Curious Markings Co.

A Case Study

Graphic Design

Web Development

eCommerce Development

Android Development

iOS Development

Social Media Advertising

The
Challenge

Curious Markings started with a simple question:

“What if we made an interactive experience from the hallucinations of a schizophrenic person”?

Curious Markings are just that. Visual hallucinations from a schizophrenic artist turned into pieces of art that can be seen by everyone. Each marking has a word in an “unknown language” associated with it. This word can be heard through the artist’s auditory hallucinations which is then translated to an English word that drawn from intuition, rather than conscious thought. The artist also has a description or feeling associated written down that goes with each marking.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to make an interactive mobile game that serves as a way to create a buzz around this unique concept. This game acts as a funnel to create a loyal following that subscribes as patrons and buys prints and merchandise featuring these Curious Markings. In order to get people playing the game, a long-term social media marketing and advertising campaign will be needed to generate organic and paid growth.

The
Objectives

Grow a social following

Build the mobile app

Make website for marketing

Build online shop for merch

The
Solution

The website was to serve a dual purpose: act as a traditional website for marketing and selling merchandise as well as serve as the back-end for the mobile app – built on Ruby on Rails. Combining these together makes a powerful combination as we were able to easily draw real-time data from the database to make a more cohesive user experience for potential website users.

The mobile app was created through traditional Java and Swift development for Android and iOS, respectively. Mockups for the mobile app were created in Adobe Xd to inform developers on interface design.

Later on in the project, the eCommerce portion of the technology stack was expanded to a separate WooCommerce website powered by WordPress. Custom functions were built to synchronize the WordPress site with the Ruby on Rails back end.

Lastly, a series of low-budget, experimental ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit were run to determine optimal conversion rate throughput for a time deemed necessary to scale advertising efforts.

The
Results

Within 9 months, everything was fully built and resolved. This includes:

$0.11/follower Instagram ad

$0.24/sign-up Facebook ad

800 Followers on social & 250 sign-ups from $100 ad spend

Had a ton of fun. 🎉