Elite Model Look is a yearly fashion modeling event held by Elite Models Management, an international model management group. Each year hundreds of thousands of models (male and female) compete in local qualifier contents for a chance to represent their country in the world’s final. Elite Model Look finals have been held all over the world and former past contestants include Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Gisele Bundchen.
For the 2009 qualifiers in Korea, the organizers used the agency DoubleGuy to deliver an immersive model viewing and voting experience on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 using the IIS Web Server and Microsoft Silverlight within the browser for a rich user experience.
"We chose Microsoft Windows Server 2008 because it allowed us to deploy our site very quickly," said Lee ChulSung , CEO. "Due to the timing of the competition, we wanted to give the models maximum exposure, and thus we needed the site to be up and running securely and quickly."
Development and Deployment
DoubleGuy used Microsoft Silverlight to build the overall experience.
“We chose Silverlight because it gave us a great way to provide a close up of the models using DeepZoom technology" said Kim HyunJung, lead designer. - Kim HyunJung, Lead Designer”
"Additionally the skills that we had in building server applications using .NET helped us to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the front end."
It took 15 man-days for DoubleGuy to deliver the prototype application, which is hosted at http://eml2009.doubleguy.com/. Users can browse 15 male and 21 female models and choose their favorite.
"The photographers had a very distinct look that they were trying to communicate" said Seo HyungRae, Marketing Manager. "The Silverlight application allowed us to deliver the viewing experience and to provide images that are of much higher resolution than the screen, and give the voters the ability to inspect them closely by zooming in on them" said Jung MinKi, CIO.
"Having a great UX isn’t enough if you don’t have an infrastructure that can serve it reliably" said Suk JunHee, Server Manager. For that reason DoubleGuy chose Windows Server 2008 and IIS as their Web Platform.
"It was a simple choice", said Kim Mingu, Silverlight Developer, "we knew the platform already, and we knew how reliable it was. It allowed us to build a scaleable site that could meet our traffic needs very quickly. We expect our end users to look at many hundreds of very high resolution images, and to be fair to the models we wanted to ensure that the system would be reliable."
Deploying and testing the site on IIS took them 3 days.
Summary
“The Microsoft Web Platform made this possible because of how well the tools, software and services are integrated cleanly. - Lee ChulSung, CEO DoubleGuy”
By using Windows Server 2008, IIS and Silverlight, DoubleGuy were able to deliver the online viewing and voting application for the Korean entrant to the Elite Model Look competition with a very rich and compelling user experience. Development and Deployment of the site to a web audience took only 3 weeks.
