Lift Interactive

gusto 2012: calendar for hope

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

At the end of the year one thing is certain: you end up needing a new calendar.

Not to worry, Lift would like to point you to this year’s Calendar For Hope that vrse design has lovingly put together.

Go ahead and order one online. The ENTIRE $20 goes toward the University of Alberta Hospital’s Hope Program.

To date vrse has raised over $12,000 to the Hope Program. As one of the sponsors we’re happy to be involved in such a great effort.

Fall Roundup

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Slightly More Than You Wanted To Know About 10 Men, 2 Women And A Handful of Spaceheaters.

One of two things are happening when a blog goes quiet for an extended period of time: either you’ve run out of things to do and talk about, or you’ve been run off your feet with lots of work. Happily for us it’s been the latter. The Lift office has been really humming during last half of this year, and we thought it was high time to put some pen to digital paper and tell you all about it.

Comings and Goings

The team at Lift just seems to evolve and grow without skipping a beat. Greg Crossfield just joined us this year and is our newest addition as a junior designer. He has the outrageous talent of going from zero to hero on the foosball table (no-one has ever taken it quite as seriously). Brandon Webber moved from Saskatoon to work in the office full-time in late July. Tim Sloan has gone and also returned from a working world tour that’s taken him to Buenos Aires, Argentina and then Barcelona, Spain over the course of 6 months. You’ll have to ask him about it – he has some great stories to tell. On the whole it feels a bit like a revolving door here at the office, and only recently all of us have been in the office at the same time.

Some Interior Design

Since late summer of the office itself has been a place of constant change. We’ve experimented at being our own interior designers and continue to install different features in the office to make it our own. It’s been a labour of love and we’ve been very fortunate to have our friends help us out with their extraordinary talents.

Dale Shippit designed and built these awesome doors for our boardroom. You’ll have to come see them in person if you’re ever around Whyte.

Matt Heide from Concrete Cat has finished some beautiful concrete countertops as well as an art installation overtop our ugly cold air return.

Micah and Brandon knuckled down and built hanging plexiglas walls to separate the office space a little more, and then Seth took them to another level with some excellent vinyl. This is our first of hopefully many adventures into what we’ve been calling ‘Manterior Design’.

So – It’s been kinda cold here..

As of the last couple weeks our office has been quite cold. The building is in the middle of installing separate HVAC systems for each floor and unfortunately ours has had some setbacks. Not to worry though, we are no strangers to the cold and we built up an awesome collection of space heaters keeping our fingers warm enough to keep typing.

Recently Finished Projects

But the updates don’t end with news in the office. Amidst the flurry of activity, we’ve been hard at work on some great new projects and we’re happy to point out a couple highlights:

Malltip

This project has been in the works for a while and we’re proud it’s finally seeing the public eye. Malltip is all about daily deals sold exclusively for mall retailers. It recently launched in our home town here at West Edmonton Mall and looks to expand to other malls soon.

River Valley Health

As one of the premier sports therapy facilities in Edmonton, River Valley Health serves a huge number of both pro and amateur athletes in our city. We were excited to be a part of the RVH rebrand and implement it online.

Yardstick

We’ve known Yardstick for a long time and we like that we get to work with them too. Yardstick has had some pretty serious honours dished their way recently – they were named to the Deloitte 2011 Technology Fast 500 as well as the Fast 50. Congratulations for the success guys!

Appboy

We’ve seen a lot of great progress from the Appboy camp over the course of this year. Recently Appboy got their Series A funding and has moved their headquarters out to New York to continue developing their iPhone app SDK. What is it you ask? It’s a service that helps create and connect communities of people around great apps.

Qube Flex

Qube Flex helps companies set up employee benefit plans with their online app, with tools that allow individual employees to customize their benefit packages to suit their needs best. It’s been a pleasure helping Qube Flex rework how users interact with their product.

Keep fit and have fun!

So that’s been just a quick taste of what has been happening with us this fall. As always, we’ve got more stuff coming down the pipe and we’ll make sure to let you know when it’s out.

Why Wireframe?

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

A look at what a typical Lift wireframe looks like

One of the hurdles we face in the web/interactive world is communicating the language we use for terms and the process for the work we do. A main reason for this is that we work with a number of people outside the industry, and the ‘speak’ isn’t overly natural or intuitive at first.

One of these terms is ‘Wireframe’ – we hear often from people who don’t fully understand the term (which is understandable). So I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about wireframing – hopefully to clarify for some what it’s function and value is.

A wireframe is design, but it’s not THE design.

Before we think about visual aesthetics (colours, images, fonts etc.) we work to create good functionality for a website. Some call this focus User Experience (UX) and might have heard something about wireframes.

Whatever you call it, a wireframe takes into account a few things: Content Priorities – the main messages and media a website is trying to communicate, User Flow – the specific steps to tasks that users need to perform on a website and Layout – the organization of elements into a framework that is intuitive to the user.

So what does it look like?

Wireframes can be anything from quick pencil sketches to polished illustrated documents and can communicate high level concepts or very minute details. Whether it’s a quick sketch or a more detailed view, the thing to remember is the value of the wireframe isn’t the look, but rather it’s the ideas that are communicated.

Most of my wireframes start out looking like this. There’s something about using paper and pencil that helps you stick to thinking about high-level ideas.

The other thing to note about wireframes is that it isn’t THE design. We use wireframes to discuss content and ideas so that when it comes to creating visual design we can easily flesh the ideas out visually into something that looks much more like a website.

If you want to see some of your favourite websites as wireframes, you should check out wirify.com – they’ve created a bookmarklet that you can use in your browser to see websites as wireframes.

Effective.

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

If a plan doesn’t cut it, take a different tack and try again. Work until you get something that moves the needle or cut your losses and move on. Above all, don’t keep holding on to things that aren’t working

We measure our success with a question, ‘Was it effective?’ That’s really how we stay successful. We make stuff that ultimately brings value to our clients.

We not only care about getting something done. We care that our work helps your work get done. We press until you’ve got more than just a project or a goal. We work till you get a tool.

In the end, that’s our bar. When we make something, it has to be effective. It has to work. And we’re not satisfied until it does.

Beyond: the un-convention (Pica 2011)

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0600

We’re pretty excited to be sponsors and attendees of this year’s Pica 2011 Beyond: the un-convention taking place in Banff in early May. The event describes itself as “a graphic design conference that openly eschews the ordinary and any other euphemism for business as usual.” What’s that mean? It means that this is going to be one very cool conference at one of the most beautiful venues in the world.

The speakers should be really great. I was lucky enough to attend another event with Laurie Rosenwald a few years back; it was memorable to say the least. The full list of speakers can be viewed at http://picaconference.ca/speakers/

Earlybird registration ends on March 21, so sign up soon!