ZURB

ZURB 2016 is a Success!

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 08:00:00 -0700

It was another amazing ZURB Wired event this year. It goes without saying- we set some ambitious goals that kept us working all the way through the entire 24 hours. There were many ups and downs throughout the day, but we came together as one team to make a tremendous amount of marketing things happen for this special nonprofit. Let’s a take look back at everything we were able to accomplish for Life Services Alternatives.

Printed Collateral

The print team had big goals and did an amazing job getting the print collateral completed. Keep in mind, we started the morning with no creative direction and by 1AM we had printed pieces in hand.

Brand new branding and layouts to match
A thank you mailer with printed envelop
An 11 X 17 poster
A printed drip campaign consisting of three mailers with printed envelopes

A Website Redesign and Implementation

The web and engineering team ran with the visual look created earlier in the day. It was an incredible 24 hours from a blank slate to an entire functioning WordPress site. Their work included:

A comprehensive content overhaul
A entirely new responsive interface design
A new custom WordPress install and theme
A live website: https://www.lsahomes.org

Brand New Social Content

Our content team also crafted some awesome new material for social campaigns including:

An email newsletter template
A three email drip campaign
Targeted social campaigns consisting of 5 videos and a ton of social assets and tweets
Overhaul social landing pages
Landing page and email copy

Thanks to our supporters

We’d like to thank everyone who supported us and stopped by to cheer us on since 8AM yesterday.

Philz Coffee provided our coffee- they're super nice!
Frost Cupcakes in Campbell gave us delicious treats.
Zazzle and Big Ink Printing brought our designs to life through their expedient printing.
Hayden Bursk (Oh Travioso) provided amazing music for our videos.
Special thank you to our families, friends, and especially our volunteers for donating their time and energy: Jim Manalisay (Videos), James Stone (Web), Courtney George (Design), Mark Hayes (Engineering), Caleb Winter (Web), Shelby Bearschild (Health), Preston McPeak (Design), Nick Witter (Web).

What made this effort even more exciting was our ability to share the work as it unfolded through our social channels (all 24 hours!). It's our hope that this type of effort can inspire other groups and nonprofits to work together in unconventional ways to make fantastic things happen in their communities. We captured the entire effort with over 24 blog posts, 200 images, 20 videos.

And finally, we’d like to thank the great people at Life Services Alternatives for making the ninth annual ZURB Wired an experience that will remain with us for a long time.

Check Out Our Project!

Get to Know the LSA Team

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 07:00:00 -0700

We were impressed with the Life Services Alternatives team the moment we met them, but getting to know them over the past 24 hours has left an even deeper impression on us. It’s rare to meet people as passionate about their cause as they are, and we feel privileged to have had a small part in helping them reach their goals. Without further ado, meet the LSA team:

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Come Meet the ZURBians!

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 05:00:00 -0700

We’ve poured more than 20 hours into this project, and we’re all feeling a little loopy. The good news is that we’re on track and on schedule. We’d like to take this time to briefly put the focus from the work to the talented men and women of the ZURB team. Without further ado, meet the ZURBians!

Check Out Our Project!

Seeing Our Work Come to Life

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 05:00:00 -0700

At ZURB, we primarily work in the digital medium, crafting screens and interfaces for digital products and services. But there’s something pretty magical about see and touch your work in your hands. When we get the print collateral back from the printer, the office become electrified. Everyone crowds around the boxes, whipping out their cell phones to snap pics of the finished products. We’re really proud of what we were able to craft with the LSA team and we can’t wait to see what they do with it!

We Set the Pace and Now We’re Close to Winning the Race

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 03:00:00 -0700

We’re still slaying it here with just under 5 hours left! It’s getting into crunch time as our web team gets further and further down the rabbit hole that is coding and QA. Since we last gave an update on our web progress, we’ve completed our wireframing and visuals. With these in hand, we have a pretty good idea of how these pages are going to look and what the end product will look like.

We also killed it on the content front by really dialing in the messaging around generating interest for their 12th home! While annotating directly onto the hi-fi wireframes, which so helpfully outlines exactly where the content is going, we quickly and easily knocked out the content and copy of each page.

Now as we’re putting our heads down into code, we’re setting ourselves up for our final steps. We’re right where we want to be in terms of scheduling and we’re feeling good, albeit a bit tired, but hey - that’s what Redbull, coffee and 5 Hour Energy are for! There is still a hell of a lot to do, but we are in good spirits and keeping each other entertained as we do it! Now - back to work for this ZURBian.

Check Out Our Web Layouts!

Turning Houses Into Homes and Engineers Into Gnomes

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 02:00:00 -0700

The Engineering Team are the stealthy heroes of ZURB Wired. They begin their planning weeks before the event, investigating the development environment they’ll be operating in, ways they can improve the nonprofit’s setup, and any new tools or technologies that can be applied to the project. This preparation is often goes unnoticed… unless something goes wrong later on.

Once the project is in full swing, they spend the early hours testing systems and getting access. Then comes the flood. The web team begins sending them templates to integrate into Wordpress. The content team sends them written copy to plug into those templates. The design team shoots them over image after image. And this is where the problems can appear. With three separate teams sending multiple files at once, the chance of miscommunication and mistakes skyrocket.

Fortunately for us, ZURB’s team of engineers stay cool as ice. They work through problems and always ensure that things work. We’re counting on the engineers to carry us through to the home stretch!

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When It Gets Late, It Gets Weird

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 01:00:00 -0700

The photobooth is always hit at #ZURBWired. For one, it helps us document the evening and everyone that participated. Secondly, it helps us both let off some steam and build up our second winds. Lastly, it has a weird way of bonding together people and things you’d never expect.

Getting in Just Under the ZURB Wired

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0700

After a lot of worry, emotions, and gusto, we got our print out the door and over to Dion and the Big Ink Printing team (you guys rock!). Getting this print out is so important because it’s a highly leveraged method of how LSA communicates with their followers and audience. Their brochures and mailers have really been delivering well on the many stories and stats they provide.

Since we knew they have such great content, we thought it was important to not only consolidate the content, but also present an even more engaging format through a 3 part mailer. On top of that, we have created some awesome thank you cards for their many admirers as well as other solid creatives! So having that in mind, we are so stoked we were able to get this print out.

Check Out Our Project!

Did We Just Become Best Friends?!

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:00:00 -0700

At the halfway mark we checked in with our LSA friends who are toughing out WIRED right along side with us, down in the trenches. As we start to descend into the quickly dwindling second half of our time together, things can start to get a little hazy and become a blur. But they are keeping right up with us!

As we go “all out” to get the work finished, all of the LSA staff here in the office have held strong with just as much enthusiasm and patience as the rest of our team (and we are 9 year veterans at this fast paced, intense process that is WIRED).

Half Way Through The Journey

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 21:00:00 -0700

It's been an amazing journey and we're now just over half way done. The LSA team has been an incredible partner. Arthur has captured the event with some fantastic photos.

We're Hauling Assets to the Printer!

