The timing and circumstances were perfect, we were short on designers and they were excited about getting into making their own products. Together we will be able to create even better projects for our clients and put more focus on making our products great.

Have a look at our newly launched site and read the announcement (only in Swedish at the moment).

In all the change that has been going on lately we realized that we had to let our latest project Moola go. We’re really sad about this, but we need to focus on our client work and PortfolioDeck. In all honesty it was kinda nuts to develop two big products at the same time. Now we’ve learned it the hard way. We’re sorry to put Ebba on the spot like this, hopefully it’s for the best for Moola and PortfolioDeck. We’re still great friends with Ebba and are convinced she’ll make a knock-out product without us. So let’s wish her luck!

That’s all for now, we’ll post more updates later. Right now we’re fully occupied by the redesign of unicef.se, exciting!

The most common questions we have (and everyone we’ve talked to who run their own business).

• How much money do I have to spend?
• How much do I have to bill clients this month so I make it the next?
• How much do I owe to Skatteverket?
• Can I afford going on vacation? (usually pops-up around may)

There are also some common problems …

• Invoicing clients is a pain. We use InDesign at the moment, and let me tell you it’s not meant for it (we hear others are using Excel, Word and even Illustrator. People basically use the tools they are most comfortable with, none of them do a great job.)
• You wait until the last minute to do your paperwork whether you do it once a month or once a year.
• Once the numbers are in whatever software your accountant uses you rarely look at them again.

Our goal is to solve these problems and more with a well-crafted, easy-to-use web-based tool.

Background

We’ve been running our own business for almost 10 years and have been forced to learn how to keep track of incomes, expenses and invoicing as we go. Every month we gather the paperwork and give it to Alexis mom who does our accounting. Then we get some numbers on what we owe Skatteverket, what we spent and what we made. But the rest of the data is lost in the black hole called BL administration on Alexis moms computer.

We also use Pulseapp for getting an idea on how our budget looks a couple of months ahead. It’s a great app and inspiration, but since it lacks handling swedish tax regulations and such it doesn’t quite fill our needs.

A couple of months ago we got a call from Ebba Berggren, she wanted to build a webapp that does all of the above. We instantly thought ”Awesome, we’ve been thinking about the same idea!”. We’re now working on a prototype and trying to learn everything there is to know about accounting. (Nuts, right?)

Interested? Follow us on Twitter, head over to moola.se to signup for updates or read the blog where Ebba writes about problems on running your own business and our progress. (All in Swedish.)

It’s exciting times to design for the web. All the good stuff in HTML5 and CSS3 have become more applicable in both client work and even more in our own projects. Since A List Apart published Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte a couple of months back we’ve started to make sites a bit more responsive. (Try resizing the browser window on this site.)

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking. Rather than quarantining our content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use media queries to progressively enhance our work within different viewing contexts.

While our work to make UNICEFs giftshop mobile-friendly isn’t truly responsive (no fluid grid), it’s a couple of steps in that direction. Can’t wait to make the whole site responsive in next years redesign.

Here are some examples of responsive designs. Resize away!

• Hicksdesign
• Simon Collison
• Mark Boulton
• St Paul’s School
• UX London

Designing sites that work great on your mobile makes it easier to focus on what’s most important. It gets you thinking about content and design from a refreshing point of view. You should try it out. Here is some recommended reading:

• Luke Wroblewski has been talking a lot about designing for mobile first. The main reasons are: Mobile is exploding. Mobile forces you to focus. Mobile extends your capabilities.
• Jeremy Keith wrote a great post on why you should serve the same website to everyone. One web.
• 37Signals have been experimenting with responsive design
• There has been some critique too but I agree with the valid points Jeremy Keith makes in the comments and in his post linked to above.

The basic concept is that you only need to upload one hi-res image and get it resized and cropped on-the-fly in whatever size you need. It allows you to have a better separation of the image you uploaded and how it’s displayed on your site/app. Need to change the size of that thumbnail? Just change the <img> in your template and you’re done.

