Studio Exploration: mono

mono

mono is an advertising agency based upon the belief that simpler is better. They don't encourage more complexity, but less. Not more services, but more innovate thinking. The company was founded by Michael Hart, a writer, Chris Lange, an art director and James Scott, account management. Chris and Michael are one of only a few creative teams to win an Emmy for a TV commercial. Their "Stay curious campaign" for PBS is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The mono agency is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They produce websites, print ads, collateral, identity, broadcast, environment design and non-traditional advertising. Their clients include General Mills, USA Network, Blu Dot Films, Hitachi, Flexcar, PBS, AMC, and many more.

The mono agency website, mono-1.com, is an excellent use of Flash. It is well organized and simple to navigate. It presents an enormous amount of information in a clean and concise way. Unfortunately for mono, the domain, mono.com is in use by a German kitchenware design company, which may cause some confusion for mono clients.

I was initially attracted to mono's work when I saw their New Years Greeting card. It is a Flash based digital card featuring the portraits of their employees, called monoface. You can click on the head and shoulders, eyes, nose and mouth of the portraits to change each section to a body part of another employee. Or you can shuffle the face with one click and see one of 759, 375 possible faces. They have done an amazing job of matching the skin tones in all the photos for a seamless match. Flash works perfectly for a project such as this because it is so fast at loading all the images.

Another innovative mono website is thegoodfoodfight.com. mono produced this for General Mills as a part of the eatbetteramerica campaign. Thegoodfoodfight.com became a viral hit with over one million registered members. This is a game in which you choose the healthy food that you wish to throw and the person you wish to throw it at. You then proceed to have a food fight with a lunch lady, a sushi chef, or a hot dog vendor animated over a background of healthy recipes. When the food is thrown, it splats on the recipe background. When the character throws back, it splats much larger against your computer screen. The characters taunt you as your throws miss them. There are sound effects for splats, clangs, and breaking glass. This is a wonderful use of Flash animation and a great way to present healthy food choices.

mono did a touching heroes broadcast piece for Sesame Street. It could have been done in Flash or a similar program. It displays individual snapshot photos of famous people such as Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, when they were about 4 years old. The black and white photos on black or gray backgrounds have fade transitions from one to the next. The sound track features music, famous broadcasts, and quotes or lines from speeches of the featured people, such as Martin Luther King saying, "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last." Text on the screen says, "Every child is a story, yet to be told." This fades to text reading, "Over 35 years of believing in the potential of every child." The Sesame Street logo then fades in. It ends with a color photo of an unknown contemporary girl, who represents every child. This was a very moving and beautiful piece.

I think what sets mono's work apart is that it is so well designed, clean, organized, innovative, fun and simple to understand. They get the point across in the simplest way possible. And simple is best.