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 21:00:00 -0700

Hitting the print deadline is a challenge every Wired. It’s the first of the day, and if we miss it, we run the risk of not having the posters, brochures and mailers ready for the nonprofit when they leave us in the morning.

Print was a much larger component of Wired this year than it was last. Our deliverables consist of a thank you card with printed envelopes, a three piece newsletter drip with printed envelopes, and a poster.

After we decided the visual direction and got some copy from our Content Team, our Print Team got to work creating the mailers and card. And that’s where things went wrong… File issues, cloud storage issues, file format issues, and good ol’ fashioned human error caused us to miss our 6:00PM deadline, but fortunately our awesome print partner, Dion of Big Ink Printing stepped up and offered to stay later to help us get it all done!

Check Out Our Print Mailers!

Keeping Wired Running Like A Well Oiled Machine

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 19:00:00 -0700

We are heavy into it right now getting our heads down further and further into our work. While we chip away at getting our deliverables squared away and polished, we want to take a moment to recognize our fabulous ops team.

WIRED takes a toll on everyone who participates: mentally, emotionally and physically, but we have the absolute best ops team we could ask for. Our Team Lead, Shawna, works hard to make sure we are all taken care of during this epic event!

Along with Nathalie, our Operations Administrator, this dynamic duo have been making sure we are in good spirits, stay hydrated, and well fed. Not only have they been making sure we don’t forget our basic needs as humans, the work required to figure out the logistics of all of this is daunting to say the least. Thanks Shawna and Nathalie for everything you do everyday and especially for WIRED!

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What's Your Status? Checking In With the Team Leads

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 17:00:00 -0700

It’s near sunset here at ZURB HQ and we’re not even halfway through this 24 hour sprint. In order to get this mammoth project done, we broke into 8 teams at the start of the day: Ops, Marketing, Design/Visuals, Email/Social, Content, Web, Print and Engineering. Each of these teams work in tandem on different parts of the campaign. As you can imagine, it takes a tremendous amount of planning and coordination to hit our deadline. We check in with our Team Leads to figure out where we are in the project.

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Laying the Foundation for a Brand New Website

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 16:00:00 -0700

The web team is has been crushing it today, churning through ideas and making huge strides through lunch. They started out by sketching some lo-fi wireframes on paper and then moved to the whiteboard to get the LSA team involved in the feedback process. The goals here are to determine that the layout will work well with the content and covers all of the needs decided upon in the morning.

From here, Rafi Benkual and James Stone are scaffolding up a coded prototype for the engineers to begin getting into Wordpress while Mandi Saeteun translates the sketches to hi-fi wireframes in Sketch for the Content Team to begin filling in.

Check Out the Wireframe Sketches!

Things Are Getting A Little Sketchy

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 14:00:00 -0700

Sketching is a huge part of our process and culture here at ZURB. In fact, we use sketching to do most of the heavy lifting in our design. After the morning brainstorming sessions, each team broke out the Sharpies and began sketching out concepts, page layouts, workflows and more.

Ideation sketches are a fast, lofi, low-cost way to generate a volume of ideas and explore any constraints before we dive into code. By generating as many ideas as possible through sketches, we can begin to build momentum and move closer to the right answers.

Producing ideas in volume combined with timeboxing can help your team drop all assumptions about a problem and uncover paths you would have never even considered previously.Rather than focusing on creating a pixel perfect masterpiece, sketching gets you and your team into energetic storytelling that solves problems for people.

Check out our lo-fi sketches!

Cutting Through the Work with Smiles and Burgers

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:00:00 -0700

As we approach the end of the first 3rd of our 24 hour day, our spirits are high and our eyes are bright! The team is in close knit collaboration mode as they continue to iterate through Ideation, Mood Boards and move into Low-Fi Wireframes. With LSA being so awesome and collaborative, it’s allowing us to cut through the work super fast and efficiently!

We had an opportunity to meet and have lunch with more of LSA’s amazing team as well as some of the residents from one of their homes! It really allowed us to put faces to where the efforts of our work here today is going. With full bellies and light hearts we push forward to continue developing for this awesome cause!

Check out our photos on Flickr!

Nailing the Story

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 12:00:00 -0700

In the morning time we broke into five separate groups to brainstorm storylines that could inspire all our campaign materials. After reviewing all the concepts, the leads came together to focus our messaging. After another thirty minutes of iteration, we arrived at: Creating Home, Changing Lives

The goal was to get all the teams moving in a creative direction so they could start to visualize the visuals, content, social campaigns, website architecture within their smaller groups.

The content team continued to work on the tagline concept to bring more clarity to the aspirational tagline. After an hour of work and a twenty minute review, we got everyone moving in the same direction.

Braving the Brainstorm to Get Home

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 11:00:00 -0700

Two hours into the 24 and we’ve been rockin’ it full force! We’ve already made huge progress in getting our creative juices flowing with the LSA team by entering into brainstorming sessions to see what sort of messages and themes we want to center our work around. This involved breaking out into several different teams, throwing out major themes that LSA works with and then coming back together as a group to discuss what works best.

At the start of our process, we look to define the challenge of the project and then come together as a group to find consensus on an outcome. The ideas thrown around were simply amazing, especially considering how short our timebox was!

The leads came together to synthesize the best ideas. Some highlights that really resonated with the group are still ringing in our ears. “What is home?” was a popular one. We asked ourselves “What makes a house feel and function like a home?" Some of the other major themes that surfaced were ones of community, love, and building a better life. The most surprising part of this process might have been just how much we are all searching for these same things, making this endeavor and project all the more meaningful to our whole team.

Check Out Our Brainstorm!

24 Hours to Accomplish a Marketing Miracle

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 10:00:00 -0700

John Nemeth and Dana Hooper outlined some of the goals of the next 24 hours as well as the impact ZURB Wired will have on Life Services Alternatives as they work to fulfill their mission of provide quality homes for adults with disabilities.

Life Services Alternatives is an organization that provides housing for developmentally disabled adults and helps them learn life skills to lead normal lives with as much independence as possible. Over the past 15 years, LSA has raised funds to purchase 11 houses in beautiful communities, each equipped for the special needs of their residents and staffed with a caring and dedicated team. This year, LSA is looking to add a 12th house to its portfolio, and needs $600k more to make it happen.

Check Out Our Project!

Donuts, Laughs, and Love

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 09:00:00 -0700

And just like that, we’re off! #ZURBWired 2016 has begun, and our teams couldn’t be more pumped! In addition to the ZURB team, we’re joined by our chosen nonprofit, Life Services Alternatives, and a several volunteers. It’s a our ninth go round, and the atmosphere is absolutely electric! We’re committed to helping LSA pull off a marketing miracle and raise the funds needed so they can purchase their 12th home.

First things first, breakfast! Our amazing ops team led by Shawna, a.k.a. “Mama ZURB” made sure we had a selection of cereals, fruits and donuts to start off our day. As an added bonus, our good friends at Philz Coffee hooked us up with some of their delicious brew to keep us caffeinated! With breakfast out of the way, we began Wired the way we always do, with a Friday15-esque activity led by Jon. Sharpies in hand, we were asked to draw our vision for what the LSA’s next home would be like. The results ranged from inspiring to completely wacky!

