Welcome to Our New Home!

Entrance to Jaya One

The past week has been very interesting for us folks at Compass. Our normally serene office (not taking into account the noisy banter that usually happens when you've got 15 young at heart people trying to get the better of each other) saw quite a few life-defining events taking place.

Old studio

Will sure miss the FREE car park!

Staircase to heaven...NOT! Studio only...

Okay, maybe life-defining is a bit of an exaggeration but seriously, how often does one actually move? Unless you're a nomad yearning for the life of an adventurer of course.

We've been rather fortunate. In the past 11 years or so since our inception, we've achieved quite a substantial growth to the extent where our headcount has exceeded the amount of room we had in our previous home.

We consulted the gods, checked out the constellation, shrugged and then said to ourselves, "ah what the heck, this is a good a time as any." So we ringed the movers and got them to drop boxes at our place and pretty soon our lives were all packed up and living in cardboard boxes - all 11 years of drama and history.

Then began the actual physical labor. It is rather amusing to see geeky programmers and dorky web designers actually taking part in real physical work. We had to drill holes in the wall to put up a mirror and what normally takes 5 minutes took us an entire hour. Of course, when the time came for our office-warming dinner, everyone was seated at the table without any unnecessary delays. Talk about priorities eh?

Wai Mun striking a pose

How many programmers, designers & copywriters to drill a hole in the wall? 1 each...literally!

Our chill-out area - The Pantry

Weary bones and aching muscles we might be but our minds are completely recharged, eager to take on new challenges. Don't be shy. Drop by or give us a call anytime you feel like it and we can discuss further any possibilities.

Here's our address and contact details.

Tel : +603-7957 7776 Fax : +603-7956 7776
37-6, Block C, Jaya One,No 72A, Jalan Universiti,
46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan

Create History: Participate in Project Lightweight

Calling out all inventive, creative, innovative, intelligent, smart, acute, bright, artistic, imaginative college students!

Here's a chance to do something big. Enormous. Mammoth even. Like standing on the shoulder of giants.

Bring to life an idea in your head that goes to show the future design of a lightweight concept. Construct this prototype and be in the running for a trip to Nike HQ in Oregon, United States.

This is Project Lightweight.

www.nike.com.my/projectlightweight

In Touch With Our Feminine Side with Palmolive Pure Silk

The ratio of of gender segregation in Compass is rather biased. Boys outweigh girls to a staggering 4:1 which makes the testosterone level in the office rather, intimidating, So when we heard that we've been awarded a project to work on Palmolive's Pure Silk shower gel via MindShare, we embraced it with a sigh of relief. Finally an excuse to be in touch with our feminine side.

As with every project we take on, the work flow always begins with a grand idea. This sparks off a chain reaction in every department to get their butts off the coffee table and return to their desks. In the case of Palmolive's Puresilk, we digged real deep and looked to history for a dose of inspiration. A few months back we were brainstorming for a previous project also by Palmolive called Thermal Spa when we came upon a neat idea of personalizing a "spa" experience in line with the product(thermal spa is a shower gel manufactured specifically for a home "spa" experience). The user (that's you) will be allowed to input their name, fav colour and a host of other details to generate their own virtual spa. Unfortunately the stars didn't align itself so this grandiose scheme was shelved.

Ahh but as with all great things, they remain timeless. When MindShare came to us to help market Palmolive's latest Puresilk body wash, we immediately pitched this idea in and everyone was smiling with approval. Of course we had to tweak the concept to suit the purpose of Puresilk and here's what we got.

A personality test that displays a bathroom according to your character.

Whoa..What in the world, you ask? Allow me to explain. The girls will get to participate in a personality test that asks all sorts of intimate yet addictive questions which will generate your personality. Once that has been determined, the system will automatically render a bathroom that fits your designated personality. Imagine you're a Man-Slayer (for example-lah), your bathroom will be fitted with seductive decorations like luscious red towels and expensive designer lipsticks and....well you get the point.

Designing the site was easy. We've had enough experience with website constructions that we breezed through the framework in a matter of days. The challenge began when we started development on our personality bathroom segment. First step was to give life to our characters.

Giving them a soul, making them matter was quite a task. We scripted out a short survey and passed it around to our female staffs, our girlfriends and anyone of the fair sex who walked by our office entrance. Once enough information was gathered, we scoured through them and with it as reference, we created 5 unique characters that girls will definitely be able to relate to.

Next step was to commence the 3-D rendering of the bathroom layout for each character. Our visual artists cracked their minds and work closely with the compiled survey to come up with an accurate depiction of each character. This is where our programmers came in and started lending their geeky skills to construct a viral element to this.

How it works is simple.

"I take the test and I get my personality. I'll send that over to my girl friends and ask them to take it on my behalf so we can compare if they know me as well as i hope they do. They then loop back the test to me and soon enough we've got a whole web of bathroom-personality girls who can't wait to talk to each other about it."

Here's a sneak preview of what you can expect. We're excited. We hope you are too.

www.palmolivepuresilk.com.my

Of rebirth and whatever not

We're back people.

It has been 6 long months since our last entry and a lot has happened - earthquakes, world famine, fuel price hikes, presidential elections, royal weddings and the likes. Yesterday, our esteemed MD, Wai Sun decided it would be fun to look at life from another angle so he climbed up the roof of his porch. Up there he saw the stars align and at that very moment of serenity, he achieved an epiphany.

Morning came and as I stepped into the office, I was summoned by Wai Sun. Fast forward 30 minutes and here I am composing the first entry to our new brainwave. Watch this space as the moonstruck people at Compass attempt to bring you a whole new experience in digital interaction.

The Making of Jangan Togel: Part Two

Character Profile

But above of all, these characters are from all walks of Malaysian life. Any Malaysian teenager could find something they could relate to with our characters. Take Aru for example, he's a 14 year old Indian boy with bubbly personality. He's likeable but a bit heavy and due to his size, it slows his movement and as a goal keeper, that's not a good thing at all. But his team mates doesn't care about his weight - they want him to be a part of the team. He was our comedy relief.

Let's look at Boon - the geek who's not into sports because he has lacks the physical coordination to be an athlete but he handles computers and cameras well; he is destined to help the coach improve our team by reviewing their games.

Here's the emerging hero - 15 year old, budding footballer named Rizki. He lives with his brother, raised by a single mother whose husband passed away years ago from an illness. Despite not getting the best of nutrition nor education, he's shown enormous potential as a leader and footballer.

We have a few more but, with these, you should get the idea of where we were going character-wise. We supply enough information in the back story of each character to give readers a sense of their motivation and personality. But most importantly, they should convince the audience/readers.

Location, Location, Location

In the same spirit, we included locations where these characters dwell and thrive in yet retain the everyday images we see and equate as being "Malaysian" - the field sitting opposite low cost flats, the mamak stall and newsstand and Central Market.

We then work with an illustrator to set the images on paper, so to speak. This stage was critical because we had no colour palette to begin. But we knew that the story called for a unique look that does not distract the reader.

This part was the longest phase of development as we had to work out the story, send it to the client then work with our illustrator to make sure everything is in place for the coding team. Mistakes here could easily set us back weeks in production time. But we got lucky in a sense that Nike was excited after viewing preliminary sketches.

Getting the images daily, we started working on the navigation and fleshing out the content - bearing in mind that time is never on our side. Due to this, we couldn't add interactive comic strips complete with dynamic dialogues and larger environment to complete the story we started out with.

Next post: What Went Wrong/Right