THE “REFLECT” TEAM

Photo: Courtesy

"The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team", said Phil Jackson, an American retired Basketball coach and former player. Applying this quote into action, the brilliant team of 'Ice9 Interactive' has proved talent, possibilities and devotion to interactive marketing solutions. Starting off in year 2012, Ice9 Interactive gradually became one of the most influential companies in digital marketing in the country.

Recently, Ice9 Interactive won two awards in two categories: A' Design Award and Competition 2015 for their generative design project 'Reflect' for Lebanese musician DJ Sarhi's album launch. Of the two awards, one is the Platinum award in the category of Graphics and Visual Communication and the other is the Gold Award in the category of Generative, Algorithmic and Parametric Design. It is to say that A' Design Award & Competition is the world's largest annual juried design competition that honours best designers, architects, and design oriented companies and institutions around the universe. This year, a total of 15,000 applications were submitted from 180 countries for the awards. Out of which only 9 Platinum Winners, among others, were invited to receive the award in the gala ceremony held at Como, Italy, including Ice9 interactive.

The project 'Reflect' was ideated by Shafiq Alam, associated creative director of IMPACT BBDO and executed by Afeef Zubaer Zaman and Fahim Ahmed of Ice9 Interactive. Of the six members of the team for 'Reflect', the rest are Ahmad Niaz Murshed, Musavvir Ahmed and Raiyan Momen.

Shafiq Alam, who worked on idea generation and overall creative direction, living in United Arab Emirates for the last ten years, was awarded the 'Cannes Lion' award thrice for his creative design ideas. He shared his ideas of generative designs with Ice9 interactive and made a plan to implement them. The main technical strength behind the project, Fahim Ahmed, works in the field of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality of Ice9 Interactive. Afeef Zubaer Zaman, who's ultimate goal is to work in the field of 3D animation and entertainment, also took the responsibilities of the technical aspects. The rest of the team helped with innovative ideas for designing the project.

The team worked hard from November 2014 to January 2015 for their generative design project. The generative design system took a snippet from a track of DJ Sarhi, the user's location and a picture of DJ Sarhi as input. Using these elements, the system created visual beats which represented momentary musical glimpses. These system generated visuals were then used for the communication campaign of the album launch of DJ Sarhi.

In spite of being students from different backgrounds, this team successfully proved themselves to be technical experts among their clients. "We had a great interest in storytelling and also in technology. Besides, we had a good interaction with many people who are from the technical background," says Afeef Zubaer Zaman.

Recently, the team is working for the identity creation of the Bengal Classical Music Festival. The identity of Bengal Classical Music Festival was developed using dynamic identity generation concept. "We took this as an inspiration to design the identity of Bengal Classical Music Festival. Each unique identity was generated through a computer system," says Ahmad Niaz Murshed, Business Development Executive at Ice9 Interactive.

Ice9 Interactive is the first company in Bangladesh to have been awarded these prestigious awards. They are also creating different projects for national and international corporate clients' like- Uniliver, Pepsi, Airtel, Nestle, Grameenphone, Robi and many more. The most important fact is that they strongly believe in teamwork and yearn to move a long way in the future.