Kevin C’s house was actually a huge treehouse!
Daniel’s kitchen had an assortment of Jelly bean dispensers
Shawna’s house had cats in it (no surprise)
Mandi’s house was a combo Victorian/Flank Lloyd Wright design

With the creative juices beginning to flow, we broke out into our teams for the morning’s brainstorming sessions. One hour down, 23 to go!

Check Out Our Project!

#ZURBWired 2016 is Live

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 08:00:00 -0700

The clock has started and we have just kicked off ZURB Wired 2016 with Life Services Alternatives! You can keep up with our progress in real-time and see our work come to life through blog posts, photos and videos published live on our ZURB Wired page over the next 24 hours. Get involved by checking out the work we post to Notable, leaving feedback and participating in feedback tests.

One of the biggest ways you can help us achieve our goals is to cheer us on. Keep us pumped by tweeting to the team using the @ZURB handle and the hashtag #ZURBWired. We'll be checking out feed for your messages and replying as much as possible. We'd love to hear from you!

Follow Our Progress Live!

Be part of the action and follow along over the next 24 hours as we race to help Life Services Alternatives create an amazing marketing campaign! Use the button below to tweet out that #ZURBWired has begun:

Tweet About #ZURBWired!

ZURB 2015 Is a Success!

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 08:00:00 -0700

And just like that ZURB Wired 2015 draws to a close. We set some ambitious goals, and we’re happy to say not only did we accomplish them, but had time to even crank out some additional pieces. Let’s a take look back at everything we were able to accomplish.

Printed Collateral

The print team worked like crazy to meet our deadlines and went above and beyond delivering some awesome pieces of print collateral including:

Brand new branding and illustrations to match
A thank you mailer
An 11 X 17 poster
A trifold brochure
A flyer

The print team also produced materials to be delivered as digital files to Downtown Streets Team and printed as necessary later:

A bus ad
A sandwich sign
An employment brochure

A Website Redesign and Implementation

The web team ran with the visual look the print team create and crafted a brand new responsive website that will be going up this week. Their work included:

A comprehensive content overhaul
A new custom WordPress theme
A volunteer management platform

Brand New Promotional Content

Our content team also crafted some awesome new material for social campaigns including:

An email newsletter template
Five targeted social campaigns consisting of a video, five graphics, 5 tweets and 5 Facebook posts
Landing page and email copy

Thanks to our supporters

We’d like to thank everyone who supported us and stopped by to cheer us on since 8AM yesterday.

Starbucks in downtown Campbell provided our evening coffee.
Frost Cupcakes in Campbell gave us delicious treats.
G-Technology donated a high speed drive for our video work.
Zazzle and Big Ink Printing brought our designs to life through their expedient printing.
Tina Case took some amazing pictures and video for us.
Hayden Busk (Oh Travioso) and Rodney Brown (Wolf Collage) provided amazing music for our videos.
Special thank you to our families, friends, and especially our volunteers for donating their time and energy.

Finally, we’d like to thank the good people at Downtown Streets Team for making the eighth annual ZURB Wired an experience we’ll never forget.

Check Out Our Project!

Revealing Downtown Streets Team’s Print Collateral

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 07:00:00 -0700

Believe it or not, within the 24 hours of Wired, Downtown Streets Team and ZURB worked together to produce a new campaign and translated that campaign into a website experience as well as print collateral. In the video below, you’ll catch a glimpse of the shiny new collateral. To see how the team came to the designs, check out the Notable set.

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Grueling; Grateful; Honored

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 06:00:00 -0700

Grueling, grateful and honored are descriptors that don’t often appear together. When they are spoken together, the context is usually at the end of an epic experience. These were some of the phrases that the Downtown Streets Team gave to the camera after nearly 23 hours of ZURB Wired. Over the past day we’ve worked together to discover insights to grow Downtown Streets Team’s impact, and how to bring those insights to life. Stay tuned for the wrap up blog post where we’ll summarize the day’s collaboration and results.

Letting Off Steam In the Wee Hours

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 05:00:00 -0700

It’s either really late or really early here at Wired and apparently that means it’s photobooth time! It’s a magical time of night where uncontrollable goofiness due to lack of sleep meets props, a camera, and of course Flickr. Downtown Streets Team and ZURBians alike are cutting loose for a welcome break after over 20 hours straight of work. Our 24 hours are almost up, but it looks like we’re in really good shape and everything will ship on time!

Meet the ZURBians!

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Up until this point, we’ve talked about our Progressive Design process and shown our work in various stages of completion, but we’d like to take a moment and shine the light on the men and women that make up the ZURB team. Without futher ado, meet the ZURBians:

We’ve spent the last 20 hours pouring our hearts into this project with Downtown Streets Team, and we’ve still got four more left to go! We’re in the home stretch!

Check Out Our Project!

The Engineers Had a Plan All Along

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 03:00:00 -0700

Last year was pretty wild when we were setting up the Wordpress site. We wanted to come in with a plan this year for Wired, which involves a coordinated approach to setting up Wordpress’ CMS alongside the front-end code. Both the engineering team as well as the designers handling the front-end code are working simultaneously on the same codebase to build from the outside in. They’re meeting in the middle to hook up CMS interactivity in phases as the site’s look and feel develops into its final build. Both teams are working together against the clock to meet in the middle and make that magic happen for the Downtown Streets Team!

On the design side of things, we started with some simple whiteboard wireframes in an ideation session then quickly moved on to sketches to give it a clearer definition. Normally we’d be in Omnigraffle making wireframes after sketching to make a prototype and present a higher fidelity version of what we’re working towards, but… today it’s Wired. We’re working at warp speed! After creating a clickable prototype with our sketch wireframes, we were able to go straight into scaffolding out the site with code. A scaffold might look really unappealing, but it’s the best way to start since it’s only dealing with the layout. If we were to make something really polished immediately, we’d regret it later when we had to make major UI rearrangements. Biting off little pieces and upping the fidelity after each iteration is what works.

Once the scaffolded site has the correct layout, we move into skinning it. This is where the polish comes into play. We’ll do a few rounds of hi-fi mockups to check out some different possibilities for visual styles. After that it’s time to get styling in the code. The scaffold will soon be turning into a full fledged website. Also, remember the engineering team? They’re still there. Now that the site is on its way to getting styles, they’re ready to integrate those into the CMS so that Downtown Streets Team will have an easy way to alter the copy and images displaying on the site without having to go deep into code.

We’re almost on to QA here at ZURB Wired. Exciting times!

Check Out Our Project!

The Website Takes Shape!

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 02:00:00 -0700

In a previous post, we checked out how the visuals were evolving for print. Since then, the web team has continued this exploration few visuals of their own. In this clip, we share a few different visual treatments with the group to narrow down the website’s look and feel. Check it out:

After this group discussion, the team huddled again and continued refining their visual design layout for a further 2 rounds of iteration.

