UppCon10
UppCon is a J-convention in Uppsala, Sweden, housing roughly 3 000 visitors yearly. I worked with Swedish agency Agigen to create a way for visitors to explore what the convention is all about. Although the convention is over, you can still view the site.
UppCon takes place during three days and nights, with hundreds of activities to explore and attend. To avoid a giant wall of text, we decided to extract every single activity, give it some attention, and display it in a gallery. And—yes—that includes riding the escalator.
Explore
In the gallery each activity is as important as its neighbor. Our guest artist from Japan, Minxone, is displayed next to sushi. Visitors can search, filter and sort activities. When an activity is clicked, an article about that activity appears.
Related pictures are fetched from konventsbilder.se—a site where we collect pictures from past events. Visitors can like the activity, and related activities—which are hand-picked by the author—are shown to the right.
For over 7 months—from the day we launched—we had around 800 daily unique visitors (remember, the event itself only house 3 000 visitors), which well surpassed all our expectations. They spent the majority of that time in the explore mode. Apart from the explore mode, we had a news blog, but worked extensively with Twitter and Facebook to keep visitors up-to-date.
Tickets
Of course, you won’t have visitors without tickets. We built and integrated a web shop for visitors to buy tickets, apply to the cosplay competition, book a school to sleep in and buy merchandise.
The event
As every year, we designed unique tickets for the convention. The cute background is made by the ever great Erika Henell, who also illustrated this years t-shirts.
I made several posters. The bigger ones were displayed at the convention, and some were displayed on billboards and busses around Uppsala. (Note though that UppCon is a non-profit convention, and we would never spend our own money on this kind of advertisement. We’ve never needed it, and probably never will. The campaign was funded by Uppsala Kommun.)
Building Expectations
Before we released 10.uppcon.se, we wanted to engage the network, so we built a site and asked our visitors to help us save UppCon.
The project, dubbed internally as sle (Site Launch Effort), featured a grid of 9 competitions and quests to solve. One of the quests included finding a car with the registration plate “UCX”. We imagined it would be several days, maybe a week or two, before all quests had been completed. Yeah. Right.
In a naive move, we forgot how effective the UppCon network can be. Most of the quests were finished in matter of hours, and we were still building the real site when the last quest was finished.
Live coverage
During the event we transformed uppcon.se to a simple site that covered the event through flickr and Twitter. We fetched all images uploaded to flickr with the tag uppcon, and all tweets containg #uppcon. On top of that, we had a separate feed for our own twitter account.
A massive project
UppCon is a massive project, and we continue to raise our expectations on our selves every year. A part from all the design work, I also wrote the script, directed and composed the audio for a short movie which we showed during the opening ceremony. The very talanted Marcus Melin animated it.
Quick Summary
- Tools: Pen & paper, Photoshop, Pixelmator, CSSEdit
- Client: Uppsalakai
- WWW: 10.uppcon.se