Download Summer Pop Sounds
Latest version: 1.0   (May 3, 2001)

Shortly after finishing the skin for 'War Games,' I was contacted about doing a skin to tie in with Coca-Cola's summer 2001 promotion/contest.

The skin was designed to accompany and therefore replicate the overall look and feel of the promotion's website, where, once you opened a can of Coke, you entered 'Coke World' - an interface featuring 'bubbles' in the 'soda' that would act as your navigation to other content on the site.

The process for creating this skin was frustrating; unlike most of my other commissions, where I was given something appriaching free reign to design the skin (making any necessary changes as the final step), this one was created by committee.

Teleconferences with the Coke website's design firm and people from the Coca-Cola Company began almost immediately upon my acceptance of the assignment, and, though I was given a month to create the skin, there were strict weekly work deadlines set so that they could comment/control every stage of design, from preliminary sketches through to mockups and the working skin.

After two and a half weeks, the skin was complete and I was notified that the website's colors had just been altered so that it wouldn't appear to be so 'dark,' and I was directed to alter the skin to match, and to have it ready for the next morning's teleconference.

Once these changes were made, the skin was forwarded to Coke's legal department, who asked that I include a trademark line reading "Coca-Cola and the Contour Bottle are registered trademarks of The Coca-Cola Company." I asked if I was alright to put it in the skin's readme.txt file. I was assured that would be fine, and all was indeed fine until I was reprimanded at the next teleconference for not putting it the visual portion of the skin. The trademark line was dutifully added to the bottom of the Equalizer window and resubmitted to Coke, who then pointed out that the words "contour bottle" and the "the" that precedes "Coca-Cola Company," had to be capitalized...

...nevermind that the e-mail I received from Coke, which was to provide me with the exact phrasing for this all-important trademark line was entirely in lower-case text...

With all changes made, the skin was approved by Coke, and is now available for your use.

I apologize to all of you who dislike the appearance of Coke's legal disclaimer on your skin; I don't like it either. For this reason, I've included a clean version of the Equalizer graphic ["Eqmain.bmp" and "Eqmain (clean).bmp" respectively] in the skin's .ZIP file. Though swapping the files is a relatively simple procedure, because Coca-Cola specified the appearance of the distributed skin, I cannot tell you how to do this, and will not answer any e-mails asking me how.