Every member of our team has contributed in one way or another to this campaign. A big high five goes out to our entire team for their hard work.  This project was completed with the City of Ottawa, and representatives from Ottawa’s eight business improvement areas.

Campaign Elements:

• Print (Newspaper, Buses & Bus Shelters)
• Radio
• Filming & Production of the neighbourhood walk through videos
• Social Media campaign  including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and others.
• Public Relations support
• Design and Development of the pictureitdowntown.ca.
• Contest Support & Analytics

Many 76designer’s have already shared photos of the city we live in and love.  So come on Ottawans, get out and picture it downtown.

Most of the 76design’ers are going to be in the house that night. It will also be our second time demoing an application. Some of you may remember our last demo: Friendsroll and Toplinks — two wordpress plugins that we developed here at 76design. When we did that demo, someone raised the question of how we’d make money with these plugins. The answer was kind of anti-climactic: we didn’t plan to make any money from them! We developed the plugins with the goal of exploration and hopefully coming up with something to give back to the community. Looking back at it, I think we can consider the plugins a successful experiment: we learned something, put it out there for the community to use at will, and left it at that.

For Monday’s democamp, we have something new in store. Again, it’s not designed to make money in any way, it’s an experiment and part of our 76 skunkworks activities. I think it will make for a fun demo and might end up being something people want to use.

So, come on out to demo camp on Monday. You can even vote for who should MC the event!

Our skunkworks Twitter applications are complete!  Over the past eight Friday afternoons our team has been working feverishly on experimental design & development projects using the Twitter API.  Why?  To learn and explore!  The web is a constantly changing landscape, and to be on top of our game it is necessary to research and explore. Not to mention, we are a creative and ingenious bunch who crave experimental projects to work on.

Skunk works or skunkworks is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.
- Skunkworks definition on Wikipedia

76design’s Skunkworks Recipe:

76design donates time each week (usually Friday afternoon), and the team donates an open mind, fresh creative ideas, energy, and finally a working demo. The projects are intended to encourage exploration, therefore the skunkworks recipe itself is iterative and malleable. Through skunkworks we will be testing new approaches to web dev with the hope of integrating the findings into our daily work. That said, the following was a guideline for our first project, but we expect this recipe to change over time.

Week 0: Preparation of project Theme & Constraints
Constraint breeds design. Therefore we present the team with a challenge while leaving plenty of room for creativity. The challenge also centers the  experimentation around a particular area of interest. For this project the Theme was Twitter, and the main constraint was the web application had to use the Twitter API.

Week 1: Brainstorming & Team Selection
The team gathered for a single large brainstorming session where everyone threw ideas at the whiteboard.  This generated a large quantity of ideas, and encouraged the team to be creative, critical, constructive, and considerate.  Following the brainstorm we broke into teams of 2 and selected the concepts we wanted to experiment with for the next few weeks.

Week 2: Research, Concept Refinement & Work plan
Now that the team has had a full week with their concept, they refine it into a concrete plan. Week 2 is all about editing  the ideas & features down into a reasonable plan which can actually be accomplished within the short time line. This exercise involves documenting each task’s level of effort and priority. At the end of the project the teams are asked to compare the outcome to their initial plan.

Week 3, 4, & 5: Design, Code & Test
These weeks are all dedicated to designing and coding the project. The teams check in briefly every week to discuss their progress and help each other with challenges. Inevitably, unforeseen issues or fresh ideas will cause the plans to change, therefore the teams are encouraged to work iteratively using agile methodologies. Teams are graded on their ability to define project scope and manage scope change.

Week 6: Present working demo to the entire team
The projects are now ready for a functional demonstration, and everyone gathers in the boardroom for a short 5 minute presentation and Q&A period for each project.

Week 7: Followup
The teams will write a reflective blog post about their project which includes an overview, the challenges faced, the outcome, and the potential next steps for their project.  Teams will also share the insights they gained from the skunkworks experience.  Furthermore, teams will post relevant information to our company wiki for future use. The Teams are free to continue the projects if they wish, or publish them online as they are.

So stay tuned. The first round of skunkworks twitter applications are complete and we will be posting the team’s project followups over the next week or so.

I filled a small white bowl from our kitchen with jujubes and placed it at the end of my desk. I felt good about it. As people started coming into my office, they would notice the candy, be pleasantly surprised and indulge.  Making them happy, made me even happier and gave me incentive to continue to fill up my bowl (at this point, the bowl was being emptied after about 5 – 6 hours).

