Carbon Grove™ is a carbon reduction reminder service. Climate change is a complex problem that affects everyone on the planet. And while not every cause can be affected by individual behavior change, we’re not without options in terms of reducing our carbon footprint. Carbon Grove was built to help you help the planet in your own small way. Sign up for reminders, and we’ll plant a virtual tree (any one of nine different species in three different forests) for you. Each week you’ll receive a reminder. Every time you’ve made progress on your commitments your tree will grow a little bit. If you stick with it for awhile local animals will start to come by your tree and make it their home for a little while.
What people are saying about Carbon Grove
Well, to be quite honest, they’re not saying much of anything quite yet, as we just shipped. But hopefully folks will like it and say some nice things soon. When and if they do, we’ll make sure to quote them right here. Literally, in this spot. Check back often!
Carbon Grove™ was created by Jackson Fish Market. It is one of a series of small beautiful branded software experiences(whitepaper here, index of branded software experiences here) from Jackson Fish.
Sponsorship
We’d like to thank the Microsoft Internet Explorer team for being the inaugural sponsor of Carbon Grove. If you are interested in sponsoring one of our other experiences or in working with the team at Jackson Fish Market to build a new branded interactive consumer experience please check out our sponsorship page or contact: sponsor [at] jacksonfish [dot] com. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Colophon
Many things went into the construction of Carbon Grove. Here are a few:
- Carbon Grove is built using asp.net, Silverlight 2.0, Internet Explorer 7 and 8
- The site is hosted by the folks at SoftLayer
- This is by far the most ambitious application of our own that we’ve built to date. We started in early January and are shipping on Earth Day, April 22, 2008
- We almost called the site “Footprint Forest” but it sounded too cutesy. (Anyone want to buy a domain?)
- For Carbon Grove Jenny chose a painterly water color art style with which to render the trees and landscapes.
- Jenny picked the forests based on their aesthetic and biological diversity. They were also all areas that are threatened by deforestation.
- We used Vue6 to create the 3d models for all nine species of trees. The animals were all drawn by hand.
- Did you know that it takes 26 weeks of completing your commitments to grow your tree to its full size?
- There was originally a cocoon that would show up in the Sumatra forest. We took it out cause it looked weird.
- Jenny was going to remove the black mamba cause she thought it was too scary. There aren’t enough websites that are scary in a good way so we convinced her to leave it in.
- Jenny used the Tarzana typeface from Emigre designed by Zuzana Licko in 1998.
- Our favorite lunch place is still Red Bowls. Bowls of rice and vegetables topped with raw fish (cooked for Walter — he orders the “Seattle”) just don’t go out of style.
- The domain “carbongrove.com” fell victim to Network Solutions sticky fingers. But we moved it out of there before we shipped. They still got our $35, but that’s the last time that will happen (until they come up with their next
scamrevenue generating move). - We’ve been listening to pretty much the same music as we did during Invitastic. But Jenny did allow us to start listening to some Reggae in the office as the weather started to get nice.
- Special thanks to Chris and the chefs at Tavolata in Seattle who made an exception to their no take-out rule and powered us through our last night of development with lots of yummy pasta.
- Over the course of development we were distracted by moving across the hall to new office space (now with actual windows)..