Radarboy Media Lab
An early digital studio with a cult following, a Loerie Grand Prix and one of the top Flash sites in the world.
Radarboy Media Lab was the studio I co-founded in Cape Town after leaving Tinderbox at the height of the first digital boom. We were interested less in building corporate brochureware than in treating new media as a cultural material to be experimented with, bent and misused in interesting ways.
One of the first projects was Capsule 01, an experimental free magazine distributed on a 1.44MB floppy disk. It won two Gold Loeries and an Invision Award in San Francisco, and helped establish Radarboy as a studio with a distinctive, irreverent point of view.
Radarboy.com was voted one of the top 10 Flash sites in the world, the agency developed a cult following, and by its second year Radarboy Media Lab was recognised as one of the top 10 ad agencies in South Africa, the only digital shop on the list.
The client roster included Lucky Strike, Independent Newspapers, MWeb, Minolta, Thawte and Alexander Forbes. More important than the client list was the method: content before content was a thing, concept before format, and technology used to create new behaviour rather than decorate existing advertising.