People were showing up in my office for no apparent reason, making up all kinds of excuses to be there, all the while, feeding like vultures from the bowl.  In true Pavlovian fashion, the mere sound of a bag opening or treats filling up the bowl, would create a response from the team (at this point the bowl was being emptied after about 2 – 3 hours).

The happier people were, the more excited I was to go out of my way to get more rubbery-textured confectioneries into that bowl the next day. Every day I would fill the bowl with something different – jujubes, pistachios, Clodhoppers, chocolate covered almonds, swedish berries, M&M’s (by the time the M&M’s hit the bowl, it took 20 minutes to empty).

Then, somewhere between the chocolate covered almonds and swedish berries, something started to happen. People started verbalizing preferences and complaining. Several “facts” about free candy and nuts began to emerge; apparently pistachios are “too much work” and chocolate covered almonds are “boring”. The more complaints I received, the less incentive I felt to fill up that stupid little white bowl.

As I stopped filling it up, the expectation for the candy became apparent. People were actually getting upset that there wasn’t anything in the bowl.

“Oh, the bowl is empty again?”
“Where the f&*% is the candy??”
“I’m not very happy about this empty candy bowl situation.”

In hopes of cutting down on the comments, I ended up taking the bowl out of my office altogether.

So, my theory is this – the candy bowl is just like life:

Unexpected pleasantries = satisfaction
Expected pleasantries = dissatisfaction

So the next time life hands you a gummie bear, just eat the friggin’ thing and be happy!

If we celebrate this much for 8000, I can’t imagine what we will do when we reach 10,000.  Let the countdown begin!

Well we wondered. We decided to take the first step towards answering that question with the first ever 76design Aural Design Poster showdown.

here is a snippet of the original project brief

“Take a Song, Listen to it, Design!…” “…Pitcher of booze for non-delivery is standard penalty.”

But where to begin? What song would provide suitable poster fodder? Well, according to one Steve Lounsbury, Brain of J by Pearl Jam would do the trick. And by golly – I dare say he was right. Well done Steve old chum.

Sure, its a “design” project…but this project was not meant for designers alone. No, this project was for all. Designers, developers, account managers, and project managers alike. With only a few abstaining from participation (and 1 poor sap that failed to meet the 2 week deadline) it was a full team endeavour. Fun? Probably. The results? You be the judge.

[View with PicLens]

And 2 of our developers took the opportunity to create their submissions in processing – 1 of whom also decided to give us a glimpse at “the making of”. Enjoy.

You get it the drift. Today is Super Sunday, average joes across the Americas and elsewhere, will don their “colours”, slaughter 100’s of buffaloes for their magical wings, drink a lake’s worth of beer, take a nap, skip bathroom breaks to watch commercials, and then experience some the most over-hyped mediocre (correction:electrifying) football ever. Yes friends, Superbowl XLIII will showcase the Steelers of Pittsburgh and the Cardinals of Arizona. Both teams have a deep heritage in the league, all the way back when the Superbowl was a naive single roman numeral.

If you have haven’t reached your Superbowl ingestion limit yet, the New York Times had a few prominent designers take a couple snaps at re-doing the logo. It is interesting to note that a common graphic element was common in a few of the logos. See if you can notice. It gives an insight into this wacky creative world; just because you came up with an idea, doesn’t mean that it is that original.

Anyhoo, check out the logos, stuff your faces, enjoy the game and ‘Go (inserts team name)!, Kill the loser (insert team name)!’.

What does a retired General, a former Olympian and a man they call “Dog” have in common? If you said they’re all speakers available through the National Speakers Bureau, you’d win the big stuffed narwhal.

For over 35 years, the National Speakers Bureau has garnered a reputation as the source for event speakers. They are the sole agents for over 100 speakers, and they work with over a thousand others in North America and abroad.

They came to 76design with a request, upgrade their brand. This included a new logo and revamping their site. During our analysis of their brand, we felt that their existing website didn’t accurately reflect the class of speakers they had, nor did it “speak” (so punny!) to their great customer service.

76 updated their corporate logo, created a brand new site with a focus on bringing their speakers to the forefront, improving the speakers search functions, and we also created a new interactive module on the homepage. Overall, our goal was to facilitate the user experience, but also motivate potential clients to call one of their reps to assist them through the booking process. The new National Speakers Bureau site launched January, 2009.

