The challenge, to showcase all of Provenance’s hotel properties while branding Provenance as classy and sophisticated, was the type of Interactive soup to nuts project theGOOD is ideal for.

theGOOD pitched several concepts that would accomplish each goal, with a photography heavy design eventually winning out. Removing all forms of cumbersome navigation, and using gorgeous photography as the center piece for content, theGOOD developed their concept into an elegant user experience. theGOOD also did all the photography for the bios section, melding together 50 different individual shots into an interactive scene.

The result has Provenance extremely happy. So much so that they’ve decided to rebrand their corporate identity based on the design put forth for the website.

We design and develop interactive creations that live both inside and outside of your browser.

We also create our own interactive products, and release them into the interactive ecosystem for you to use.

We’re not traditional.
We’re not integrated.
We live this stuff.

Chris Teso
Creative Director and co-founder.

I subscribe to the belief that nanotechnology, coupled with Moore’s law and genetic engineering, will enable earthlings to attain immortality within 30 years. Unfortunately for me, I live life like this is fact.

Find me on Twitter, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

Jon MacDonald
President and co-founder.

Since co-founding theGOOD, I can usually be found writing statements of work, managing project schedules, handling the day-to-day business operations, and occasionally contributing to the development of our client and internal projects.

Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn, and let’s have a conversation.

Shaun Tinney
CTO and Partner.

Besides a semi-pro mohawk, I also have extensive expertise in the experimental interactive realm, and joined theGOOD as a partner to help solidify our core development abilities.

Find me on Twitter, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

In other words, theGOOD is different in the same way that all companies differ from each other. Each one brings its own set of expertise, talent, solutions, and even mistakes, to a given problem.

Each project is a problem with various solutions. We attack problems from a confident honest place. Confident with ourselves and honest with our clients.

How does this matter in the context of interactive? We don’t come from a place where we’re learning to design for interactive, or a place where we’re trying to make the difficult transition from traditional media. We come from a place of extreme confidence in our interactive abilities. Confident we can build anything we concept, or concept what needs to be built.

We’ve lived interactive since its internet inception. When you’ve lived there that long the solutions become beautiful, profitable and effective. They become utterly apparent, and you execute them with all the ease of instinct.

The challenge was to develop a consumer-facing application that enticed shoppers to stop, interact with the application and ultimately consider purchasing the phone. From a technical standpoint the application needed to run identically on varying sized and powered netbooks. The application needed to function autonomously, while inviting consumers to interact with it.

theGOOD developed and animated the application in Flash published for Adobe AIR, and partnered with Cinco Design who handed off design assets. On a technical note: Sequentially-animated linear applications such as this are typically very difficult to update or alter. For this purpose theGOOD developed a dynamic system that enables easy updates to the many dependencies involved. The result was a consumer-focused, animated, in-store application that solved for Microsoft Kin’s challenges, and solidified a new partnership with Cinco Design.

Frustrated with the lack of a simple way to sell and buy items online, theGOOD charged itself with imagining and developing a solution.

The challenge was to make selling and buying anything online dead simple, transparent and efficient by using existing platforms people are already engaged in. From both a design and usability standpoint, simplicity was  the overarching guiding principle. Challenges abound when developing user flows for selling, buying, listing, bidding,  and all other elements inherent in creating an online e-commerce marketplace.

theGOOD concepted, designed and developed Sell Simply using the Twitter API as the core user account and application engine platform. Twitter was chosen due to its wide adoption, transparency of user accounts, and  real-time data qualities. Boiling down listing products to the simplicity level of a single tweet was a valid and good solution to the original problem.

On Sell Simply sellers have a Simple Shop, where they can list items of any variety for sale. Shoppers looking for these items can easily search by tag, location, keyword and price range. Shoppers can “follow” these searches to get a direct message when an item matches their search criteria. Once they find an item they like they can make an offer. Sellers can accept any offer at any time and get paid with their PayPal account. Shoppers can “follow” these offers to be alerted when their offer has been accepted, or outbid. All communications are facilitated using your Twitter account.

