Today we officially launched our first product, Exceptional.
App School 2008
This month, Contrast are taking one lucky idea to App School. We’ll pick an idea submitted by an Irish startup, charity, non-profit or individual and teach it how to be a fully-grown app. We’ll build it in one week and we’ll show everyone how we do it. And, we’ll cover 95% of the cost.
Uncomfortable newspaper brands
Irish newspapers (and their journalists) have long had an uncomfortable relationship with the web. One very interesting aspect of this is how they portray their brands online. While American papers (below) have the confidence to use their actual brand names, Irish papers (above) still feel they need to dissociate the “real” paper from the less “real” online incarnation with an online version of their brand.
Pink for October
We’ve gone pink for the month of October to support the annual, appropriately named, Pink for October campaign to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Anyone else?
One page websites
We offer one page websites as a service. It’s a service we love, because it allows us to do one page really well. We design a unique, usable, beautiful one page site, exclusively for your business. It’s our alternative to the template based offerings that seem to be popular these days.
The path of increasing fidelity
These shots (the first four by Des, the last two by me) were taken throughout the design process of a tiny site we made recently. This is the path we work though for all our projects, increasing the fidelity of our work along the way, allowing the client to provide feedback at the right level. It follows a nice observation made by Kate Rutter over on the Adaptive Path blog recently: “Low fidelity = High-level feedback, High fidelity = detailed/low-level feedback”.
Monitoring Twitter via Campfire
At Contrast, we use Campfire extensively every day to keep in touch, share links, make plans and discuss projects. We also love Twitter, and often use it to have small public conversations viewable by anyone and everyone, but also to share ideas that often originate from discussions that we’ve had in Campfire.
Make it meaningful
I’ve long been a fan of Stephen P. Andersons work, especially his presentations. One diagram that really stuck with me is his User Experience pyramid. I’ve reproduced it here using Omnigraffle, but you can find the original in his Creating Pleasurable Interfaces presentation on slideshare (slide 15).
Flicking the switch
It’s the second you stop thinking about what the problem you’re attempting to solve, and start mindlessly doing what the client wants, just to get the damn project closed. I call it flicking the switch.
- You want your a big red “BUY NOW” button on every page?
Sure. - 15 marketing questions in your contact form?
No problem. - You want your advertising jingle on played on each page?
Abso-fucking-lutely. Howsabout we loop it too?
Long projects go cold
I love good coffee and I love good cafés. When I’ve the time to do so, I’ll spend hours in a café, thinking and writing shite like this. I prefer to order many regular-sized coffees, rather than a few large ones. This is because no matter the size of the coffee, the speed with which I drink it and the rate at which it cools stays the same, which leaves me with an unpleasant drain of cold coffee at the end. The same happens with large projects.