Challenge: Raise general public awareness about insomnia and other illnesses caused by lack of sleep.
Solution: We spent a lot of time brainstorming the concept of representing insomniacs in a tongue-in-cheek way to breathe some fresh-air into an industry inundated with imagery of big, puffy, white clouds and peaceful sleepers.
We were inspired by popular cultural references to Zombies. I believe that the reason Zombies are so popular among audiences over the past few decades is because, unlike other monsters, Zombies are humans—albeit depicted as mindless, shambling, decaying corpses with a hunger for human flesh or brains.
Our Zombies were insomniacs. They suffered in the same way… shambling, stinky, and moaning, with a mindlessness caused by a lack of sleep.
In terms of the art direction, we were greatly informed by other large public awareness projects, one of the most famous being those that were a part of the Works Progress Administration. This gave us a framework for typography and the illustration.
The goal for this site was to create something that could be a unique user experience. We found that the best way to tell our narrative (what Zombieitis is, idenfity the warning signs, and pay everything off with the cure (new mattresses)) was to actually do that in… a story.
We were framing the art style within an era from 1935-1943, which allowed us to expand the creative for the site using an early technicolor movie style. As if we were actually shooting a public service announcement film, we created a script and storyboards.
Much of the actual conversation about functional practicality came into play before we started designing anything. We were a team of 2 designers and 1 programmer and split the work up pretty evenly to pull this off over the course of 2-3 weeks. We discussed the best way to achieve the “feel” of old films and began testing concepts while production design was taking place. Our idea was to create a site with navigation dependent upon only the vertical scroll; this allowed the user to control the speed of the animation.
Additional outreach efforts include: participation in several social media channels, and paid advertising in online and print trade publications.