Think of Sell Simply as an Etsy, only simpler, cheaper, without product restrictions, and controlled with your Twitter account. Think of Sell Simply as Craigslist, only totally transparent, spam free, and without all the back and forth email hassle. Think of Sell Simply as an Ebay, only something that takes you minutes, not hours, to experience.

The challenge was to build an application that interfaced with Nike SPARQ’s live data flow, had a front-end display flexible enough work on multiple screens of varying resolutions, and included a sequencer to control the video clips and statistics displayed on-screen during each event. The application also needed to be lightweight and responsive enough to work over spotty Wi-Fi connections, and smart enough to display cached data if the Internet connection was lost.

The end result was a fully customizable, branded application that allowed for endless combinations of statistics to be sequenced and displayed in an easy-to-read manner, enabling athletes to get real-time feedback on their performance at national and regional Nike SPARQ events.

View the video.

Below are screenshots and an English translation of the article.

Yes, we recognize the humor in the magazine design. We’re flattered all the same. Thanks, Korea!

Please, give us a brief bio of yourself & company.

About Chris

Co-Founder of The Good, a Portland based interactive think tank. Flash Designer/Developer and Photographer. Educated in design, an autodidactic programmer, and 13 years of experience in the Interactive space, Chris brings inconceivable ability to fully concept, design and develop projects for clients that range from ‘mom and pop’ to ‘evil empire’. Winner of an Emmy Award, Clio Award, Mobius award, Webby Award, and an Andy Award for work on brands Truth, Progressive Insurance, ESPN, and Activision. Chris subscribes to the belief that nanotechnology, coupled with Moore’s law and genetic engineering, will enable earthlings to attain immortality within 30 years. Unfortunately for him, he lives life like this is fact. A Boston transplant, Chris is now a Portlander, or an Oregonian, whatever they call themselves out here. He’s assimilated (to the borg). Chris plays drums, rides a ducati and is dead serious about sushi. Chris wants you to know that this was written by Chris, and thus has the potential be completely bias.

About The Good

theGOOD is an interactive think tank that concepts, designs and develops meaningful connections between the analog and digital worlds. The Digilog –- where most people reside.

We use the term think tank as a response to an industry awakening. We feel it’s not alright to call ourselves just a development shop, or just an agency. The industry has finally grown up and people should take notice. People are taking notice. Interactive projects require more than just production. They require strategy, brand insight, technology chops blended with creative thinking. Someone immersed in the industry. Someone that can actually build what they concept and concept what they build.

Tell us about your background.

I went to college as an art major with a concentration in print design. I realized half way through that the print design industry would be deeply afflicted by the coming interactive boom that is the Internet. Since neither web design, nor web programming, was taught in colleges at this time, I became a recluse, locked myself in my room and set about self schooling. I picked up a copy of FutureSplash Animator and fell in love. To date, I believe that DIY attitude has been one of my life’s most valuable lessons.

Introduce your portfolio site.

Our portfolio site not only showcases our client and experimental work, but also aggregates the social media activity of all our employees. We purposefully removed the idea of a traditional navigation system in favor of a more experimental approach. This is a methodology we carry forward throughout our body of work. The result is a more engaging user experience, making participants out of users. We’re heavily into photography and have incorporated that into the backdrop of the site. The site is essentially a large data visualization of our our company, sorted and filtered to your liking.

What do you regard as being your(or thegood) biggest achievement?

Being able to pay ourselves to do something we love.

What did your(or thegood) first work look like

My (christeso.com) first work looked like most Flash 3 websites. Painfully slow, arduously navigable and overall hurty to the eyes.

Would you tell us about your(or thegood) usual working process?

Initially, we embark on a Discovery phase to fully understand all strategy, design, business, and technology objectives and needs. During this phase, we identify and document all elements of the project, which will be key to building a successful solution. These documents are so both client and The Good has a clearly defined scope before beginning design and development.

Can you explain style of your(or thegood) design?

