I was meeting Jimmy Chen at an Irish bar in downtown Los Angeles to talk about the process behind the new South Park Studios Web site, and he was running late. As I sat at a table with my sketchbook, I started to gather my research notes for the interview. After college graduation, Chen worked at eLogic and Studio Archetype (now Sapient), eventually settling back down in LA to start his own gig, Typographic. Being the savvy businessman that he is, he successfully ran that company into the ground (due to cable TV and the heat wave in LA) and then went back work again, at agencies with air conditioning such as Genex and DNA Studio. Now he is a Senior Art Director at Schematic, the longest job he's ever held, supposedly just a little longer than his first job at Denny's.
"Hey," said a voice from behind me. Chen arrived. He'd been busily working on the site for months. But now that it was finished and launched, he had time for a beer.
I asked him, what's so great about the South Park Studios Web site? Is it just a place to go online and watch South Park endlessly? "Yes, that's pretty much the point of the site. Now all the fans can watch all the episodes online while they are at work or in their classroom for free, except they'll have to watch some short advertisements. But it should be worth it, who wouldn't want to watch ads?" Chen questioned. "Unlike other shows, the South Park episode that you missed last night will be online within minutes after the show, so you can catch up on it, then the next day, you could share the experience with your pretend friends at the water cooler. And you can even grab the clips and share them on Facebook, MySpace, or in your underpants."
The site definitely puts the control back to the users and has allowed South Park to gather many more fans. Offering full episodes for free online has attracted more than half a million unique viewers in March. But there's more to the site than being an episode library, it also features a forum that is filled with very active and dedicated fans along with many casual users. There's an avatar generator where fans can make themselves into South Park characters. Production Blogs and Behind the Scenes sections let fans know all about what's going on at South Park.
South Park initially approached Schematic with a list of requirements and requested that video should be front and center. They wanted the site simple and clean, easy to navigate and not too wacky. And of course, their business requirement was advertising. Features needed were mainly based on browsing, searching and promoting content.
Although working with South Park sounded fun, Chen mentioned that the project was a lot of work in a short amount of time, about four months. And as the Art Director of the project team, he collaborated with the designers, developers and project managers to make the process run smoothly. Comedy Central provided the team with technical integration.
"Research was definitely entertaining, going through all of South Park's DVDs, watching and re-watching countless clips and episodes of the show. Of course, some of us had no need for research due to the ability to recite every line from every episode."
Then, he went on to talk about design. Simplicity was key. The screens had different challenges so the team had to develop a flexible and dynamic system. "We came up with a mosaic design that was color and imagery driven, with minimal amount of copy, and personally, I don't like sentences with more than 3 words. We used tight shots of the character because we know the fans recognize the style of the illustration which is the branding element that's peppered throughout the site. I asked him if there was any art direction from the client. "One of the requirements was to have the site be uniquely South Park, from colors and imagery to attitude."
After the approval of the initial pages, production and development started, and design moved forward with other pages of the site based on priority and complexity. "Even though our team was in different cities (both Comedy Central and Schematic have offices in New York City), we were able to integrate our workflow seamlessly."
Throughout the project, Chen and his team were able to quality assure the site as development progressed. To bring South Park Studios to life, Javascript, CSS, AJAX, HTML and Flash were used. "Not to mention animated GIF, which is always really fun," he added.
"We worked very closely with South Park and we met with them frequently as their approval process was incredibly speedy. It also helped that their office was just down the street," Chen confessed. "It's not very often that you get to work with a client that easy-going, so we took advantage of that."
The project started last December and was launched March 19th. The original launch date was a week earlier but launched late due to some technical issues. South Park's goal was to launch with free streaming, full-length episodes. And thanks to Jimmy Chen and his team at Schematic, they did. Now, that deserves a beer.
Visit southparkstudios.com.
Rachel Elnar is a partner at Ramp Creative and editor-in-chief of the AIGA/LA Web site.
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