We’ve had this feature in PortfolioDeck and our clients different publishing tools for a long time, but we got tired of keeping track of the same functionality in different projects so we decided to extract it. We will soon integrate Resizor in our own apps and hopefully someone else can find it useful too.

Manual cropping

There is of course limitations with automatic cropping, heads get cut of and other nasty stuff. The next step is to create an easy-to-use manual cropping and rotating tool in javascript. Our idea is that as a complement to the API you should be able to link to a cropping view where you can make a manual crop of the image, save and be redirected back to your app with the cropped image.

If you got any suggestions or thoughts on javascript libraries for handling the cropping interface do let us know! We’re leaning towards Jcrop.

Stay up to date and beta invites

Head over to resizor.com to sign up for beta invites and dig into the API-specs. If you want to stay up to date with our work on Resizor make sure you follow @resizor on Twitter.

Lately we have been working together with Jung and Sony Ericsson to create a webapp for sharing collections of Android-apps. It’s called Mash-App and it was launched a couple of weeks ago.

It has been a quite different project, more like when we develop apps for ourselves than a typical client project. We started by refined the idea Jung had together with them, removed all the functionality that didn’t fit the initial scope. From that we developed a prototype to have something clickable to talk about, where we could actually try the interactions. We then designed the interface, finished up the development, made some adjustments and finalized the product. It has been a lot of fun and the people at Jung and Sony Ericsson have been great to work with. More of those projects, please!

This is our first project in Ruby on Rails 3 and frankly it’s been a smooth ride. We haven’t stumbled upon any major problems a part from having to patch a few third party gems. We’re hosting it on Heroku’s bamboo stack and we are really starting to love the git workflow.

One of the technical challenges was that Android Market has no official API. Einar, who works at Jung and is also Arvids brother, wrote a small java application that uses the unofficial api. It serves as a proxy between Mash-App.com and Android Market. The API app is hosted on Google App Engine and uses geokit to make sure we’re searching the correct market.

We also had the opportunity to design a mobile version of the webapp.  it’s great how easy it has become for modern devices, check it out with your Xperia X10 (or iPhone for that matter).

Have a look at mash-app.com and let us know what you think!

(Feedback is greatly appreciated, either via the feedback link, twitter or plain old email.)

PortfolioDeck is a web-based tool that makes it easy to create portfolio sites. Upload your work, organize it and sort with drag-and-drop. Check out PortfolioDeck.com for some example portfolio sites and screenshots.

Who is PortfolioDeck for?

PortfolioDeck is for photographers, designers, illustrators, typographers, architects, artists, stylists and anyone else who needs a portfolio website.

It’s also for designers and developers that make portfolio sites for their clients or friends (that’s us!). No more hassle editing HTML and uploading with FTP. Create a great design and let your client/friend handle the content.

Why?

We built PortfolioDeck because we needed it ourselves. Being a small design agency clients and friends often ask us for simple portfolio sites.

But since you really don’t want to ask your friends for money, and small clients rarely have large budgets for their own sites, we always ended up with static sites that lacked a proper management tool.

This didn’t feel right, so we scratched our own itch and built PortfolioDeck for us, our friends and you.

Your site, your way

We have done our best to stay in the background. Create your own design and get full control over HTML, CSS, javascript and graphics. Use your own domain name (e.g. frankaschberg.com), your visitors won’t even know your site is on PortfolioDeck.

Don’t know your way around code? We also have two designs ready for you to use today. They both show your work in a clear way. One white and one black.

Know your way around code? We use a templating language called Liquid. Check out the documentation

Sounds like something for you?

We haven’t opened up for public signups yet but you can get an invite by giving us your email or a tweet

Don’t forget to check out the site.
You should also follow us on Twitter for updates.

