Back in January, Doug let the ... uh ... bear out of the bag, so to speak, with his post about using geometry in design. In it, he showed his design process for the Pointless Bear -- the mascot of Pointless Corp. What's Pointless Corp. you ask? Well, it's neither pointless nor a corporation. But, first, some history.
Ever since we started Viget almost a decade ago, people have often said "you guys have all the talent to build web apps -- designers, developers, marketers -- and you must have ideas. Why don't you launch your own products?" It's a fair question with a simple answer: we don't want to be a product company. Our goal at Viget has always been to be a great consulting company, working with great clients on a wide variety of interesting projects.
Consulting isn't easy. There's a ton of work that goes into all aspects of the business, including traditionally boring things like accounting and operations and interesting things like how you can closely collaborate with clients with methods that are customized enough for their needs but still structured enough that you can count on the results. The standard advice we all give start-ups is to focus. Without focus, a business has no hope. At Viget, our focus has been consulting, and trying to build products would put that focus -- and our success -- at risk.
That's not to say we haven't built our own stuff. Like most web shops, we built our own content management system in 2002 (since phased out). Being open source advocates, we're constantly contributing code to the community. When we have time between client projects, we're always playing with new technologies and ideas in one way or another. Even with all that, we felt that we could be more effective with our downtime, learn more from our experiences, and become better consultants providing more value to our clients if we had a more structured approach to internal projects.
Enter Pointless Corp.
Pointless Corp. is a way for our teams to rally around an idea and work together to launch a web app independent of client work. It's not an original concept, but I think we have a slightly different take on the approach.
Continue reading "The Point of Pointless Corp."
Viget's Durham office facilitates Refresh the Triangle each month, and if you're local to the area you should have been in attendance last night. Robbie Allen, sole founder and CEO of the StatSheet Network, spoke about his experience running a web startup in the Triangle area. Here are my top three highlights from the talk and why the meeting was one of our best yet.
Highlights from the talk:
- Don't believe the hype! People like to say that 8 or 9 out of 10 businesses fail, but Robbie called that a myth. According to the Small Business Association, 50% of businesses survive four or more years. Take heart!
- Execution trumps ideas. Having an idea is easy, executing is hard. Robbie's business, StatSheet, is one of those ideas that lots of people claim to have had long ago. Robbie's success is, of course, based on his hard work, not having some perfect idea that no one has had before.
- Competition is good. Robbie shared stories about talking to ESPN
and the like about what he has built to date. Why share ideas with
potential competitors? The way he sees it, he can only benefit from
their efforts to copy what he has already done or their interest in
beating out another competitor by building off the work he has in place.
Why the meeting was one of our best yet:
Continue reading "Refresh Recap: Myths, Wisdom, and Beer"
Everyone knows the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) for free TV, especially their top-notch kids programming. Many of us grew up watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. What you may not know (if you aren't a teacher) is that every single PBS show is a potential goldmine for education resources and many series have accompanying lesson plans and interactives. Aside from being a great national media organization, PBS has a long-standing reputation in the education community as a provider of high-quality teaching resources and services.
In addition to program-related content, PBS Education offers professional development courses and communities along with independent national services like PBS Kids Island. The PBS Teachers web site faces the challenge of helping PreK-12 educators navigate these rich resources - across all PBS program and station sites - to find just what they need for their current lessons or professional development needs.
While a primary goal of the redesign was to establish a consistent browsing experience that could scale as new
resources and services were added, PBS Teachers also needed a fresh look to fit in
with the new PBS brand strategy. Viget had the great privilege of
working with the good folks over at
PBS Education to tackle this redesign, and we're pleased to announce
the launch of the new PBS Teachers site!
This year, the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, an organization in which several Viget folks are actively involved, expanded the interactive side of their Annual Show. We're not really into the award scene here at Viget, but we're big supporters of ADCMW's recent emphasis on the DC web community, and were excited to be involved.
