Give And Take: Rails Rumble 2009
Last Friday, I joined Tony, Patrick, and Rob in the conference room here at Viget for the kickoff of Rails Rumble 2009. It started a long (yet, very short) weekend of frantic coding, last-minute fixes, and awesome breakthroughs. The Rails Rumble rules (all files must be created within 48 hours) have an element of drama built in, and even while detached from the development process I had my share of terrible and great moments before the 8pm Sunday deadline.
In 2008, our team (with Nick Schlueter in place of Tony) took home second place with Qflip, a little Netflix app that still sees some action today. Qflip came out of the same set of parameters we used for this year's idea:
- No login/pass — Rumble judges and users need to go through 150+ apps, don't make them create logins to remember. Logins also add complexity — is there a "Remember me" checkbox? What if I lose/change my password? What if I enter my email wrong? Huge pain.
- Instant results — Don't make users wait until they've completed ten actions before the app starts to pay off. The first action a user takes should have value.
- No friends required — Some apps are at their best when your buddies are already using them. Rails Rumble is not a great place for these — users need to be able to enjoy RR apps without large, existing communities.
Out of these simple rules (and an idea from Pat) came Append, a way to create a content-rich blog through Twitter. Tweet @ppend, and we'll figure out if you tweeted a link, a quote, a picture, a video, etc, and do our best to make it into a cool post with comments, an RSS feed, a yourname.ppend.to address, the whole deal. It's a fast way to share cool stuff from anywhere at any time, without cluttering your Twitter stream or bothering with some new interface.
Rails Rumble voting starts tonight and ends Saturday, August 29, so if you're interested in checking out all the apps and voting, get started!
The biggest difference between Append and Qflip for me was the conceptual clarity (or lack thereof). Qflip is a simple idea that takes a few words to explain, and its potential use becomes immediately apparent. Append is more like Twitter itself - the first time you hear about it, it might take a minute or two before you can imagine what you actually want to do with it. In the end, this became a focal point of our post-launch discussion (and quick tutorial screencast Pat put together), which I will now share with you in the form of:
Git: A Designer’s Perspective
Let me start by saying I'm not one of those super tech-minded designers who loves to dive into new programs. Especially when those programs involve heavy use of the command line and every tutorial written about them is so technical it might as well be in another language. I was happily tooling along using Tortoise SVN through VMWare, slooooowwwwwly moving through my SVN checkouts without much complaint. And then two of our developers, David and Ben, pulled me aside one day and told me that instead of using SVN, I'd be using Git for our next big project. I remember sitting in Ben's office thinking, "Crap... what kind of learning curve does this thing come with?" I barely knew what I was doing with version control in SVN, and here I was faced with the prospect of a new (and arguably less n00b-friendly) program and process.
Perspectives: Mood Boards, Love ‘em or Hate ‘em (plus a panel)
Sample mood board from Viget Labs. Embiggen
To mood board or not to mood board. Is that the question? Yes. At least amongst those of us that have ever used them as a means to jump start the design process. Personally, I've come to love mood boards as a tool in the web designer's design process tool kit. Are they always necessary? Not in my opinion. But I have found them to be quite useful when it comes to starting a project quickly and offering some stylistic options from which to pull from as goals and structure are being clarified. We use them quite often at Viget Labs and I'm seeing an increasing interest (or sometimes disgust) with their utility. With this post I wanted to share some thoughts on mood boards both for and against them.
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Can a Website Design Be Inspired by a Chair? This One Was
Inspiration can find a designer in many unique and wonderful ways. Often, web designers go out seeking inspiration, browsing galleries online and looking at other websites, but in the case of a site redesign for Choice Hotels Scandinavia, I found my inspiration in a chair.
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Design Share: Now With 100% More Website
Our very own event series, Design Share, now has a website of its own. We needed somewhere to advertise upcoming events in the series, as well as archive videos and photos from the past two Design Share events.
Over the summer I've been chipping away at the project with Tumblr. This was a great chance to try out Tumblr and see what it could do since a site for Design Share needed to be simple, as well as easy for anyone to use and update, but it needed to still handle lots of videos and photos.
While building Design Share's site I learned that there are some benefits to using Tumblr and a couple snags.
Google Maps jQuery Plugin with ExpressionEngine
Yesterday Carolyn blogged about a site we did for NCGives. One of their requests was to have the ability to add locations to an ExpressionEngine weblog and have them display on a Google Map. Seemed easy enough until I realized we also had to make external map controls, display content both in the map bubble and on the page, color code the map points, and auto zoom/center the map. I looked around for existing solutions, such as the SL Google Map Extension, but nothing I found did exactly what our client was requesting. I knew that one of our developers, Brian Landau, had experience with Google Maps, so I started talking to him about what we could do.
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Breaking down the process: Designing LegalRiver.com
One of my favorite things about working at Viget is the opportunity to work with promising startups. Our recent engagement with Legal River is a great example of how a unique working relationship can make the most of small startup budgets. Viget helped establish a look and feel for their website, https://www.legalriver.com, a marketplace that helps connect small business owners with attorneys.
The guys at LegalRiver didn't have the budget for a blue-sky solution, but they did have the smarts to invest in the basics. What made this project unique is that I only designed one page. The Legal River team is using that design as a roadmap for the rest of the site. They also did all of the development in-house. While it would have been great to design more of the site, we were able to give them a solid foundation to work with.
Learn more about our process and check out the Before and After screenshots after the jump to see how well this approach worked.
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2009