Jordi Romkema

McJunior Club is an interactive playground for kids containing lots of games, fun facts, movies and promotional contests. The site has been created for McDonald’s together with Nickelodeon. The primary goal of the website is to offer the kids a form of entertainment, to stimulate the kids to play games and do sports.

A new logo was specifically designed by me to be used on the website and on promotional items such as posters and in-restaurant placemats. The site was also designed by me and features several different sections each with a specific layout: Movies, games, Happy Meal, birthdays and Ronald McDonald. Every month the site’s look and feel is updated to match the current Happy Meal theme (as you can see in the screenshot the current theme is promoting healthy food options such as water, carrots and apples. Other times the theme is around an upcoming movie, a big event such as the Olympics, a television character and so on… The site is very popular, especially the flash games.

McJunior Club - Homepage

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TMF Reaction is a very popular television program made for teenagers/young adults and can be seen on a daily basis on the television TMF. With TMF Reaction the audience is in control and they influence the content of the show.

The show is presented by a changing group of VJ’s: Nikkie, Sascha, Saar, Damien & Valerio. Every day after school they discuss the funniest and hottest facts of the day regarding celebrities, fashion, sports, school, music, games and more. In between different topics and items on location the newest and best music videos are shown.

TMF Reaction has its own website where the viewers can join in on the show with their webcam. Through the webcam they can interact with the VJ’s, ask questions to famous guests in the show and play games and win prizes with each other. TMF Reaction can be seen every day between 16:30 and 17:30 on TMF but the show continues on the web through active blogging by the VJ’s. Throughout the day they post their news, videos, photos, etc.

The design of the site was made by me and every VJ has its own variation of the homepage design. The design and colors correspond with the topics the VJ’s are interested in. Below you can see the different variations.

TMF Reaction - Homepage

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Expo Cooperative is a collective of designers that create and solve problems together. They share their results, research and output with the design community. I came across their site today and there are several elements on their website that really impressed me. The first thing that immediately struck me was the use of vibrant colors, I simpy love the color combinations used througout the website. The main content is a combination of grey, white and black but the background is really colorful to make the main content stand out more. Second thing is the use of large typography. Besides being easy to read it's also a great design element.

Another fun fact is that the site looks like it's being held by one of their designers as you can see from the hand on top of the main page and the hand on the bottom of the main page. When you go to their about section the site is flipped, including the menu and hte logo, and you see the designer holding the site among other really creative artwork. Cool!

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I haven't had the time to update my site the past couple of days unfortunately. I had a week off from work but I had another 'project' that's keeping me busy. I mean extremely busy... but right now it's about 30% completed. It will probably take me another couple of weeks or maybe months to finish it. I'm talking about Grand Theft Auto IV of course. If you want to play, add me on Xbox Live. My nickname is SizzlingJordi.

Spring has officially begun a week ago and the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development launched a new website to promote Tennessee in the springtime. They usually do this every season but never got the chance to write about it. Their main website Tennessee Vacation is absolutely stunning and now they released the spring version promoting events and happenings in the upcoming months. The whole look and feel is literally a breath of fresh air which suits the time of the year perfectly! The attention to detail is simply amazing. Makes me want to go to Tennessee!

The latest, the spring version

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I just came across this new website created by Pikaboo, a creative studio from Brussels in Belgium. Their site is really simple but extremely well executed with smooth animations. At first I thought it was a Flash-based website because of the smooth transitions but I was wrong: It's all javascript! I'm impressed...

The Nickelodeon Cartoon Creator is an interactive application where kids can create their own Spongebob Squarepants. They are literally the director of their own cartoon: they decide on the story, how the characters will be animated, what the set looks like, what background music is playing and much more.

The kids can edit and customize their cartoon, save it and come back later to work on it again. If they’re happy they can decide to publish their cartoon online. This will send the cartoon to Nickelodeon for moderation because every cartoon must be checked for explicit content first. When this is done the cartoon can be seen online and they can send it to their friends.

The Cartoon Creator is entirely made in Flash/Actionscript. The cartoons aren't actualy saved as cartoons or movie files, instead the keyframes are saved into an XML file. So everytime you view a cartoon it needs to be build up from the XML data. This has the advantage that resources used in the cartoons such as characters can be swapped by newer version anytime whereas regular movie files are static.
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On February 20th Nickelodeon launched a new website in The Netherlands and in Belgium. We created a new interactive playground for the kids. We got fed up with the old site, especially when it came to the content management system. Besides the CMS the site desperately needed a new and fresh design because the navigation on the old site was terrible. Anyway, now all of that is in the past and luckily the new site is a huge success. Read the rest... »

I came back just a week ago from Salt Lake City but it feels like it has been months ago, figures what just a week of work can do to you... Anyway I finally had the chance to sit down and upload my pictures to Flickr. Also, I made a photo album at MyPublisher. I ordered it on Friday and according to Fedex it will be here on Monday, hooray! It's an awesome service where you can create your own photo books with different layouts and other customizations you can do in a program called BookMaker. I can't wait to see what it looks like when I have it in my hands, 50 pages of pretty pictures. Meanwhile you can see the photo book I made online here.

Around 4000 Nickelodeon fans have helped launch the new Nickelodeon website on Wednesday February 20th. Kids could ‘earn’ puzzle pieces by answering questions together about Nickelodeon characters and shows. When all of the pieces were put together the new site was launched which was much faster than expected because the children gave 72.000 correct answers within just 10 minutes. That’s about 150 correct answers per second! The launch was therefore a great success. Patrick Alders, General Manager North Europe Nickelodeon: “The new and improved website is more visual and interactive to better connect with the way children browse the Internet these days. The site offers children more possibilities to express and develop themselves creatively. With a broad selection of games, video’s and the Cartoon Creator Nickelodeon stimulates creativity.”

The first day
A total of 30.000 children (unique visitors) have visited the website on the first day. On average they have viewed 17 pages per person and stayed around 19 minutes on the site to discover all the new things. The Cartoon Creator was already extremely popular from the moment the new site launched. On this first day around 800 cartoons have been created by enthusiastic SpongeBob Squarepants fans.

The first week
The success of the first day continued the rest of the first week. At the end of the week the new site generated 245.000 unique visitors. On average the visitors stayed around 18 minutes on the website and together they viewed almost four million pages. The average visitor viewed 5.1 videos in TurboNick, Nickelodeon’s online video-on-demand service.

The Cartoon Creator remained successful: in a week the children made 10.383 cartoons! Just like the Cartoon Creator the games remained popular with the kids. The generated great figures: the different games were played 243.000 times by visitors.