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An Evolving Prototype

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 01:00:00 -0700

We’ve drawn up our sketches refined our layouts, now it’s time for prototypes. Even at this stage, we don’t stop iterating. Each round is a new opportunity to refine, tweak, and improve. We did three rounds of prototypes for the site before we came to something we felt really good about.

Round 1

For this round, we scanned our sketch wireframes and then built a clickable prototype using Notable Prototypes. Without any coding, we’re able to take our sketches, insert some hotspots and click through the pages to get a feel for the flows we’ve created. This makes it super easy to fix any problems navigation or flow issues before we even get to code, saving us tons of work.

Round 2

After we worked out all of the kinks and interaction gaps in the layout that the prototype exposed, we turned up the fidelity and moved on to a coded prototype. This is a basic scaffold to help us figure out where things fit spatially on the final website. You’ll notice that although we’ve moved to code, we haven’t applied any styling. The reason for this is that we’re still tinkering with the layout, and adding styling too early only adds more work for us later on.

Round 3

A lot of the changes in this round are “under the hood.” The HTML and CSS have been greatly refined, and we’ve put a lot more effort into how the site looks at various screen sizes. We’re building the site on Foundation for Sites, our responsive front-end framework, which ensures that it will looks great on desktop, mobile and anything inbetween.

The bones of the site are in place and we can start to focus on adding visual weight and style! We’re getting closer to the final design all the time!!

Check Out Our Project!

Stories Through Pictures

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

The final print materials for the Downtown Streets Team are gone off to the printers! This is always a big milestone every year during ZURB Wired. We’ve previously talked about the initial three directions and settled on “See. Change. Fight.”

We delivered on mailers, flyers, trifolds and a poster meant to capture the story of the individuals who are directly and positively impacted by the Downtown Streets Team programs. So, how did we get to these final designs? Let’s take a look back.

We started by completing an audit of the existing Downtown Streets team materials.

By working through an audit with the Downtown Streets team we continued to build a better understanding of the message they want to convey. The existing materials had a lot of images with drop shadows that were distracting from the overall messaging. The story was there, but the visuals needed to be toned down a little for the copy to be clearer.

After the audit we focused on a few explorations appealing to a wide range of audiences through the brochure: possible team members, donors, employers, and partners. To do this, we layered in the education, the action, and the ability to empower components. Visually, we carried over the color palette from the existing logo and brand, the gritty street and urban feel, while giving it a refreshed look. This was the first pass and there were three other competing mockups, but the style shown above was the most compelling of the set.

For the final iteration, we introduced a secondary color to accent the purple, highlight the quote, the team member’s story as well as the cities where Downtown Streets Team targets their efforts. The process involved a couple of iterations and an extension on the print deadline, but those guys over at Big Ink Printing and Zazzle were very forgiving and gave us a pass, took our files and are printin’ up a storm. We’re back on track to do some good with Downtown Streets Team with some fresh, new marketing materials.

Check Out Our Project!

Reaching People with a Clear Message

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 23:00:00 -0700

ZURB’s design process begins with defining the problem and understanding organizational needs. This includes aspects such as the organization’s business needs, mission, culture, and target clients. Through defining the challenge, insights arise. These insights are pushed forward to explore opportunities. This exploration begins with sketching, and structure becomes more clear through wireframes and prototyping.

The Social team went through this process, starting with an audit exploring different facets of homelessness and looking to define how Downtown Streets Team can use social media to grow its impact. The team examined how Downtown Streets Team might increase traffic to their site through Facebook and Twitter. The team identified that the concept See, Fight, Change can be applied to different videos for social media. The social team is exploring these different concepts in a series of small videos. Exploration of these videos began with sketches:

Through these sketches, the team was able to quickly put a large amount of ideas up for discussion and quickly gain feedback. It’s through this mixture of visual representation of ideas and conversation, that teams can quickly move from insight to opportunity. For us today during ZURB Wired, this involves several rounds of sketches to move the best ideas forward into prototyping where there are also several rounds of iteration.

As the team developed a stronger understanding of the concepts to translate into clear messages within video clips, they began putting together storyboard sketches. Whereas sketching was about discovering insights, storyboarding was about bringing those insights forward into several executions of unified messages. The team explored several storyboards for the social videos. The videos are being designed to be used on social channels with different promotional campaigns, with a focus of engaging users with simple calls to action to donate to Downtown Streets Team or to get involved in their cause.

The purpose of storyboarding at this stage is high-level exploration of storytelling themes. The Social Team’s exploration of five social campaign concepts is summarized with a brief synopsis.

After the social team determined the basic messaging strategy behind these five campaigns, they began iterating on tactics to use within social media assets to funnel people into Downtown Street Team’s donation pages. The tactics explored are templates for Facebook and Twitter involving both video and still images, as well as workflows.

(We'd like to thank G-Technology for generously donating an awesome Thunderbolt drive that's speeding up our video editing!)

Check Out Our Project!

Sketch Wireframes Are the Blueprint

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 22:50:00 -0700

Here at ZURB, the Sharpie is our best friend. Before we write a single line of code, we sketch out our layouts to ensure our flows make sense. The reason? There’s no faster or cheaper way to weed out bad ideas than good ol’ sketching! Through quick iterations on paper, we’re able to get to solutions quicker, edit on the fly and crank out tons of ideas.

In this case, we made most of these opportunity sketches on our whiteboards so that the whole team could give feedback on the ideas. We even did a quick audit of the existing Downtown Streets Team website, writing down each page on individual sticky notes so we could rearrange and consolidate their sitemap. Once we felt good about the sketches and our layouts, we brought our creations to life via these sketch wireframes.

Homepage is Home Base

The Downtown Streets Team homepage has to convey a lot of information to several different groups of people, so it was essential that we come up with a layout that makes it easy to get to the most important pages of the site. Our new design consists of an overview of the Downtown Streets Team mission, testimonials, benefits for volunteers and team members, our communities and how to immediately get started. That’s a lot of important information and messaging on a single page.

Purposeful Design Patterns

One of the new pages on the site is a Communities page that highlights the different areas within which the Downtown Streets Team operates for each location.

As with any non-profit, keeping donation options clear and easily accessible is a major priority. In addition to some prime real estate as a button in the header, Donate gets its own page that educates users on all of the different ways they can donate to Downtown Streets Team! Psychological triggers play an important factor in this regard.

Using tried and true, reusable patterns in the new layout helps keep our code clean and easy for third parties to edit if needed. An example of this can be seen in our Success Stories layout, a 4x8 column structure that makes it really easy to show information.

Work Smart AND Hard

Going through our pages, you can see that we are re-using the page layout patterns and elements that we have set-up in earlier wireframes. By working smart, we’re creating a clean layout with clearly defined hierarchy, the perfect blueprint for us to start building on and adding extra polish!

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Keeping ZURB Wired

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:00:00 -0700

The operation of ZURB Wired involves a team of people filling logistical and marketing roles. Shawna, aka Mama ZURB, is probably the primary driver of Wired behind the scenes. We took a few minutes to catch up with her to learn more about how to keep a team going for 24 hours straight. The goal is to keep all of the humans, well, human.

