Justin Dettle reviews extreme heavy metal music for Antiquiet. He’s got so much to say, we decided to give him his own blog dedicated to metal. I threw this together one weekend, after commissioning a badass logo from the very talented Wes DeSoto. Designing this site was so fun. The stone texture is a photograph I took in my backyard.

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It’s about time I add this one. I created Antiquiet in 2007 with Johnny Firecloud. I designed it (we’re on our fourth version), I built it, I write for it, I shoot video for it, I edit video for it, I record and edit live sound for it, I throw events, design flyers, design ads, sell ads, traffic ads, I manage our SEO- which is great- I do business development, I administer the server, the works. I don’t know why this wasn’t the first thing into my portfolio, but when I say I can do it all, Antiquiet backs it up.

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I helped The Visionaire Group develop a ridiculously audacious, envelope-pushing Facebook Application to help support the theatrical release of the Lion’s Gate film Crank 2.

Going far beyond the typical boundaries of promotional Facebook Applications, we set up a series of fourteen complex obstacle courses. Users would get a new one each day for the two weeks leading up to the movie’s opening day. Any brave users who completed all fourteen challenges would be entered into a drawing to win a cash prize.

At any time, you could see which of your friends were playing the game, and how many challenges they had successfully completed.

When a user would accept a challenge, the game would go through a series of shocking Facebook updates of various types; different combinations of status updates, photo uploads, photo tagging, video embeds, friend adding & group joining.

Everything was done according to Facebook’s terms of service, with all necessary user confirmation & permissions granting.

The challenges ranged from the relatively tame, such as posting a shocking viral video, to the disruptive, such as announcing via status update that you “hooked up” with a randomly selected member of the opposite sex from your friends list, all the way up to some downright offensive ones I’ll let you find on your own.

(MOSTLY) FUNCTIONAL DEMO

Since the game was built for a relatively short, very time-sensitive run, many of the features broke after the campaign ended. However, I’ve set up a demo for perpetuity, with those parts disabled. Feel free to take on any of the challenges, if you dare. Those still work.

(DOT) SQUIRRELS is my LLC. For the corporate image, I wanted somehow to play off the idea of industrious worker squirrels building stuff, without being too literal. In my head, I was picturing the old boxes of screws and nails in my Dad’s basement growing up.

Am I weird for being inspired by a box of nails? The nail is just so iconic to me. So simple, so direct, so effective. That’s the kind of work I want to be known for.

Anyway, the cardboard texture (box of nails idea) worked great for the business cards, but for the website, I didn’t like it. So I put together the tiling wood texture you see above, and deteriorated and sliced the logo subtly to make it look like it was painted on the side of a toolshed. Same concept, different angle.

For a minute, I got sidetracked by a more squirrel-centric idea, inspired by those ancient National Geographic documentaries my high school science teachers made us watch. They still used reel-to-reel projectors in my school, through the 1990s. Ghetto, but I wouldn’t trade the experience / point of reference for anything.

http://dotsquirrels.com

What a ridiculous project, from start to finish. The concept came from Gorilla Nation CEO Brian Fitzgerald. We thought it was a joke for a second… And then we fell in love with it.

I hired my friend Lisa Kurbansade to do the photography. We had very little time, and ran into problems when the row of urinals in the Culver City Pacific 12 movie theater men’s room looked absolutely nothing like the way we swore they looked when we planned the shoot. We wound up across the street, in a Trader Joe’s. We took some photos of their single urinal, and I then assembled the ad’s scenery piece by piece in Photoshop. The floor, walls, urinals, and guys are all from completely separate photo shoots.

Crave has recycled this ad so many times, it’s almost not even funny anymore.

Oh yeah, I designed Crave’s logo, too.

Almost forgot about this one… Not everything I do is loud and in your face

One of my most satisfied customers of all time. I grew up with April in Philadelphia, and this logo & business card I created was perfect for her. A little girly, a little rock n’ roll, the right shade of pink and a leopard pattern that might almost be classy.

I did this in one day. The idea was silly- maybe even dumb- but sometimes, those are the best kinds of ideas. I was working on location at Gorilla Nation at the time, and we came up with the concept during a brainstorm session with the sales team, who were pitching ideas to promote the would-be cult classic film Snakes On A Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

It was a huge hit- G4 talked about it on their Attack Of The Show TV program, and it was featured as an outstanding campaign in a Gorilla Nation company profile published in the July 2007 issue of Business 2.0 magazine.

It went over so well with the client, they did a sequel to the game (also designed and developed by me) when the DVD came out. I’ve archived both versions here:

http://iamskwerl.com/misc/soab/theatrical-release.html
http://iamskwerl.com/misc/soab/dvd-release.html

I’ve only told a couple of friends this secret, but I baked into both games secret codes that would remove all the snakes. Try typing naughty words while playing to see if you can find them.