We’re also in the middle of redefining what we do as an agency and we needed our site to reflect that. Besides creating sites and apps for others we’ve also started creating our own products.

At the end of last week we finally had some time to design a basic site that we felt was good enough, so that we don’t have to feel embarrassed every time we felt like posting new blogposts (big announcement coming tomorrow).

We’ve used Typekit to be able to have some nice fonts (FF Meta Serif by FontFont for body text and Adelle by TypeTogether for headings). The design is very much a work-in-progress, will keep you posted on how it goes. Hope you like it!

• We like design that communicates clearly.
• We like sites and apps that are usable and feel right.
• We think form should follow function.
• We think Copywriting is Interface Design.
• We like typography and white-space.
• We like markup that is structured and semantic.
• We like design by Apple, 37signals, Mark Boulton Design, Dan Cederholm, Jason Santa Maria, iA, Happy Cog, Bokardo, Oktavilla.

We are a small co-operative design and development agency. We design sites for others and web apps for ourselves (and others). We don’t like hierarchies. Everyone takes care of their own responsibilities. We’re two programmers, one designer. If we like each other we would like you to be the second designer, to even the score.

We are in the middle of redefining what we do. A part from being a designer we would like you take part in creating the agency you would like to work at. Where we create great stuff, have a good time and don’t work ourselves to death in the process. Our goal is to have a balanced mix of our own products and client work.

It’s a big plus if you in any way have been running a business or been freelancing.

Do you think you would be a good fit? Show us your work and tell us why. Send an email to designer [at] winstondesign.se

What are you waiting for? Let’s get started!

Update: We’ve joined forces with Oktavilla, so we are no longer looking. But if you’re too good to miss out on, get in touch!

And we did it! Sleep deprived, but happy we nervously and swiftly presented Holodeck at 2 pm on Sunday, 24h after the hack started. At the moment it can get music from SoundCloud, gigs from Last.fm or Songkick and posts from Tumblr. We made an example site for our friend Marcus Price. This is how it looks:

We’re still working on a few glitches and bugs. But you can create your own presence using our default theme, choose which services you want to aggregate and edit your personal information. If you know HTML and CSS you can even create you own theme.

Some stuff coming up in the near future is template documentation, more services, a caching layer (to make everything superfast) and the ability to use your own domain.

Many thanks to Hannes and Matas from SoundCloud for their help with the API and their brand new JS player.

Holodeck even won SoundClouds price after the hack. Thanks! The prize? Flights to the next Music Hack Day! Any ideas on what to we should build then?

Check out Holodeck at http://holodeckapp.com and follow @holodeckapp for updates.

Let us know what you think and what we can do to make it better!

“The main goal of Music Hack Day is to explore and build the next generation of music applications. It’s a full weekend of hacking in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related.”

We plan on building a tool for musicians and bands to create their own websites. Like PortfolioDeck but for musicians. The idea is to aggregate content from other services and display them on the artists own domain with their own design. We’re going to use SoundCloud for music, Last.fm for shows, Tumblr for news, YouTube for video and more… The idea is somewhat inspired by the site Martin Ström has done for record label Pluxemburg.

We have one problem. We haven’t found a suitable domain yet. Any ideas?

We all worked together on launching some tweaks on last seasons hit at UNICEF. A giftshop with blankets, vaccines, footballs and more. The gifts you buy are sent to children that actually need them, you get a nice gift certificate to give away. Now you know where to buy presents for christmas.

Arvid has finished a small project for Dennis Blomberg who runs Nollimages, a stock-photo agency. The project involved getting acquainted once again with his lost friend PHP. Now you can buy illustrations by Liselotte Watkins, printed on canvas by ProCenter.

Joel has been working on a couple of projects for Daytona recently, writing markup, style and javascript. Can’t tell who they were for though. I also helped out a bit while he was drinking beer i Prague.