Behind-the-scenes rule number one: keep people hydrated. The brain and muscles are 75% water, and keeping them going for 24 hours straight is going to be difficult without staying hydrated. Besides the meals and snacks throughout the event, we arranged refresh kits so people can freshen up in the early morning.

Behind-the-scenes rule number two: keep people well fed. We agree with the maxim “stay hungry,” but not when you’re working for 24 hours straight. ZURB is always a treasure city of tasty treats, and tonight is no exception.

Behind-the-scenes rule number three: keep people having fun. The journey during ZURB Wired is a fun challenge. Nonetheless, we provide additional fun with plenty of room for tomfoolery with our prop-filled photo booth.

Meals served (including inbetween meal snacks): 8

Cupcakes ordered: 96

Varieties of beverages available: 36

Glasses of water Shawna wants us to drink per hour: 1

We've Hit the Halfway Mark!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:00:00 -0700

We’re now halfway through ZURB Wired 2015, and it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions. From unbridled excitement during our morning icebreaker to the nervous panic of trying to make our print deadline, Wired has challenged both ZURBians and the Downtown Streets Team in many ways. But we’re incredibly excited about how things are progressing and it’s absolutely thrilling to see the ideas we sketched out only hours early come to life!

The biggest challenge during the first half of the day is the same every year, meeting the print deadline. By remaining focused and delaying dinner, the print team was able to finish their designs and get those final assets zipped up and sent off to the printer. More on that in the next post.

It hasn’t all been nerves and sweating bullets, we’ve shared a ton of laughs, blasted some tunes over the speakers and even found a few moments to prank each other. We’ve also got over 300 pictures up on Flickr that you can check out on our Photostream but here’s a few of our favorites:

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We Made Our Print Deadline!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 19:00:00 -0700

There was definitely some nail biting, but we made our print deadline! The trifold brochure, mailer and small flyer have all been sent out to the team at Big Ink Printing and will be ready in just a few hours. They also finished up a gorgeous color poster to be printed by our good friends over at Zazzle.

Kudos to the print team for cranking out the designs in the nick of time. Now for dinner!

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Translating Downtown Street Team’s Mission and Culture Into Clear Messaging

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:00:00 -0700

The content team has been hard at work finding a messaging direction that depicts the Downtown Streets Team’s mission and culture. They’re continuing to refine the core message, which will shape long and short form copy. Check out the team’s messaging brainstorming here.

Brand Promise

The Content Team has refined the core elements of Downtown Streets Team’s culture that ultimately shape its brand promise:

See

The team has identified see as a description of what it must help the community do as a first step to fighting homelessness and making change happen. Many within the community don’t see the whole story of homelessness, and without that it’s hard to get the community to take on the homelessness fight.

Change

When communities, organizations, and citizens see the whole story of homelessness, and commit to fighting it, change for the better is inevitable. This change is universal, and isn’t restricted to one person or organization. Positive change that comes from reintegrating people into society benefits everyone.

Fight

Through helping the community see the whole story of homelessness, the Downtown Streets Team seeks to actualize the community to fight homelessness. This fight involves donating both time and funds.

Stay tuned to see how the team further refines these core brand elements and translates them into messaging!

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Checking in with Downtown Streets Team

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 15:00:00 -0700

Although ZURB Wired has a pace all its own, moving at extreme speed is pretty normal for us ZURBians. As we enter the phase of Wired, working through visuals, content direction, and more, we wanted to check in with Downtown Streets Team to get a feel for what they thought of the work so far.

“It’s been a really fascinating process and so fast moving…”

The Downtown Streets Team is extremely passionate about their cause and really appreciate the unique perspective ZURBians bring to the project. One of the major goals of this year’s Wired is to take everything Downtown Streets Team does and distill it down into a simple message people can easily understand.

It’s absolutely thrilling to see the ideas take shape. We’ll be posting some more samples of the work in progress soon!

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Status Report!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:00:00 -0700

We’re now six hours into our 24-hour race to help Downtown Streets Team create an amazing marketing campaign. Let’s check-in with each of the teams to see where they are.

Content Team

The Content Team is auditing Downtown Street Team’s current messaging. They’re putting together an outline of current messaging elements, and are identifying ways to bring more clarity to their brand message. The team is pushing hard to discover a central message upon which they will then establish tone and style for long and short form copy.

Web Team

The Web Team are auditing Downtown Streets Team’s current website, going through the site map, and making sure that they move the right pages forward. This audit involves making sure that all of the required pages are verified, and moved forward into the design process.

Engineering Team

The Engineering Team has divided and conquered. As the team responsible for the backend implementation after the website design has been completed, they’re focusing on making sure they’re ready for the build later tonight. They’ve come up with a game plan and a set of tasks to prepare for the build. In short order, they assigned responsibilities to make sure everything is ready to go tonight.

Social Team

The Social Team is currently helping the content team get to the right general brand messaging, to then plug that into social media copy and visual collateral.

Visuals Team

The visuals team have come up with three visual explorations, and are now narrowing it down to one. They’re hard at work judging each approach, and looking for the right visual direction to support the Downtown Streets Team brand.

Each team is pushing hard to turn their insights into opportunities. Soon, teams will be making decisions to move work forward and start adding fidelity to designs, and bringing them to life—stay tuned!

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Choosing a Path

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:00:00 -0700

We’re getting closer to a campaign direction for the Downtown Streets Team. So far, we’ve broken up our project into Content, Visuals & Print, Website and Social. We’re going through and tackling these individually as we work towards those end deliverables. We’ve taken five different directions, and cut it to three to make the message clean and clear. We’re now at the tail end of getting to the main direction that’s going to drive the rest of our teams and the content that they create.

Downtown Streets Team wants to end homelessness and we’ve been exploring three distinct campaign directions after moving on to the second round of our Brainstorming sessions. We’re looking at three separate ideas ranging from color spectrums to strong calls to action. Here’s a brief rundown of some possible campaign directions:

We want to “solve the puzzle” by rearranging the pieces that have fallen apart to fix the problem. This is specifically targeting the idea of “one person at a time”
“Homelessness is a Spectrum” - This approach gives us a view of the world in black and white representing all of the triggers that lead to homelessness juxtaposed with a world of color representing helping themselves to get out of that world.
“See. Fight. End” - A more aggressive approach with provocative language and a strong call to action.

The story remains the same, Downtown Streets Team has a system to get homeless people off the streets to make them self sufficient productive members of society. We're hashing out how Downtown Streets Team can communicate their mission to the community. Polishing the story is key to helping potential donors see why they should donate time or funds to help Downtown Streets Team achieve their mission. We still have quite a lot of work to do, but we’re going through the process to get there. Click here to see our progress, let us know what you think!

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Staying Laser Focused

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:00:00 -0700

ZURB HQ becomes a hive of activity during each Wired, and we stay on track by using our Progressive Design philosophy. We also use a method called timeboxing, which involves setting strict limits on the time we’ll spend on each activity. Decisions are made faster by reviewing design work, even if the work is not polished. It’s all about collaboration and continuous use of the feedback loop. By bringing in the feedback sooner, we’re able to iterate faster. This helps us achieve small wins, build momentum and get us closer to the best solution, faster!