Take a spin on NSB.com, and book yourself a speaker or two. On a personal note, I am awaiting the confirmation that Strombo is coming to my Super Bowl party. Fingers Crossed!

So after no longer being able to cope with Yammer’s pitfalls anymore, Thornley Fallis and 76design’s CEO Joe Thornley had the insight to give present.ly a try, and actively encouraged both organizations to become part of this community. Here are my thoughts and feedback after our first week of use.

Ease of use

A handful of us are already avid twitter users, so the learning curve was next to none.  Many were newly introduced to Twitter lingo, but after a few tries, it was smooth sailing.

Luckily for all us there are also some great additional features in presently that we got to know :

• Groups are a marvel;
• “Highlighting” when people ask questions (?) or say something urgent (!!!) is quite useful;
• Built-in media sharing.

The web interface is really straightforward, and logical.  In addition to this, present.ly also has a desktop AIR app and an iPhone-friendly interface.

However, things tend to behave just a little differently than they do on twitter, which can lead to some frustrating moments.  The behaviors aren’t bad, but I like my conventions!

• No “delete” option: seriously, we all make typos;
• Unlike Twitter’s web interface, the return key will send a message instead of doing a line break (This seems minor, but without a delete button, it’s a total pain.)
• Another often mentioned issue is that of the confusion on how the “Groups” feature works.  If two users are members of a group, but do not “follow” one another, they don’t receive all the updates destined for that group.  This could lead to people missing out on part of the conversation. And also forces a user to follow pretty much everyone;
• Multiple email activity notifications that are impossible to turn off.

None of these issues are significant enough to stop me from doing what I want to do with present.ly.  But to the folks at present.ly, if you’re listening – hear me out!

Is it all worth it?

After the first day on present.ly, many of us, myself included, questioned if this tool was worthwhile.  The entire day on present.ly had been spent sending silly messages and testing out the features.  It felt like a productivity killer.

I’d say that for the remainder of the week, a good lot of us realized the potential of present.ly and made a conscious effort to make it useful.  A few examples of things we’ve used it for:

• Tracking any internal technical issues with hashtags;
• Sharing news / ideas about development in our devSquad group;
• Sharing business successes;
• Status updates (what you’re working on, where you are, etc.);
• Giving out bonuses (if you’re Joe)!

Overview

All in all, I think Present.ly is a great app, and it seems to have really “hit the nail on the head” in terms of what we needed as a inter-office communication tool.  I also envision it being useful on any “Enterprise” level, as it is reasonable secure and stable.  But as with any collaborative tool or app, we must always keep the ball rolling and choose to make it useful…

What do you think?  I’d love to hear feedback on some solutions that have worked for you, and have allowed you to communicate better at work.

1. When your browser requests a file, Apache may report that the file hasn’t changed. You can see this with a tool like firebug, any files that come back with a “304 Not Modified” header will not be re-downloaded by your browser.

2. When you first requested the file sometime in the past, Apache may have sent an expires header with the file. This means that until a specified date, your browser will never re-download the file. Unlike the #1 above, it doesn’t even ask Apache if it should re-download the file.

Note: I’m sure I missed a few ways a file can find it’s way into the cache, but that’s not the point of this post.

All this caching is great for the performance of your website, but it sucks when you actually want your users to download the new version of the file. Putting up “our site has changed, please clear your browser cache” is obviously out of the question. So, what can we do?

When your browser encounters a file that it hasn’t seen before it will always go ask Apache for the file. So, one option is to add a version number to the filename and update your source to point at the new file. This works, but adds a maintenance overhead because you have to make sure you maintain the version number of the file and deploy it with the proper filename. So, style.css could become style-20090109.css.

The problem with the above is that you have to maintain the file version in two places, once in your source html and again when you update the css file. We can get around this using htaccess by pointing all reguests to style*.css to style.css. So, when a request is made for style-20090109.css you get the updated contents of style.css and since the filename is unique you get around the cache issues. Yes, you still have to maintain the reference to the stylesheet in your html source, but you don’t have to worry about how to name the file. Anyway, here’s how you go about doing this.

Create a .htaccess file in the directory where your style.css file lives. In it put the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^style(.*).css$ style.css [QSA,L]

Now, when you request style-20090109.css or style-monkey.css you’ll always get the contents of style.css. There are other solutions, but I find that this works best for us. Hope someone will find it useful.