all's well that, well, ends.
9 11 2002
and so began my career of zooming into shit.
sofake blew the ears off flash webmasters all over the world wide web when it was released.
people ask me what sofake means, well it’s what I think about a lot of things, but I also like the way it looks vaguely japanese if you don’t know how the syllables break apart.
so • fa • ke
10 13 2003
me and martin met on an old flash forum called were-here, arguing in a thread about the validity of robots in web design. at some point we decided it was put up or shut up time and created our first site together, Hungout which was followed soon by wefail.
I don’t remember much about making wefail. (a theme)
martin was in the UK and I was in texas and I would create ridiculous shit-take animations to make him laugh when he woke up. I would say “look at how preposterous, I only wanted to see you smile!” and he would say “nah, let’s leave it in.”
1 12 2004
wefail’s first client site was for austin based musician Bob Schneider. this site would kick off our trilogy of sxswi music wins.
before it’s time we installed “Bob Schneider Radio One” which would detect what day it was using a php script and play the daily show accordingly.
“holy crap welcome to bobschneider dot com and radio bob schneider coming to you live and direct on this glorious thursday…”
in the final days of 2018, I still think this is pretty cool.
12 7 2005
wow eminem was pretty famous back then. Interscope Records wanted us to make his site. we engineered a timeline site that took you from his obscurity in the 90s to his eventual death sometime in the 2040s.
on a conference call Em had told me and martin “look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, one moment, would you capture it?”
taking full advantage of Em’s greenlight me and martin did whatever we wanted. eminem.com cemented wefail as a go-to studio for creative web design for musicians.
8 16 2008
how we had longed to work with someone obsessed with The Neverending Story and Labyrinth and Julian Velard was to be that man. with a fresh major label deal with EMI, who John Lennon always hated, Julian came to us with reasonable freedom and a reasonable budget.
we created an exploration game that was too hard for people in 2008 and is certainly too hard for people in 2018. the rewards however were great, including Labyrinth covers, Final Fantasy battle sequences and an ultimate finale with Julian’s cover of the Limahl classic “The Neverending Story” a song I still put on from time to time and just cry.
me and martin had no way of knowing at the time that we’d created our second to last site for EMI and our second to last flash site.
ruin lay before us.
7 10 2010
a fitting send off, me and martin created a paper pop-up world full of secrets.
David Lynch took the photographs that formed the basis for this exploration of the Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse presented album, which includes appearances from Iggy Pop and the singer guy from that band everyone liked, The Flaming Lips.
I put this album on last night and the front half remains really good. after we’d finished our wefail handler was kind enough to let us know she had spoken to Danger Mouse on his tour bus and he had said the results were “genius”.
thanks, Danger Man!