Four pieces of our work were selected for inclusion in the show, the most of any interactive agency:
Saturday night, three of us went down to the National Press Club to view the show, which included some really great work from a lot of area agencies, and a great dinner with other designers who had work in the show. We also took home a Silver Lightbulb award for SpeakerRate, the only such award to go to an interactive work, which was a welcome surprise.
Also, separate congratulations to Viget designer Samantha Warren and friend-of-the-family Ali Felski for having their wonderful personal sites win a spot in the exhibit as well.
Thanks to the Art Directors Club for hosting the event and to the panel of great judges on the interactive side (Dan Mall, Leslie Jensen-Inman, and Ian Coyle) for participating. We're looking forward to watching and helping ADCMW grow to become an integral part of DC's web community.
You might know that KaBOOM! is a non-profit organization dedicated to building playgrounds. You might not realize, however, how much emphasis KaBOOM! puts on the process by which the playground is built. KaBOOM! believes that bringing diverse community members into a collaborative team is as important as the resulting playground itself.
With that in mind, when we were hired to create their new Project Planner tool, we felt Viget had the chance to contribute to the core of KaBOOM's mission of empowering communities. The tool promotes collaboration and communication among everyone involved in a playground project.
The Project Planner allows KaBOOM! members to start or join a project, view recent project activity, keep a team journal, post photos and files, and have discussions with other team members. Team leaders also have "mile markers" that outline incremental project goals to keep the build process on track. KaBOOM! also wanted the application to help motivate its members to participate through the "builder central" section, which highlights content across all projects. Users can post questions and answers, as well as browse and reply to feedback requests and progress reports. There is even a widget available for each project which participants can grab and display on Facebook, MySpace, or their own web site or blog, hopefully drumming up financial support as well as community interest.
The main challenges for us were integration (KaBOOM! has an
existing web presence and social network, an established design and brand, and multiple external
applications) and a tight 8-week schedule! We are pleased to say that we met our goals (our application launched last Friday), and we feel the end product hits the mark.
Is it cheesy to say that we enjoyed the process of working with KaBOOM! as much as we enjoy seeing the Project Planner in its final state? It might be; but it's true! They are really onto something with their emphasis on collaboration and team building. We're hoping our first "achieveable win" (to borrow from their mission statement) will lead to more opportunities to work together.
Check out the Build a Playspace tool Viget created and KaBOOM!'s mission. And why not join a project or encourage someone on an existing project while you're at it?
I should start off by admitting that I'm a philologist -- a lover of languages. Languages have always been a curiosity and a passion of mine. I earned a degree in International Business in large part because it required fluency in another language as one vital component (I chose French). I've studied German, Spanish, and Russian all for fun and to gain at least tourist-level proficiency. My latest challenge: Arabic.
Arabic is the first right-to-left (RTL) language that I've attempted and as I surf more and more Arabic-language web sites, I'm able to better appreciate and understand some of the design challenges one must take into consideration. A couple years ago, Viget designed its first web site for an RTL language -- Persian, which uses a modified version of the Arabic alphabet -- and it was a big learning curve for our team at the time.
To jump-start you on some of the basics when designing web sites for RTL languages, I've interviewed some of our team members who worked on the Persian project (Kara and Jim), as well as added some points I've picked up along the way:
- Character Set. You’ll need the Middle East version of Photoshop (which offers bi-directional text flow, the Western version does not) in order to create any text graphics. While you may be able to type in characters if you just install the fonts, they won’t be connected to each other correctly and will be illegible (cutting and pasting text also does not work as the text will flip around). You will also need to specify the language (fa), character set (UTF-8), and text direction (rtl) within your page code:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="rtl" xml:lang="fa" lang="fa"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> - Dates. On Persian sites, at least, you’ll need to add a little script to convert dates from the Gregorian calendar to the Persian calendar.
