António Costa

Founding member of Cardboard & VR team at Google.
Launched Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer at Google I/O 2014.
Launched v2 Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer and announced Google Expeditions education pilot program at Google I/O 2015.
Launched Google Expeditions.

After 2 years at Google X and Project Wingman/Glass I have now moved on to Google Research, joining the Machine Perception group, team Airbender.

After about 8 years freelancing, I decided to accept Google's offer to join the Google [x] team in California, and have thus relocated to San Francisco.

This obviously means I will be putting all my freelance activity on hold, and for a period still to be defined. If we have worked together at some point, thank you very much for that opportunity, and I hope can have more in the future.

Donate 1/8 is a cross media campaign created for Pink Ribbon.

The goal is to support Pink Ribbon in raising funds and build awareness around the alarming statistic that 1 out of 8 women in holland will develop a form of breast cancer at some point in their life.

Via print, TV, radio, online PR, etc, people are directed to the campaign site, where they can easily create a project of their own, share it, gather support, and through the process, raise money.

Art direction, visual and interaction design with Tribal DDB for Pink Ribbon.

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Gucci Guilty ad campaign stars Chris Evans and Evan Rachel Wood, in two Frank Miller directed commercials. The spots soundtrack features a remixed version of Depeche Mode's classic tune 'Strange Love', and a Sin City inspired comic book influenced style. Not surprising as he made his start as a comic book artist with an acclaimed dark and sexy style.

To promote the intense line of gucci guilty fragrances, the campaign was rolled out online with a new style on youtube and facebook, where an viral app was created, that allows users to set each others pictures on fire.

Art direction, visual and interaction design with Tribal DDB for Gucci.

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Follow-up project to the Cannes Grand Prix-winning 'Carousel'. Collaboration with DDB London, Tribal DDB Amsterdam, Ridley Scott Associates, Unit9 and MediaMonks on the Parallel lines campaign for Philips. Five short films commissioned from RSA will premiere in a special online media player that recreates the effect of its Ambilight TV technology.

Philips started the online film premiere project by asking RSA’s directors to submit treatments for a short film in a genre of their choice. It received 45 treatments and picked five, which were shot on location in Uruguay, London, Moscow, China and South Africa. The project will launch April 8th 2010.

Read the article on Brandrepublic or Contagious. Join the competition on YouTube or talk about it on Facebook

Art direction, visual and interaction design (shared) with Tribal DDB and DDB London for Philips.

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Advice module for Nivea sun, along with product advisor.

Visual and interaction design with Blast Radius for Nivea.

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Personal project, born out of the frustration of tracking new music on different weblogs. FeedBleed is an RSS aggregator and search engine for MP3 webblogs. It continuously archives and indexes posts from weblogs that offer music downloads via file sharing websites. Made with codeigniter and powered by sphinx search. Go get some new tunes and don't forget to submit your favorite feeds.

Concept, design and code by myself for everyone and anyone.

Is a person’s network of friends global enough to circle the planet in 80 days?

With the objective to promote Volvo’s new DRIVe range of fuel efficient cars within a social network while supporting Volvo’s new campaign line "There’s More To Life Than A Volvo.", Volvo’s DRIVe Around The World game challenged people to find out how well connected they really are.

Players had to virtually drive their C30 DRIVe to a friend who lives as close to 1,333km away as possible; that’s the distance the thrifty car makes on just one tank of fuel. Then, the car is passed on from friend to friend, moving from country to country, until it makes its way around the world. And, in the true spirit of adventure, we gave people only 80 days to try.

To reinforce the impressive environmental credentials of the DRIVe range, Volvo donated €15,000 in the winning team’s name to a wind farm project in Izmir, Turkey and, for everyone who played, Volvo additionally offset 99g of CO2. So the more people played, the better it was for everyone.

Running on Facebook from November 16, 2009 to February 4, 2010, DRIVe Around The World was a truly unique social experiment. With almost 600,000 views of an animated trailer on over 500 sites around the world, the game got off to a racing start. 134,000 people downloaded the application, making DRIVe Around The World the only branded application to reach the top 20 most popular Facebook applications during its campaign. In all, 63,000 teams made up of friends-of-friends experienced the benefits of the DRIVe range in a uniquely engaging way, working together to win a prize that benefits the environment and ultimately, brought to life Volvo’s new campaign line: "There’s More To Life Than A Volvo".

Social application visual and interaction design with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Europe's largest operator of private jets, NetJets Europe, allows individuals to partially invest in a jet.

New website is designed to showcase the extensive choice across the fleet of 800 planes accessible through the NetJets programmes, explore the network of nearly 1,000 European airports where NetJets flies and allow the visitor to calculate total journey time and see how this compares to commercial airlines.

Visitors can also view the 10 aircraft types in the NetJets Europe fleet and sort them to match their exact requirements, filtering by factors such as range (distance or hours), speed, passenger and luggage capacity and fleet size.

The site also contains a Virtual Walk-Through section where visitors can explore exactly what each aircraft cabin looks like from the inside, with a 360 degree view from nose to tail.

Visual and interaction design and animation with AKQA for NetJets.

