managers
It was a huge hit! Even years later, when I mention this event, anyone in attendance remembers it well. This was a labor of love and a true testament to the folks we worked with. For digital visibility, both during and after the event, we built a microsite to host a teaser video and online brackets were updated live as competitors were eliminated. We pushed live social updates that attracted noted attendees like James Victoire, Hydro74 and SignalNoise to participate as special guest battlers. Post-event, we published profile and BTS videos, a 4 part reality-show style web series, and a gallery of contestant’s work.
