Carpe Diem Daily - Specialmoves

“Carpe Diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary”. So says Robin Williams in 1989’s Dead Poet’s Society.

It’s a sentiment everyone should live by, but there’s no denying that sometimes you need a little help. Life today can move very quickly, and it’s hard to keep finding new and exciting ways in which to keep your life - well - new and exciting.

It was in this spirit that Wieden + Kennedy London asked us to work with them on a novel brief from Nokia. It was to be a mobile app and website, designed to show off the capability of their phones without being overt and obvious, and to bring about a little more good in the world.

The result is Carpe Diem Daily, a unique collaboration with the School of Life, designed to fire up the imagination and learn a bit more about yourself and the world around you. Every day for a year users are asked to perform a different simple task. They upload a photo, text or video of the results and share it with the community.

Wieden + Kennedy got us involved for our ability to seamlessly integrate both the mobile and web experience, and to create an application which looked beautiful and worked well across a wide range of handsets. This proved extremely challenging, considering we had to support phones which hadn’t even been released during development, and the different configurations of touchscreen, keyboards and screen sizes.

On the backend, one of the more interesting features for us was a content conversion system allowing any video to be uploaded, automatically converted and pushed out to handsets. We also worked hard to allow the application to update automatically, critical for a campaign that runs for a year and needs to respond to its reception. As with everything we do, all this was to make use of the application as slick and effortless as possible.

The app received very positive reviews from the Guardian and CNET and in its first few weeks had already been downloaded nearly 20,000 times.