- Layout. Users will naturally be looking at the site from right-to-left. That's how all words and sentences are written, so your horizontal navigation should start on the right. Utility navigation, typically found in the top right portion of the screen in English, is usually placed in the top left of the page instead. Vertical scroll bars belong on the left side of the browser window instead of the right. Search boxes with "go" buttons will have the active buttons to the left of the search field. Dropdown menus will drop from the left corner and display choices listed in right-aligned format. Arrows and similar icons should be flipped horizontally. Thumbnail images should appear on the right, etc. It may be helpful to think of the site as a mirror-image of a site you'd lay out in English.
- Flash/JavaScript. Tickers and fly-in text should be set from left-to-right to allow proper reading, just as the reverse is true in English.
- Captcha. Even on all-Arabic sites, I've seen the English Captcha tool integrated into the site.
- URLs. You have two choices when deciding on which URLs to use: transliteration or English text. After researching other sites, our team chose English text URLs because they appeared to be the convention.
- Font Size. When we included larger font sizes in our designs to promote content hierarchy, native speakers reacted poorly, noting that the fonts looked ugly when they were too large. We ended up knocking down most of our headers several points.
- RTL vs. LTR in CSS. Specify “direction: rtl;” for all right-to-left elements. We found that the bulleted lists were a bit tricky, but got the hang of it eventually. Telephone numbers, email addresses, and any other Roman text should still be presented left-to-right, so you’ll need to call those out as well.
- Content Management. ExpressionEngine allowed us to specify when a text entry field was left-to-right or right-to-left, which was very necessary, so that’s something to consider if you’re evaluating CMS solutions.
Good luck with your own RTL web sites! Shokran.
When we first heard the news that Ficlets was closing shop, we were as disappointed as the tens of thousands of flash fiction writers who frequented the site. After all, a site where passionate writers can add new beginnings, endings, and alternative takes to stories started by others is a great example of what makes the web so powerful. So when Jason Garber and Kevin Lawver came to us with the idea of breathing life into a similar idea, of course we were interested in helping out.
Being that Jason and Kevin are both talented developers, they didn’t need help in that regard. More, they were looking for a design for their new endeavor -- dubbed “Ficly.” Our talented designers quickly drew up mood boards and branding concepts to brainstorm some different ideas stylistically. Shortly thereafter, we jumped right into producing detailed compositions to bring the ideas to life.
We’re thrilled to have been a part of this, and it was especially fun to work with people who we’ve met in the web development community over the years. Take a look at the final results, and while you’re at it, join the Ficly community and start a story of your own.
Over the weekend, Ficly launched.
Brian will be traveling to Prague next week to discuss Viget's work with Choice Hotels International at their annual European convention. He'll co-present a series of workshops with Jeff Hickey, Choice's Director of International IT, sharing the results of the extensive research and testing that went into the redesign effort our team has worked on since late last year.
Continue reading "Brian Speaking in Prague, Sharing Work with Choice Hotels"
When our neighbors at the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation talked to us about their annual blues festival in June, we were excited to help them become the premiere blues festival in the Washington, DC, region. So we helped them on a pro-bono basis to launch a new web site promoting their John Jackson Blues Festival.
"We support the City of Falls Church community, and our being on the same block as the historic Tinner Hill made this an ideal project for us," President Andy said. "We're excited to be involved."
Plus, we gave them a brand new presence for their foundation web site to represent the important community, educational, and cultural work their committed to doing.
Said THHF's Nikki Henderson,
Working with Viget was a wonderful experience. They are so up-to-date it was mind boggling, yet they are so helpful -- especially to someone who is 'technology challenged.' They make it a point to avoid industy jargon and explain every step in understandable terms. The company is professional, prompt, and personable. All of them were easy to get along with and a joy to work with.
Awww, shucks. Thanks, Nikki!
Stay tuned to see if our own Owen Shifflett decides to be a part of the blues festivities. (He's got a guitar and an open invite....)
