The Carver One is the incredible, 3 wheeled wonder that steers like a car but corners like a motorbike. It’s insane and it’s also no secret that we quite like it. We have a nicely rendered photoshop version of our ideal Carver One in all its metallic green goodness as a constant reminder of how much closer the real thing is getting.

Peter James is the chap that manages Carver New Zealand and Australia and fortunately for us he is local .. which means he pops over from time to time and enlists our help in any design work he may need and takes us for the occasional fly/ride/drive in the Carver.

We created a new site for Peter a few months ago, www.carverexperience.co.nz to help him get the word out on some of the great tourist packages that he is offering as well as promoting the Carver in general. We decided that it would be a good idea to try and give people a bit of a feel as to what its like piloting the Carver so we created a Flash application that lets people get a feel for how it behaves when you go around corners.

We pieced together the interior cockpit, created the ’tilt indicators’, steering wheel etc and with some photos from Peter’s travels in the background and some actionscript to tie everything together we had a fun little simulator. Click here to see what its like from inside the Carver.

We also built a page to show some promotional videos as well as a bookings page where you can book and pay for your experience online. So what are you waiting for? Go and experience the Carver One!

About a year ago, 3 mates launched an innovative concept for a ‘world first’ business idea which aimed to reward Kiwi’s for interacting with New Zealand’s best brands. The web site was www.mintshot.co.nz and it got off to a rather explosive start! (watch the video here http://www.mintshot.co.nz/about-us).

Recently Mintshot were looking to make some signifcant changes to their site and enlisted the help of RND Group to develop the systems and programming as well as ourselves, Martian Design & Interactive, to put the creative together and build the front end.

Nick and the team from Mintshot had a pretty clear vision for what they wanted to achieve with their new site. Build the Mint Shop, increase the value of the Mint dollar, introduce new games and much much more … so after an initial meeting we got to work putting the wireframes together.

The whole process spanned about 3 to 4 months and during that time we were responsible for the look and feel of the majority if the website, creating the html for the site as well as creating all the flash based components and user interaction.

One of the really interesting parts of this project was putting together Mintshot’s new Instant Win game. The concept is quite simple, choose a point on a map where the prize is hiding and if you click on it, you win it. Again we developed all the imagery, built the flash game and worked closely with RND Group to hook the game into the all knowing brain that manages the Instant Win system. Lots of fun and since going live that game has generated massive interest.

The Mintshot redesign was a great project to be involved with and we’re certainly looking forward to working with Nick and team in the future … perhaps for Mintshot version 3 ;)

As a side note, the three parties involved in this project were all located in different cities. Mintshot in Auckland, RND Group in Wellington and ourselves in Tauranga. We kept a tight schedule of conference call style meetings using Skype as well as using some great web based tools which gave us visibility over the entire project … Basecamp for project management, Unfuddle for bug tracking and Harvest for time tracking. These tools are very affordable and really make it easy to keep on top of projects. With a good broadband connection, the right tools and lots of coffee, distance need not be a hurdle anymore.