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YoungWorks is an Amsterdam agency for knowledge, strategy and creation, specialized in youth communication.

I was involved in their house style definition and complete website design, where the objective was to take advantage of their existing photography portfolio, while keeping the website interface completely encapsulated within a simple core statement text.

Style and visual design with and for YoungWorks.

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Personal project, born out of necessity for such a service. mmmmail! is a completely anonymous and free Email-to-RSS service/app. All mailboxes/addresses are thus public and disposable! Give it a try!

Concept, design and code by myself for everyone and anyone.

Brand utility/online tool for Dutch beer brand Amstel, named Teamlink. It's an application designed for (Dutch) amateur football players, in support of their team and weekly matches. It features official local competition details as fixtures, tables and results, but also non-official information uploaded by the players themselves. The app can be embedded within social media or at the team's website, which makes it very accessible with high viral potential. Combined with a football minded nation (over 1 million amateur football players on 15 million people), this can potentially represent a huge success.

Tool interaction and visual design with 2009 Amsterdam (currently Lab1111) for Amstel.

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What is online content worth printing? And how would you translate it to a single sheet of paper? Personal experimental project for prnt scrn magazine issue #000000, Spam Cloud generates a "tag" cloud from a Gmail spam feed.

A take on tag clouds, the role of email and internet culture in general. Described by some as the "mullet of the internet", a tag cloud is a visualization of word frequency on given text content, used typically to describe the content of a web site.

Mash up of PHP, SimplePie, TextDB and jQuery. Released open source under GNU General Public License. Live demo here.

Concept, design and code by myself for prnt scrn magazine + everyone and anyone.

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New London aims to promote the UK capital to a cool French audience...

Sponsored by Eurostar and created by ad agency Sid Lee, New London shows Jarvis completing a large mural artwork on the site. Visitors can view videos of different stages of completion, explore a augmented reality model of the artwork, while a clock at the bottom of the screen shows how long he has been at work.

Alongside this insight into Jarvis' working practice is a set of listings that reveal the site's ultimate purpose: to get French creative types to visit London. The listings include bars, restaurants, shops and galleries, all of which will appeal to a hip creative audience.

Concept, visual and interaction design with Sid Lee for Eurostar.

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To build a long-term platform within IKEA's theme "Design your own life" we let proud IKEA customers do the advertising in a user generated IKEA catalogue.

The catalogue provides a stage where they can show and share their own IKEA creations. With more than 500.000 website visits and over than 4700 uploaded bedrooms and kitchens, the catalogue has become the biggest IKEA showroom online and now has chapters for each room in the house.

IKEA 'Open Kitchen', provided an initial stage for proud kitchen owners, who were invited to open up their IKEA kitchen to the public. IKEA also inviteed the rest of The Netherlands to have a peek in this real life virtual catalogue.

On a second stage the focus was then shifted to an even more exciting part of the house: the bedroom. In this latest campaign stage for IKEA, "Bedroom Secrets" are revealed. Bedroom photos and stories can be uploaded - granting visitors a glance of other people bedrooms. Live webcams across the country and one in Amsterdam IKEA store, give everybody a 24/7 live view on how people deign their own bedroom.

The campaigns were supported by TV and cinema commercials, outdoor, radio, online advertising, online seeding, instore communication and direct mailing. Only two days after going live visitors could already play peeping tom on over 1800 kitchens.

Visual and interaction design with Lemz for IKEA.

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Website for interactive agency Tribal DDB Amsterdam.

Visual and interaction design with and for Tribal DDB Amsterdam.

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Aurea is an advanced flatpanel TV that uses light to enhance the action on screen. The result is a more immersive and emotional television viewing experience.

The philips consumer website demonstrates this ambilight effect, by recreating the television's lighting effect in Flash. I was involved in the design of diverse Aurea online creative and the ambilight flash player.

Visual and interaction design with Tribal DDB for Philips.

An interactive adventure starring the Volvo Ocean Race Edition cars. Can you get the rescue crew in the harbor within 4 minutes?

Visual and interaction design and animation with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Until the New Volvo XC60 hits the markets at the end of 2008, six distinctive stories are told about a beautiful car made by a beautiful people from a beautiful land. In a place called Löv you can witness the launch of a beautiful Swedish model.

Visual and interaction design and animation with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Volkwagen Passat CC dutch launch campaign website. Website complements direct marketing communication, and is intended to highlight the key features of the car, while allowing registration for a test drive.

Visual and interaction design, animation and partial development with Achtung for Volkswagen.

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Beck’s: Germany’s biggest beer brewer. Definition of the online identity and content for Beck's global.

Visual and interaction design and animation with Euro RSCG 4D for Beck's global.

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Viral campaign for dutch bank Rabobank, to promote their mobile phone service. Based on the dutch Sinterklaas tradition, the user could place a shoe and some food (for Sinterklaas' horse.. of course!) by the fireplace. By returning to the website the following day he could collect his prize, which ranged from coupons to mobile phones and bluetooth headsets.

Visual and interaction design, animation and partial development with Euro RSCG 4D for Rabobank.