(Timelapse video by Tina Case)

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This Morning's Forecast: Brainstorms

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:00:00 -0700

As Bryan’s written about on the blog, getting started with a volume of ideas and then filtering down can really help build momentum. It’s critical in a project like this to get that momentum going early and carry it out through the day.

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How Much Need Finding Does It Take To Get To The Center of a Design Challenge?

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 10:00:00 -0700

Well, we have to Open Up the Challenge first, and that’s where we are now—the Define phase! We’re two hours into our 24-hour race to help Downtown Streets Team create an amazing marketing campaign. Right now, we’re opening up the challenge to discover insights into how to shape a great campaign. This involves splitting up into teams, brainstorming, putting ideas onto paper, and then selecting the best ideas.

Check out the teams' brainstorming sessions on the whiteboards in this Notable set.

The teams for Wired are Content, Web, Engineering, Social, and Visuals. The Content team is tasked with shaping the structure of messaging and storytelling. The Visuals team is tasked with creating the visual assets that will make up the presentation layer of the website as well as print collateral. The Web team is tasked with designing the Downtown Streets Team’s new website. The Engineering team is tasked with standing the site up in WordPress.

Why Is The Define Phase Important?

The ZURB process starts with a Define phase is about coming together as a group so that each team has a common understanding of what the challenge is, and how everyone can move forward in their respective functional areas.

The next step is for each team to present their best ideas, so that the larger group can quickly choose the right opportunities to push forward. Stay tuned as we move into Ideation where we’ll start sketching and wireframing!

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What We'll Accomplish in 24 Hours

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:00:00 -0700

John Leenane and Chris Richardson outlined some of the goals of the next 24 hours as well as the impact ZURB Wired will have on the Downtown Streets Team as they work to fulfill their mission of ending homelessness.

Since 2005, Downtown Streets Team has been empowering men and women to transform their lives through work experience programs that restore hope and dignity and put people on the path to self sufficiency. Their model is award-winning and effective, and has had a huge impact on the people, businesses and environment in the cities they operate in.

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Starting the Day Off Right - Breakfast, Laughs and Creativity!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:30:00 -0700

And here we go! ZURB Wired 2015 has begun and there’s a tremendous amount of energy and excitement here at ZURB HQ! This is our eighth ZURB Wired and also happens to be the Downtown Streets Team’s 10th anniversary.

Wired begins with breakfast, some inspiring words from Bryan and a special Friday15-esque icebreaker to get our creative juices flowing. The icebreaking activity was led by Ibie, who handed us paper and Sharpies, and gave us all five minutes to sketch our perfect vision of the Downtown Streets Team KARTMA cart in any location in the world (or beyond). The results were creative, hilarious and completely absurd:

Mandi’s cart was actually an automated drone that delivered her coffee at any time
Tim’s cart was rollin’ on dubs and blasted the latest Hip Hop hits
Shawna’s cart was an intergalactic, feline piloted rocketship
Geoff’s cart served pizza in a shnazzy game show fashion

After the laughs, Bryan broke us up into our teams for the morning brainstorming session. The energy is high, the ideas are flowing and the music is bumping. 23 hours to go...

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ZURB 2015: It’s Showtime!

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:00:00 -0700

We've officially kicked off ZURBwired 2015 with Downtown Streets Team!

Join us over the next 24-hours because we'll be publishing our progress through blog posts, photos and videos. Feel free to also browse through the many blog posts and videos to see what we’ve accomplished during previous Wired events. ZURB WIred is a yearly tradition that we’re very proud of!

Here’s what we’re going to do in the next 24-hours:

A brand new responsive website will be designed and brought live
New print materials including posters, mailers and more will be in our hands
Digital media including social messaging and newsletter templates will be created

Follow along with this blog (We’re posting each hour!), send us some love on Twitter (Use the #ZURBWired hashtag!) and watch us on Periscope (We’ll send a tweet when we’re broadcasting!) to see what amazing things can be accomplished in 24 hours! You’ll even have a chance to participate in the project by leaving feedback on the work as we create it, so stay tuned!

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ZURB Wired 2014 Wrap-up

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 08:10:00 -0700

The whole team committed to — and accomplished — a staggering amount of work in a single sleepless day. Now it’s time to stretch, contemplate breakfast, and look back at what we created. ### Printed Collateral The print team hustled to beat their ultra-tight deadline. In spite of technical and design challenges, they produced an entire campaign that included: - Brand new branding and illustrations to match - A 8.5 X 11 poster - A 12 X 18 poster - A trifold brochure - A greeting/thank you card - Postcards The print team also produced materials to be delivered as digital files to SHCS and printed as necessary later. - A poster for their donation barrels - A drive kit - A promotional building banner - A sponsorship brochure ### A Website Redesign and Implementation Drawing visual inspiration from the print team, the website went from zero to launch in less than one day thanks to the tireless efforts of our web team. At least, they kept each other psyched throughout the day … and night … and next morning. Their work included: - A comprehensive content overhaul - A new custom WordPress theme - Custom fields for page headings specific to their design - A calendar/events manager ### A New Promotional Video We used existing footage and captured new shots for a public service announcement. This two-minute video promotes the upcoming holiday donation drive, calling on people to donate food or volunteer their time. It also tells the story of Erica, a current Sacred Heart Community Service employee who began her relationship with SHCS when she needed them most. ### Thanks to our supporters More than 30 people spent the day here at ZURB World Headquarters — but we weren’t alone. We’d like to thank everyone who supported us and stopped by to cheer us on since 8AM yesterday. - **Starbucks in downtown Campbell** provided our evening coffee. - **Frost Cupcakes in Campbell** kept our sugar levels high with free confections. - **Spread Sandwiches and Armadillo Willy’s** for not only getting our orders right, but delivering on time. - **Zazzle and PrintHQ** for their expedient print services. - **Our families, friends, and especially our volunteers** who donated their time, talent, patience and — in one case — cookies. Finally, we’d like to thank the good people at Sacred Heart Community Services for making the seventh annual ZURB Wired a rousing success.

Website: Feature complete!

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 08:00:00 -0700

If this year’s theme was one of unity, no other project fit better than the new website. Designing, building and implementing the site took the combined forces of engineering, content and design — all of whom worked right from the start down to the wire to get things done.

See more screen shots on Influence

The features include: - Auto-hiding navigation - Google translation - A comprehensive footer - Hand-drawn icons — and by “hand-drawn” we mean “created overnight, specifically for this project” - An events calendar We’ll be thrilled to see everything come together when the site officially launches next week!

New Promotional Video for Sacred Heart!!!

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 08:00:00 -0700

Yes, we did it! Together with the SHCS team we created a new promotional video to energize the community and tell their powerful story. This involved some outdoor shooting, inclusion of SHSC photos, interviews with SHCS team members then music and video editing. It's a lot of work but the results are super...a must see video here!!!

