Energy Market Matters Australia

 Illustrated Parallax Sliders for Web Site

CLIENT: Grafix Garage + EMMA

August 2019

EMMA – an acronym for Energy Market Matters Australia is an energy and electricity procurement and project management consultancy firm specializing in energy markets, founded in 2017, by C.O’s Jackie Barber, Paul Marshall, and Justin Bold. They help Australian businesses resolve their energy dilemmas, but explaining ‘How’ EMMA does it is difficult to describe.

The three C.O’s had approached Craig Litchfield and Brent Irvine of Grafix Garage to consult on redesigning and updating their existing web site, primarily to differentiate them from the generic look of the competition.  The first issue highlighted to circumvent and redress involved the overwhelming confluence of energy market techno-babble buzz word ‘Gov-Speak’ that infests the promotional and marketing activities of the competition, creating a sameness to every company. 

The main challenge was to visually represent across six separate slides an illustrative method to communicate EMMA’s management consultancy and company ethos in an offbeat, whimsical, and quirky fashion, highlighting unique challenges and problems in consulting to the customer, whilst pin-pointing the effectiveness of EMMA’s capabilities.

Hence, the unusual anti-corporate approach taken by the C.O’s was to represent the company personality in a series of six animated cartoon settings as interactive slides.  The dominant influence that emerged from development meetings was to stylistically represent the artwork in the fashion of 1950’s Warner Brother’s Loony Toons shorts, and Disney animated movies.  In essence the company presents itself by intimating it becomes a Mary Poppins type super nanny fixer character, who can identify problems, strategize solutions, and implement procedures to recovery – with a spoonful of sugar.

One of the clever results of dealing with the energy industry techno buzz-word text issue on the competitions web sites was to deliberately make fun of it on the EMMA site.  Brent Irvine coded a funny way of extracting text from those sites, then randomly regenerate them into almost legible Energy Speak Lorem Ipsum body copy filler.

Energy Market Buzz Word Bingo Lingo example generated off the EMMA site…

“Readiness new financing models, volatile, the market will stabilise hedging strategies carbon legislation reporting best candidate.  Financial risk forecasting, readiness greenhouse a high price-point aggregating demand.  Full package alerts, risk management generators new lights.  Performs an array wealth of experience, optimization government policies micro grid.”

Home Page ~ Innovating Earth

The Home page plate consists of a 3D globe spinning slowly in space, and the effect required the creation of a flat texture map of the Earth globe to be wrapped around the 3D geometry.  All these plates are illustrated in Photoshop on a Wacom Cintiq Interactive monitor.  The style incorporates line art over paper textures, that are tinted in hues picked from the Emma Logo style guide, which also features as coloured tabs on the menu system on the site.

Help ~ Bat Girl City Lights

The city of Brisbane skyline at night is given a Gotham treatment by having city blocks separated into layers in a dark unlit state, then as a lit state when powered up.  The EMMA logo as the Bat signal is animated by the movement of the user mouse across the clouds, which also glow when the city lights are on.

Yea-Ha! ~ Herding Cats in the Desert

This was the first of the slides to be created, with the art style influenced directly from the 1950’s Warner Brothers Road Runner and Coyote shorts.  The scene is introduced as a night state, then becomes daylight, the wind turbine in the distance starts spinning, and the cactus set piece blows over in the wind, while the tumble weed rolls past.  

Spoonful ~ Experience Librarian

The bookshelf background represents the many aspects of knowledge and experience offered by Emma, and there are five book sets that are deliberately placed within the collection that reference particular readings the founding CEO’s wished to drawn attention to in regards to project management.  These books are highlighted with extra links and interactively function with the mouse.  

Buy! Sell! ~ Naked Emperor

The Naked Emperor in the swan floatie represents the client, who resembles the character from the children’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.  The trick was to create a floating bobbing character with an added animated cycle of his legs, and subtle movement of the cocktail, while operating over a cycle of rippling water reflection.  An extra hidden gag is when the user clicks on the pinkie finger of his right hand, he farts creating the gas bubble cycle animation.  

Magic ~ Flying Carpet

The Magic Carpet design is inspired by Disney’s Aladdin, and is made up of the Emma logo and energy icons.  The background is the Moroccan Medina of Fez. The cycle animation runs while the carpet lifts up and into the sky through the clouds.

The Founding CEO’s Caricature Portraits

Justin, Jackie, and Paul thought it might be a point of difference to have the three head shots for the ‘About Us – Contact Page’ as cartoon caricatures in the style of the rest of the site illustrations.  These would replace the normal corporate head shot pics that would also be used on business cards, and other business links like LinkedIn.