/Absolut_Ruby_Red

Website for the Brazilian Ruby Red campaign for Absolut, starting a new marketing phase for the brand in Brazil. The idea is both to introduce the grapefruit - largely unknown in Brazil - to a local audience, and to advertise Absolut's own grapefruit-flavored vodka, “Absolut Ruby Red”, using its own brand of surreal identity.

That was accomplished with an overwhelmingly animated, sometimes even chaotic, website. In it, visitors are asked to answer a personality quiz that questions their approach to everyday moral puzzles; then, based on the visitor's answers, the website slowly transforms itself to match. The visitor's answers also help inform an ideal Absolut Ruby Red-based cocktail selection, presented as a suggestion of a drink that perfectly matches the visitor's personality. Visitors where also able to download personalized artifacts such as wallpapers and ringtones.

Finally, the website also features an option for visitors to invite their own friends to visit the experience and answer the quiz. The twist here is that, in perfect Absolut's playful fashion, their friend's answers to the moral questions would be emailed back to the user who invited them in the first place, exposing potentially embarrassing answers to the personality quiz.

Answers to the personality quiz were also aggregated globally; visitors could check individual questions and see the percentage each answer had been picked by other visitors.

My role in this project, as in many projects at the time, was on everything that needed to be developed. That included the frontend Flash UI (including implementing all the animations), as well as the backend (using PHP and MySQL) to send email invitations, gather statistics, and create customized wallpapers on-the-fly.

This website was published in Brazilian Portuguese, English, and Russian. This presented an interesting challenge. It's common that I have to edit fonts to adequate them to websites I developed; for example, when certain Latin accented characters (common in Brazilian Portuguese) are missing from the original font. This was not different in this case. However, here, a lot of work was also done to adapt different fonts to Cyrillic for the Russian version to work correctly, as a different font needed to have its weight, metrics and slant changed to match our designs consistently across languages.