Download Operation Swordfish
Latest version: 1.0   (May 10, 2001)

This the second of two concurrent headache skins.

A few days before 'War Games' was completed, and almost a week before receiving Coca-Cola's 'Summer Pop Sounds' assignment, I was asked to produce a skin for the Warner Bros. movie 'Swordfish,' starring John Travolta. Why the skin wasn't released until a week after Coke's is a story all its own...

The design of 'Operation Swordfish' was, as with 'Blow' and 'Summer Pop Sounds,' intended to mirror the look and feel of the movie's website. Swordfish's website featured an innocuous front page, but the meat of the site was a high-tech-looking interface hidden behind a link marked 'Enter Password.' Part of the film concerns hacking into heavily fortified computers, deciphering the passwords for them along the way. The website mirrored this concept through the use of passwords hidden: online, in print advertisements, in TV commercials, and in posters and trailers for the film. As you found these passwords, you entered them into the website so as to find other passwords and keycodes that would leave you eligible to win prizes.

Not only was the skin intended to look like part of this interface, but passwords would be hidden within (there are five hidden inside) the skin. As with the Coke skin, the creation of this one would be guided every step of the way via teleconferences and weekly deadlines.

The design, at Warner Bros.' request, mirrored the coloration and look of the interface windows on the 'Swordfish' site, and was put together in roughly an afternoon. The skin was initially completed after a week spent splitting my time between it and the Coke skin. The original version of the finished skin fit seamlessly into the website's look. When viewed atop a browser window displaying the website you'd never know what was the website and what was Winamp - the colors and design pieces were perfect matches.

Then the insanity began.

Warner Bros. wanted to change parts of the skin to colors that were completely outside the palette of the specified portions of the website (example: that nuclear phlegm green used so heavily in the final skin was not in the original design, or on their website). I wouldn't have minded if the results worked, but following their directions looked mediocre, and through a week and a half of daily phonecalls and submissions (and my protests), they continued to tweak the severity of the discrepancy between the look of the skin and the website. I felt like little more than a paid flunky, and my spirits plummeted.

After color approvals (I should note again that I don't approve), the final step in the design of this skin would be to hide five passwords in the skin. The passwords were planted and the skin submitted, and Warners complained that they couldn't find them (I was given the impression that that was supposed to be exactly the point). Another week was spent making the passwords visible enough that the studio would be satisfied.

Finally, a week after the Coke skin (which was also plagued by heavy-handed revisions) was released, 'Operation Swordfish' was done.

For the record, I'm not satisfied with the skin - the final colors do not go together well, and they make an otherwise interesting design into something mediocre.

Because I was never allowed any creative input in the design of the skin, and all of my suggestions were universally ignored, I take no responsibility for it.