In a nutshell, this is the strategy poster that I designed as a conversation piece during our discovery presentation to Dunkin’ Donuts while working on the DD.com redesign for 2010/2011. None of the stuff shown here existed when I started on the account in 2007—every stitch of it was invented and assembled by myself and the team at Studiocom over a two-to-three year period.
The goal of the piece was to celebrate everything that we had accomplished with the Dunkin' team and to better illustrate how a their website fit into the picture. Here the site is not simply a digital billboard with product offers and price tags as it had been since 1999; it is a robust content repository that can syndicate to the platforms where people actually spend their time (e.g., Facebook, mobile), generating zero- and first-party data through clever experiences, then using the resulting insights to develop better, stickier experiences. Bear in mind, this was in 2010—much of this seems rote now, but none of this was codified, or necessarily obvious, at the time (let alone in 2007, when we actually started putting it together).
Our client loved it so much, we had a poster-sized print framed for him. It hung in his office until he retired a few years later.
Explication
The top and bottom are meant to entangle such that when you arrive at the bottom, you’re arriving back at the top of the image. Paid and Earned media live in the world, and we show here how DD.com can feed and seed that world, but also reflect that world back to its audience. Along the right and left of the .com Content Library (viz. the donut in the middle), there are faint arrows meant to suggest feedback loops or "virtuous cycles"—this data convection speaks to the modularity of modern websites, from both aesthetic and a technological standpoints; pipes and lights, as well as software, needs to be portable and flexible enough to scale and shift without negative impact. Many of the “Tools” and “Modules” referred to on the poster are now living in a cloud for just that reason.
