Holy Shit! The New Redbull.com
John Sullivan Hamilton
Designer : New York
topics: Design, Creativity, Internet Culture, Video, and Rock and Roll
filed under: Programming Languages, Entertainment, Internet Culture, User Experience, Video, Art Direction, Strategy, Design, Developers, Flash, Games, Content Strategy, and Barbarian
http://tbg.cm/fL2cLN
You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.
That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “gives you wings”.
We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?
Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.
One of our favorite new additions to RedBull.com can be found right in the navigation. Take a look and click on the “Holy Shit”. This is the place you should go to see the most insane, size XL HD videos that Red Bull has to offer (in our custom made video player). I dare you to not say “Holy Shit” or jump back to see it again.
To allow fans to see the breadth of events worldwide, we integrated the google and made this immersive events page. Seriously, there is always something going on around the world with Red Bull and now we can see a full view of it. You probably didn’t know there was a paper airplane contest near you coming up, but now you do—so go to it cause its pretty awesome.
Anyone want to join me at Red Bull Fensterl König in Germany on August 22nd?
Then there are the athletes—Shaun White, Travis Pastrana, Ryan Sheckler, Sebastian Vettel and the other 400+ renegade mavericks. If aliens landed on earth and challenged us to a stunt off, the Red Bull Army would not only save us but they’d do it with finesse and then sleep with the alien’s cheerleaders. For real, go to the athletes & teams and search for anyone and you will be amazed.
That being said, Red Bull has their arms full in a lot of different cultures and lifestyles. Each one of them deserves its own place on the redternet. So we made the entire site customizable via CSS so all the properties can maintain their own essence and still exist within the RedBull.com platform. Red Bull Air Race is an example we’re totally excited about. These guys are awesome and do some wild shit.
So yeah, we’ve been busy and there’s much more to come from this site. It’s only the beginning but keep checking back, you’re bound to find something that will punch your mind in the face.
14 comments
The flash video is awesome. The player, the streaming, just nice. Overall execution is done well too. Just the general thought of actually pushing out content (wow, what a concept).
Granted, all my complaints is probably the result of some VIP or european big-wig who threw down the hammer and reasoned it into existence without really knowing what they were doing.
Guess maybe I do know something after all? Probably not, just got lucky....
Now.. about that "holy shit".... ;)