I’ve been trying hard to finish a re-design of Ungdomsstyrelsens site. It’s long overdue, it started more than a year ago, but should be finished any day now. I’ve also spent some time with our friends at Oktavilla. They are helping us defining content strategy and information architecture for unicef.se.

The development on PortfolioDeck has unfortunately been quite slow. We did get the chance to have a workshop with our good friend Henrik about pricing. He did his master thesis at KTH on “Pricing Strategies for selling Software as a Service”. It was both fun, interesting and extremely helpful. More on that later. Thanks Henrik!

One big step for PortfolioDeck though is that we released the first portfolio built and designed with the app. The site is for our friend, and former office-mate, Frank Aschberg. Go check it out!

Btw, Henrik and David have been keeping us company at the office while working on their personal projects the last couple of months. Yesterday they released their iPhone app for citysounds.fm. It’s mighty cool.

One of many interesting aspects of the shift towards the browser as the OS, and sites as apps, is that it makes the need for the OS interface almost non-existent. The learning curve for new users will therefor be minimal. “Here you go: The web, you’ve used it before haven’t you?”. Microsoft should be worried.

We’ve just bought a netbook to try it out and make sure that PortfolioDeck fits well in the clouded future!

If you haven’t already, watch the What is Google Chrome OS? and Google Chrome OS UI Concept Video below. You can also take a look at “the motivations, assumptions, and directions behind Chromium OS’s user interface design”.

Interesting keynote about The Pirate´s Dilemma by Matt Mason. (via Torstensson).

Note: Originally posted at Alexis log.

Next week I’m going to Barcelona to help Andie and the RjDj team with design and front-end code. For those of you that don’t know what RjDj is I copied this from Andie’s log:

RjDj creates mind twisting hearing sensations by weaving your environment into music. Voices, cars, your walking speed.. these and many other things can be used by music creators to shape your experience. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, try it!

RjDj is really interesting and I think it will be a really fun project. They have a lot of playful and colorful illustrations I’m looking forward to integrate them in a usable design.

Many thanks to Andie for our first international project!

On this day five years ago, 37signals released Basecamp, their first product. We had been following their blog for some time, but this was something else. We tried it out at once. The feeling, design and usability was like nothing else on the web at the time. It just felt right and it really helped us manage our projects. We were just about to release UNICEF Swedens site and started communicating through Basecamp right away. We still do.

Following 37signals and the development of Basecamp during those early days changed the way I thought about design and interaction. I’ve had two experiences like this in our little agency’s history. The first was when Joels classmate forced him to use web-standards. Once we started writing standardized markup we never looked back (we were one of the first agencies in Sweden to build sites according to standards). Besides all the obvious advantages like more appreciation from google, faster pageloads, easier development process, cross-browser support and all the other things we take for granted today the most important thing was that it makes you define what every part of a website is. This changed the way I thought about creating websites and lead to thinking about what, where and how the content and disposition of a site in a way I didn’t before. I wasn’t even really into designing for the web, print design was what I wanted to do. Standards changed that.

The other time was, and probably still is, reading about how 37signals think and practice design, communication and running a small business. Using Basecamp and their other products and getting real. It has inspired our work and we have since been dreaming about developing our own web-based application. And we’re actually almost there, we have a working application that a bunch of friends are using and testing. We’ll see how it goes.

So congratulations and thank you for the inspiration, we’ll continue using Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Highrise, and probably what you’ll release next, for the five years to come.

Note: This might seem like an exaggeration or a sales pitch. But it’s not, they’re just that good and after five years it was time to join the choir.

Idén till 24h Business Camp är inspirerad av 24 Hour Dot Com, ett projekt som Eric Wahlforss och Adam Wern gjorde under en konferens i Berlin 2004 (se en kort dokumentär på Vimeo). Ted tog upp tanken på sin blog att samla 10 personer under ett dygn, då var och en av dem skulle utveckla varsitt webbprojekt. Efter diskussioner och några veckor var det till sist runt 90 deltagare och ett flertal sponsorer.