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I was involved in the early concept visualization and pitch work that led up to the current Nike Footbal Bootcamp. Since the specific concepts and designs worked on have never been made public and available online, they cannot be displayed.

Bootcamp is a pre-season training programme designed by pro coaches to turn you into a high performance footballer. It’s the fastest route to a dominating football body. It’s weekly video drills and measurable stats.

Visual design and animation with AKQA for Nike.

Dutch market online campaign for Douwe Egberts Senseo Coffee, where female visitors could win a dream date with one of three dutch celebrities.

Visitors could take an online test to find out with which one of the three men they were most compatible with. Winners were picked based on submission of pictures and a letter to their dream date. Submissions from all visitors were available to everyone on the site. 4000 submissions and 225.000 visitors in 3 months turned this campaign into a success, when taking into consideration the specific target group.

Visual and interaction design with LBi Lost Boys for Douwe Egberts/Sara Lee

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Volvo Flexifuel, fuel up naturally online campaign, presenting Volvo's new alternative fuel technology. Users can explore how to reduce CO2 emissions, how biomass fuel is produced, read about E85, the fuel used in flexifuel engines, the range of greeen cars and read more about Volvo's heritage in sustainable mobility

Visual and interaction design and prototyping with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Why make a website for a printer if you can use the multifunction printer to make the website? The Canon PIXMA site was created from paper cut-outs and folded models, all printed out by the very machine being advertised.

A ton of handicraft with a twist of stop-motion animation bring these imaginative scenes to life. There plenty to explore, as many of the site elements interactively illustrate the creative possibilities of this multifunction printer

Exceptionally, the creative concepting for the PIXMA website drove the print element of this integrated campaign.

Visual and interaction design with Mediacatalyst for Canon Europe.

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Partnering with Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End Volvo organizes a global treasure hunt. The campaign shows a treasure chest filled with gold and a key to a Volvo XC90 sunk on the ocean floor: find it and it's yours.

Having picked up a pirate chart at your Volvo dealership, The Hunt continues online. Hopping from website to website a 4-week journey towards World's End unfolds. Meet the mapmaker and hear his secrets, find your way out of a Persian maze and learn to speak Sentinelese. Fold your Pirate Chart to find matching numbers, wander around an ice desert and see what the End of the World looks like.

The increasing difficulty of the puzzles urges participants to seek assistance from each other resulting in a multitude of user-generated forums and blogs where The Hunt is discussed extensively.

The Hunt ran in 22 countries across North America, Europe and Asia.

Visual, interaction and functional design with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Playing with "A Product of Free Will" tagline, the C30 website features an incredibly interactive box (the ultimate product). But visitors soon discover this aint no boring Volvo box.

Initially, teasing with peephole previews, we popped the lid for the Paris Motor Show so visitors could unbox their personally-styled C30. Finally, celebrating its arrival in Volvo showrooms, the C30 bursts free of the box; revealing games, gadgets and downloadable eye-candy. And, by rating all 16 eye-popping TV commercials, each visitor is free to answer the question: "What do you think?"

Visual and interaction design and animation with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Recruitment campaign for air traffic controllers. An online tour gave potential candidates insight into the fascinating world of Dutch air traffic. The visitors could also test their skills through several games.

Visual and interactive design and animation (partial) with Euro RSCG 4D for Air Traffic Control the Netherlands

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Small personal website for drummer, percussionist and composer Srdjan Ivanovic. Intended as showcase of music and curriculum.

Concept, photography, visual and interactive design, animation and programming for Srdjan Ivanovic.

Sponsoring Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Volvo organizes a global treasure hunt. A television commercial shows a unique Volvo XC90 being buried: find it and it's yours.

Having picked up a treasure map at your dealership, The Hunt continues online. Hopping from website to website a 30-day journey across the Seven Seas unfolds. Unravel an old man's tale on Madeira, match broken china off Africa's coast, decipher Maya murals on Cozumel and be the first to return in Port Royal harbor. The increasing difficulty of the puzzles urges participants to seek assistance from each other resulting in a multitude of user-generated forums and blogs.

Seven finalists are flown to an island in the Bahamas for the final event: the recovery of the buried car.

Visual, interaction and functional design with Euro RSCG 4D for Volvo Cars.

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Lead visual, interaction and functional design, animation and partial development with and for Media Catalyst.

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Nokia’s groundbreaking 20 Lives was a rich multimedia event enabling more than 750 000 participants in 21 European countries to live a day in the life of 20 fictional inter-connected characters. Combining SMS messaging, widescreen interactive video and online gaming, 20 Lives is a revolutionary step in digital storytelling. Produced by a team of more than 30 writers, developers, testers, producers and designers.

Lead visual, interaction and functional design, animation and partial development with Euro RSCG 4D for Nokia.

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Online re-creation for the dutch National Postcode Lottery of the original TV show, where a hidden guest celebrity's identity would have to be guessed by contestants who asked questions (only to be answered with YES or NO). Multiplayer game running daily at 4 pm. Winners could pick a prize from a carrousel of prizes with varying values.

Visual and interaction design, animation and partial programming with Euro RSCG 4D for Nationale Postcode Loterij

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