Catching up with the Teams!

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 07:00:00 -0700

We just had a whirlwind of a ride going through this year's ZURB Wired, but we're not done just yet! Sacred Heart Community Service has been really great and we all are really enjoying each other's company. Overall we're wrapping it up in the QA phase. Meanwhile some of the teams that hadn't been heard got some love. Here are their stories!

Run to the Printers!

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 06:00:00 -0700

It was time to drive to the printers and collect the first batch of print materials. We returned with a batch of trifold brochures plus greeting cards. The ZURB team of Alina, ibie, Jessica, Jennifer and Alex put a lot of design hours into this effort, and we all gathered around to see the result. Check out the video to see everyone’s reactions.

With a Lean, Solid Team You Can Accomplish Anything

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 05:00:00 -0700

We're not just talking about our ZURB Wired team in general, but each individual group. We're all tackling a pretty monumental task! This brings us to our video content team! They've been hard at work all day putting together a video message in line with Sacred Heart Community Service’s mission: to feed thousands of families and give thousands of kids a present to look forward to during the holidays. Here are some impressions from the team as they were making the video!

The Web and Engineering Teams Show Stylish Progress

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 03:00:00 -0700

The hour was late but excitement was high as we gathered ’round a wall-mounted screen to see another round of work. It wasn’t just any show; the web and engineering teams gave us a double feature. We saw scaffolding and visuals — the web pages’ structures and moods, respectively — already fit into [a WordPress theme](http://jointswp.com/ "A Blank Foundation 5 WordPress Theme by @jeremyenglert") tailor made for the content team’s needs. Using select design elements from the print team’s work, the visuals definitely fit the larger campaign. Warm colors, hand-drawn line art, the same type families and a timeline (familiar to all who saw the printed pieces) earned nods of approval from the audience. The web team played a ragged-edged heart motif against crisp, spacious, regions with a thin, geometric typeface for a surprisingly balanced composition. In short, it looked great. The scaffolding allowed for flexible headings beyond what WordPress supplied. Our engineers worked hard to make the changes required while keeping the pages easy for Sacred Heart Community Service to edit. Even with eyes slightly glazed, the assembled group offered [some sharp feedback](https://zurb.com/university/design-feedback "Master Design Feedback | online class information at ZURB University"). From this we learned: - The unorthodox handwriting font that looked great on posters didn’t work so well as website subheaders. But on main headers, it looked fine. - The calls to action were a little *too* [harmonious with the rest of the page](https://zurb.com/university/lessons/7 "How to Improve Design by Coordinating Colors | how-to lesson at ZURB University"). They needed to stand out. - The team had many suggestions to solve certain CSS challenges with overlapping images. In all, things are looking on-track for a successful website launch shortly after dawn.

Fun, Unicorns and Massages!

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:00:00 -0700

Thar be some fun amiss, you say?

If it weren't for some fun, ZURB Wired wouldn't be possible. Levity is a necessity and luckily, ZURB is well supplied with nerf guns, 122 cupcakes (thanks to Frost Cupcakery's donation!), red bull, hotdog costumes, unicorn masks and of course Shelby!

You might as well call Shelby our CRO or "Chief Relaxation Officer". She provides the office with massage therapy, yoga and stretching tips to boot! Without her it would be hard to power on through to the next day.

And then there were unicorns...

Well, a little known fact about ZURBians is that they occasionally turn into unicorns around midnight when drinking Red Bull. We'd not be big fans of werewolves but 'were-unicorns' ... Who knew?

Zany Photo Booth Action

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:00:00 -0700

Every year after midnight we let off a little steam with a crazy photo booth shoot. It’s a long-standing tradition of doing absolutely anything you want — as long as it’s random. [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/zurbinc/sets/72157647749641552/ "ZURB Wired 2014 | photos at Flickr") [Catch all the action in our Flickr stream!](https://www.flickr.com/photos/zurbinc/sets/72157647749641552/ "ZURB Wired 2014 | photos at Flickr")

Finalized Web Visuals! The Build is Underway!

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 23:00:00 -0700

###Here are the finalists!

Normally going through the visual build and redesign of a website would be a one to two week process with a client. ZURB Wired condenses this process into 24 hours so we're forced to make the hard decisions at a faster pace. The kid gloves are off, as they say. Making the hard choice may not be easy, but it must be done — and ZURB Wired is definitely no exception! There is a point of no return, so we use a process that [includes the feedback of our peers](http://zurb.com/article/1205/17-design-feedback-techniques-that-influe "17 Design Feedback Techniques that Influence Others and Win Meetings by ZURB") in the decision. The choices above represent three distinct types of messaging for Sacred Heart Community Service. Even though the different iterations have the same content — technically — the way they represent this content matters! The difference between emphasizing the color of a login button vs. a donate button could mean that your conversion on potential donors suffers. **[The consequences are real](http://zurb.com/quips/1149 "red buttons increase conversions | Design Quips from ZURB")**. Without further ado, here's the winner! You can see how we got to the final iteration and check out the final designs here on Influence!

Taking Care of the Team (and Maybe Making a Suggestion)

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 22:00:00 -0700

Not long ago, we noticed our office manager/office Mom Shawna carrying little colored bags around the office. She stopped at various desks, eventually reaching everyone in the building. We looked inside the bags to find Altoids, bottles of mouthwash, toothbrushes, toothpaste and even deodorant. Maybe it was common courtesy. Maybe it was her way of telling us that some us might need help with — shall we say — our *aromatic* qualities after 16+ hours on the job. Little thoughts like this are important when 30 people work for 24 hours on three media for one campaign.

Survival tips

Conducting a marathon work session frays nerves and taxes our physiology. It’s more than getting tired — fatigue affects everything we do, and how well we do it. Tricks to staying active for 24 hours is mostly common sense, but it was worth repeating to the team two days before the event.

Get enough sleep the day before. Not too much, but you want to start rested.
Hydrate. Drink water, tea, or other non-fizzy beverages throughout the day.
Put the brakes on coffee after lunch. Many people crash more than buzz after a steady stream of caffeine.
Be prepared to be mentally tired. “It can get a little dicey at night. We push people to do this — trying to do this in 24 hours is insane. But we’ve always done it,” a Wired veteran said.
Don’t try to sleep Friday morning. Aim for noon or 1pm. Sleep three hours at most, and then get up and walk. You’ll be back on your sleep schedule by 9pm.

All this came in handy after the first 14 hours on the job. It’s well worth the effort to help Sacred Heart Community Service celebrate their 50th year.