Det hela var väldigt kul och inspirerande. Jag tycker helt klart att det bästa projektet var Hinkes, David och Erics Listen to blogs. De skapade något innovativt och knöt ihop befintliga tjänster på ett snyggt och användbart sätt (OAuth, SoundCloud, Twingly, App Engine).

Tack till alla som var med och sponsorerna. Framförallt Joakim Jardenberg och Mindpark som gjorde ett mycket sympatiskt intryck som första sponsor.

Är du intresserad eller känner till någon som kanske skulle vara det? Hör av dig till oss på info@winstondesign.se.

Vi har arbetat med UNICEFs närvaro på webben i snart fem år. Sajten består främst av det redaktionella materialet, gåvosidor riktade till olika målgrupper och projekt samt butiken för privatpersoner och företag. Utöver det gör vi även ett par kampanjsajter per år. I våras var det För varenda unge där besökarna kunde starta egna insamlingar och för ungefär en vecka sen lanserade vi en gåvoshop inför julen där man kan handla allt från myggnät (45 kr) till en fyrhjulsdriven jeep (183 493 kr). Alla gåvor skickas till barn som behöver dem för att överleva, som tack får du ett gåvobevis som trycks och skickas per post (man kan få det skickat via mail också).

Det både vi och UNICEF la stor vikt vid är att gåvobeviset man får som tack ska kännas bra att ge bort, inte bara vara utskrivet med en färgskrivare på vanligt A4. Gåvobevisen trycks av Trosa Trycker. Framsidan och baksidan är förtryckta med offset, insidan med information om gåvan samt avsändarens hälsning trycks digitalt.

Det grafiska uttrycket, annonser och reklamfilmer till kampanjen som går just nu är framtagna av F&B.

Det som skiljer de senaste två kampanjerna vi tagit fram från tidigare är att de är en del av UNICEFs sajt istället för att vara egna fristående sajter. De behåller ramverket (huvud, navigation och sidfot) så att besökaren lätt kan fortsätta surfa på resten av webbplatsen. Kampanjsajter är i regel ganska kortlivade, de finns tillgängliga under kampanjperioden och sen tas de ner. Jag tror det är tekniska begränsningar i publiceringsverktygen som gör att kampanjsajter ofta blir fristående sajter. Vårt mål är att skapa kampanjsajter inom UNICEFs ordinarie sajt som kan leva vidare där även efter att kampanjen är slut. Så att man tar tillvara på den tillfälliga ökningen av exponeringen för kampanjen och därmed den ordinarie webbplatsen under kampanjperioden, men att man anpassar och låter dem leva vidare även efter att kampanjperioden är slut. Det gör att resurserna man lägger på kampanjen får en längre livslängd eftersom de läggs på den ordinarie sajten istället för på en helt frånkopplad kampanjsajt som släcks ner när kampanjen är slut.

Vi håller nu på och letar efter någon annan, bättre DNS tjänst. Som helst har ett redundant system som inte går ner p.g.a. elavbrott eller liknande. Men det kan man ju tycka är en självklarhet.

Någon som har några tips? Enkla, användbara gränssnitt är ett stort plus.

UPDATE: DynDNS Custom DNS tjänst verkar vettigt, någon som har någon erfarenhet av dem?

Vår goda vän Frank har blivit nominerad till Scanpix stora fotopris. Det är det näst största fotopriset i Sverige efter Hasselbladspriset. Rösta nu!

Scanpix Stora Fotopris ges till den yrkesverksamma fotograf som juryn anser bäst skildrat det svenska samhället på ett sätt som tar tillvara god traditionell bildjournalistik eller som på ett nyskapande sätt bidrar till att utveckla dokumentärfotografiet. Bilderna ska vara tagna under de senaste tre åren.

Du kan ser fler bilder på Franks sajt.