The Horizon Interactive Awards are a prestigious international competition recognizing excellence in interactive media productions from all over the world. The Competition has a rich history of recognizing the “best of the best” websites, videos, mobile applications, advertising, and more. Entries were judged by an international, volunteer panel of industry professionals with diverse backgrounds and various roles within the interactive media and advertising industries. Judges looked for the best blend between creativity, content, and functionality.
Each entry was judged on the following:
- Solution creativity and originality
- Overall graphic design/appearance/user experience
- Communication of message
- Technical merit
- Effectiveness of solution
DAVEY AWARD – SILVER WINNER 2022 We also won a Silver Davey Award for the Sonic Dresser Burger Builder in the category “Educational & Instructional” which covers branded digital campaigns that promote education, learning, intellectual growth, and discovery. As Lead Gamification Developer, I designed and developed this game for Evolve Solutions Group in coordination with The Select Group.
Davey Awards are the largest and most prestigious awards competition exclusively for the “Davids” of creativity. David defeated the giant Goliath with a big idea and a little rock – the sort of thing small agencies do each year. The annual International Davey Awards honors the achievements of the “Creative Davids” who derive their strength from big ideas, rather than stratospheric budgets.
The Davey Awards may be for smaller companies, but the judges have big reputations. The Davey is sanctioned and judged by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. AIVA members include executives from organizations such as Condé Nast, Disney, GE, Keller Crescent, Microsoft, Monster.com, MTV, Push., Publicis, Sesame Workshops, The Marketing Store, Worktank and Yahoo! and many more.
WHY BUILD A SIMULATION GAME: The Sonic Dresser Builder was custom designed and developed as part of a blended learning strategy to meet the needs of new hire and tenured restaurant staff. It provides just-in-time practice to new and existing restaurant team members. The microlearning provides a safe environment where team members can spend just 5 minutes honing their sandwich and burger recipe skills.The game is available to new hires as part of their onboarding learning journey and to practice throughout their tenure. Taco Builder utilitizes on demand practice of the entire taco menu that enables targeted learning and recipe simulation. Rusty Taco is already realizing the benefits of gamification:
- Increased product knowledge
- Reduced in training time
- Reduced training food waste
ABOUT THE DESIGN: At the start of the project, my colleague Tristia Hennessey, had to photograph every ingredient used to make the sandwiches. Each photo had to have a transparent background, which required graphic designer, Kristen Piazza, to spend many hours doing tedious and amazing edge-work in Photoshop. 
In the simulation, ingredients would be put together to build the sandwich. I created a Photoshop master file that contained every build-stage of every sandwich step by step. Each sandwich included two parts: ingredients placed on top of the bread crown, and ingredients placed on the heel. I painstakingly recreated each state using ingredient photos, and applying lots of Edit/ Transform/ functions and Layer Styles within Photoshop. In this way, I was able to produce button states that were persistent enough to the eye to look natural as ingredients were added along the timeline. See a demo of the Photoshop layers in the video below.
Next, I exported each layer as a separate, transparent .png image and then imported them into Storyline. Each sandwich is composed of multiple button states that reveal the sandwich build step by step. One thing that I had to work out was avoiding a jarring jump-cut when one state replaced the next. I’m pleased with the gradual blur you see when an ingredient is correctly placed on the sandwich.
TOOLS USED: Articulate 360, Adobe Photoshop.
VIEW A PROTOTYPE: Prior to building the Sonic Dresser Builder, I had created a similar simulation for Jimmy Johns. Below is a prototype called “Let’s Make A Sandwich” based on that earlier application.
View Let’s Make A Sandwich
Watch Promotional Video (below)