The Good design philosophy is that content is king. Our design approach is simple: Minimalistic experimental design that provides the simplest solution to a projects most complex goal. So many design and advertising agencies place design above all else. In interactive this is a mistake. Design is but one facet of an overall solution. It should never lead an interactive project, but compliment and create a marriage between content and functionality.

What do you(or thegood) do for inspiration?

We immerse ourselves in the work of our peers and the interactive industry as a whole. We also spend a lot of time staring into our 110 gallon salt water reef aquarium.

How do you make your own idea and creativity for your works?

We start with the problem. Every idea needs to solve a problem. We define and attack the problem, mortally wounding it with creativity.

What is your solution when there is some communication trouble between you and your clients?

Due to our process of meticulously defining scope we rarely see client issues arise. However, if they do we usually come to a generous compromise.

What are currently working on you?

We are concepting an interactive installation with motion detection for a yet to be constructed building near downtown Portland, Oregon USA.

What is a unique brand identity of ‘your(or thegood)’ different from the other artists?

We believe our brand identity stems nicely from our name. We come in offering a high value product and we deliver on that promise. Some may see it as slightly arrogant. Making good on their presumptions, we’re fine with that.

Working environments is also important thing to creators. Are there some special features in your own working place and your office that distinguish another one? We want to know about your space.

Our space is a wide open loft with plenty of natural sunlight through walls of windows. We haven’t fully decorated yet, but have a 110 gallon salt water reef aquarium and a full fridge of Portland’s finest microbrew beer.

Have you been experienced Korea`s design works, films, music anything about Korea? If you have been experienced, tell us your thought anything about Korea.

We know little about Korea, except that we are extremely jealous of your broadband speeds.

Is there particular moment in your career that stands out?

Meeting my business partner Jon MacDonald is a recent moment that stands still in my mind. We were complete strangers when starting The Good. As it stands now, I could not have hand picked a better partner.

There must be a project that you have always dreamed of doing, what is it?

We would like to design and develop the Star Trek Replicator.

Looking 10 years in to the future, how far can web design or your design go?

We think we are fairly cutting edge. We see no limit, nor slow down, in the progress of interactive development. We feel the entire interactive experience will move away from the traditional web browser, and mobile devices, out into the environment we live in. We’re poised for this transformation and look forward to leading the way.

What is you and your(or thegood)`s plan for the future?

We have no plans. We think long term plans are an exercise in futile guesswork.

Please list 3 of your favourite things.

Technology, design and experimentation that combines the two.

Last word to our readers

Do what you love. You’ll love what you do.

The challenge was to create an AIR desktop application that added real value to Flickr, used the program’s API to extend  product offerings, and included valuable new features the community desired.

The result is almost certainly the best Flickr uploadr ever. Abound with features such as geo-tagging, people tagging, photo exif data integration and much more, theGOOD Uploadr is currently used by thousands of people in the Flickr community.

You can download the Uploadr today and give it a try!

Beloved in the Pacific Northwest, Tillamook County Creamery Association was ready to spread the love of its cheese to other parts of the country via a national Loaf Love bus tour.  As part of Tillamook’s interactive strategy for the tour, theGOOD was tasked with engaging the nation’s passionate community of cheese consumers and introducing them to Tillamook in cities across the country.

The challenge was to create an experiential website that showcased elements of Tillamook’s tour, while enticing consumers to engage with, and share, content via social media. theGOOD responded by  concepting, designing, and developing a socially-engaging mini-site — complete with a full client content management system — that interfaced and shared data with Flickr and  Facebook.

On the mini-site visitors are able to view user-generated photos and videos from each tour stop, send user-generated cheese poems to friends on Facebook, upload photos to Flickr and Facebook, enter photo contests, and follow the tour using an interactive map.

The mini-site also aggregates real-time data from a Facebook application and displays it in a heat map visualization that lives both on Facebook and the site. On Facebook fans are encouraged to “Share The Loaf”, creating loaf notes that they can send to friends and post on their wall.

By  leveraging the mini-site, Tillamook increased its brand visibility on multiple platforms, engaged users to share content, increased its user base, and most importantly sold more cheese to  new and expanded geographic markets.