Jury member Kevin Farnham praises the site, designed by the firm Transistor Studios, for its rich motion graphics, depth of storytelling and original navigation system. “The content is extremely deep,” he says. “And there’s a level of polish that you don’t see very often from car companies, which often have generic websites. You know what to expect from a lot of car sites, and, typically, what you can expect is a hard-sell approach. It’s uncommon to see something that rises above the fray and draws you in, but this does.”

The fresh approach was particularly welcome when so many entries to the 2008 Best of Web left Farnham, founder of the multidisciplinary design firm Method, wanting more. “There was a lot of stuff that seemed like it could have been template-based,” he says. “And I was a little crestfallen to see designers using tricks from the mid-1990s. There was just not enough attention to detail across the board, and as a result, things started to feel generic.”

When judging competitions, he runs each entry through a test: If he replaced the logo and swapped out existing colors for new ones, would the site work just as effectively for another brand? Too many sites fail the challenge. Not Thinkaboutit.com, which Farnham describes as “singular.”

The site refers to itself as a “thoughtscape,” defined as “a place to think about what really matters in cars.” On the home page, a voiceover invites you to “Question it. Ponder it. Dare it. Test it. Flip it. Flop it. Think About It.” And then the site dives into a rush of provocative copy, still and motion graphics, spooky music, ani­mated and live-action films and interactive elements—all working together to create a fast-moving, nonlinear, semi-surreal stream­of-consciousness experience.

Still, Farnham’s judge’s selection decision didn’t come easy. Some of the elements of Thinkaboutit.com that he most valued— like the motion graphics—also contributed to load-time issues. He first viewed the site from his home office, where it was too slow to load for his taste. That gave Farnham pause. “Most busi­ness users have fast connections,” he says, “but not everyone does. So from the start, you’re setting up the user’s expectations in a somewhat negative tone.”

Farnham is partial to sites that excel creatively while still man­aging to stay within strict business parameters. Though the Hyundai site was clearly built to solve a formidable business problem, Farnham notes it didn’t face the same logistical restrictions as a B2B like Gallup’s entry. Since users go to the latter site expressly to access information, it couldn’t afford to be slow to load. “They did a great job with that,” says Farnham. “I came really close to choosing it, but it fell apart for me when I got to those second and third levels, where I didn’t feel they went deep enough.” He recognized a number of B2B sites, like a pair of General Electric entries (www.ge.com/innovation/nano/index.html and www.ge.com/innovation/aviation/index.html), whose design Farnham calls graceful—though they sometimes veer too close to a PowerPoint-y feel at times, he adds.

In the end, Thinkaboutit.com won Farnham’s vote on the strength of the experience it yields. Once the site has loaded, in other words, it takes care of you. “When consumers jump from a TV commercial to actually typing in a URL, that’s a pretty big leap. So you have to treat them right once they’re there. Here, the storytelling draws you in. And that level of engagement is going to be necessary as user expectations continue to escalate around what they expect from websites.”

From an aesthetic standpoint, the numerous interactive ele­ments at Thinkaboutit.com don’t share a common design sensibility. A Frank-Milleresque animated film about a high-speed car chase (the protagonist uses his Electronic Stability Control to survive) differs dramatically from a game like Save the Egg, which challenges players to wrap an egg in materials that will pro­tect it when dropped, just as “Hyundai never stops searching for the best possible combination of safety features.” And yet such “metaphors”—which is what Transistor Studio’s James Price calls these various interactive elements—hang together relatively well. “The result is that it doesn’t feel like Hyundai has any one pre­established way of thinking,” says Price, creative director at Tran­sistor, whose team designed the site under an intense deadline.

Interactive production company Perfect Fools handled backend development. As of this writing, the team at Transistor was work­ing on redesigning the site, including backend development). “It’s meant to express the idea that Hyundai considers things from many different angles and in many different ways.” The navigation system opens up numerous paths, too, allowing users to take great, bounding leaps back and forth through the content. Appropriately, the Transistor team drew inspiration from the experience of driving. “When you’re driving along a road, you’re always looking at the horizon,” says Price, “but you’re also always aware of where you’ve been—of what’s behind you. We wanted people to feel they could go anywhere. So rather than say­ing your job as a user is to click from A to B, we’re saying that as a user, your job is to explore—to find whatever it is you want, anything you want.”
Tiffany Meyers