Print Team Squeezes Past a Tight Deadline

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:30:00 -0700

The design team had their work cut out — or should we say cropped? — with print production. The 6PM deadline kept their workflow extra tight. From [their explorations earlier in the day](http://zurb.com/wired/885/sketches-sketches-and-more-sketches "Sketches, Sketches and More Sketches | article by ZURB"), they developed final InDesign comps. Iteration upon rapid iteration resulted in: - A 12×18 poster - A trifold brochure - A greeting/thank you card - Postcards [](http://new.influenceapp.com/projects/172-zurbwired/pages/f452b041a89a73f2ef4c "Print material reference | Influence") Then their deadline slipped a little. Undaunted, they saw the work through, and had all collateral done by 7PM. That pushed dinner back a little, but a spot of hunger was quickly assuaged with a steady stream of snacks and coffee. With the bulk of their work done, the print team turned to web support, turning out scaffolding in a quick sprint to give the website a boost. It’s all online: [You can peek at the print materials on Influence](http://new.influenceapp.com/projects/172-zurbwired/pages/f452b041a89a73f2ef4c "Print material reference | Influence").

Halfway Check-in

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:00:00 -0700

We’ve passed the halfway mark! Everything is moving in the right direction. Time to recharge the batteries for the nightshift. We’ve made a few key deadlines, especially in getting the brochure, poster and card templates out to our partners for printing overnight. Thanks to [Zazzle](http://www.zazzle.com/ "Zazzle | Custom T-Shirts, Personalized Gifts, Posters, Art, and more") and [PrintHQ](http://www.printhq.com/ "The online home of Progressive Solutions")! Let’s check in with Alina, Bryan and Jay for more details.

What is a prototype, anyway?

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:00:00 -0700

So, we brainstorm a product, iterate through ideas, build lo-fi wireframes, then hi-fis, a prototype or two, and then launch it. Seeing the process through is rewarding, exciting — and we admit, sometimes a relief. We love seeing people use our products. But before we reach that point, we have to test. We want to find the bugs. The gaps in user interaction flow. One missing </div> can make a world of difference. That’s why we always [test, test and test again](https://zurb.com/university/lessons/50 "ZURB U | Save Your Product From Launch Failures | how-to lesson at ZURB University") to make sure everything works before launch. And while we always test with real devices, testing workflow begins long before we touch code. ### Testing With Clickable Paper Mockups We import our scanned sketches into [Solidify, our prototyping app](http://solidifyapp.com/ "Solidify | Quick way to build prototypes for user testing"), to create a series of graphics with *hotspots* — areas of an image we can tap or click to visit other sketches. This simple technique helps us work out workflow hiccups long before they reveal themselves in code, when they’re more costly to fix. Sure enough, our web team discovered a few areas that needed work in the new SHCS website. They iterated several times until the prototype hit [the right mood](http://zurb.com/wired/884/creative-direction-uncovers-a-visual-stor "Creative Direction Uncovers a Visual Story | article by ZURB") from our earlier opportunity and ideation sketches. Taking time to scan a stack of paper, sift through images and link up hotspots may seem like a waste of time — especially since we’re on a 24-hour deadline. But we’ve found that sketched prototypes *save* time in the long run… even when “long run” means early the next morning. [Stroll through the wireframe yourself.](http://new.influenceapp.com/projects/172-zurbwired/pages/e2e14135b7299a8b6fa2 "Sacred Heart CS mockup | prototype by ZURB")

Prototying Check-in

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:00:00 -0700

The web team’s morning sketches came together into [high-fidelity wireframes](http://zurb.com/word/wireframing "Wireframing | article at ZURB") this afternoon — that is, a walkthrough of their website without code. Yes, they tested the website with hand-drawn sketches. Wireframes let the team find the most efficient ways to help the public donate or volunteer, and other people find the services they need. Once they nailed it, they built a prototype before starting to hammer out code, confident that they were on the right track. What’s a prototype? That’s coming soon. [See their hi-fi work for yourself on Influence](http://new.influenceapp.com/projects/172-zurbwired/pages/4ea73156d9a875e4628c "website wireframes | resources at Influence").

Sacred Heart Check-in

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:40:00 -0700

Working through ideation and content production parts of the design process, we paused to ask our friends from Sacred Heart Community Services what they thought about the work so far. They said they’re excited to see how the design process creates products that tell people what SHCS is all about. And the deadline pressure makes people produce immense amounts of quality work. That comes, in part, from our philosophy of opportunity and ideation sketching — tons of Sharpie sketches and Post-it notes to make sure we’re on the right track before starting to implement.

“We can’t really believe how fast ZURB moves.”

We’re all encouraged by the work so far, even though the pace is frantic. But what excites us most is seeing it come together in [hi-fi wireframes](http://zurb.com/university/lessons/41 "Turn Your Ideas Into Solid Wireframes | how-to lesson at ZURB University"), which lead to final comps — an important deadline for the print team’s 6pm printer deadline.

Lunch & Flickr

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:20:00 -0700

Feels like the morning flew by. With so many teams iterating through so many tasks on such a tight deadline, getting bogged in details is easy. Sometimes we like to step back and look at the bigger picture: where we are and who’s doing what. [Our design process](http://zurb.com/word/design-thinking "Design Thinking | article at ZURB") is collaborative, and we find that keeping up with each other’s work is both inspiring — and practical. Engineers need to plan for visuals. Visual designers rely on content. Content creators work within engineering limits. So we all work together. And yet, we also work apart. After our [initial brainstorms this morning](http://zurb.com/wired/882/cranking-through-ideas-discovering-with-t "Cranking Through Ideas, Discovering With Teams | article by ZURB"), each discipline found their own work areas to concentrate on what they did best. That’s why [we stopped for a comprehensive review](http://zurb.com/wired/886/work-session-review-shows-great-progress "Work Session Review Shows Great Progress by ZURB | article at ZURB") just before lunch. But enough of the high-level stuff. [Here’s an inside look](https://www.flickr.com/photos/zurbinc "ZURB Wired stream | photos at Flickr") at what’s happened so far at ZURB Wired.

Creative Direction Uncovers a Visual Story

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:00:00 -0700

It’s more than a look. There’s more than picking your favorite colors. Creative Direction is the process of discovering your project’s story. In this project phase we explore what-ifs in a visual way. To understand that, we need to pick the term apart:

Creative: Figuring out your story.
Direction: Committing to that story.

Creative exploration reveals what your product or service making is really about — and how to express that idea to people. The right tone and mood tell people what to expect, like a good promise.

As you might imagine, details are scarce at this point. Nothing’s sacred, and we’re not afraid to start over. In fact, the fewer details the better because we don’t want to waste time on a concept destined for the recycle bin.

So, what direction did we create for SHCS? See the ideas for yourself.

Work Session Review Shows Great Progress

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:00:00 -0700

We interviewed the team leaders to see their progress so far. Good news: Every team has kept its schedule so far. At noon the teams reconvened to show their morning work to the team. We all met around one of the office’s wall-mounted screens — and liked what we saw. ### Engineering Preps for WordPress The developers had done more than hash out the best way to build out their work — they’d set up their local Macs as Apache servers. They also prepped the old website for its impending DNS change to make a seamless transition to the new site at 8AM PST tomorrow. It may be 20+ hours away, but we when we say “go live!” we mean “now!” ### “What Do We Need to Communicate?” The question facing the content team was simple to ask, challenging to answer. The team explored many ideas, settling on a storytelling approach. Who SHCS helps, how they do it, and how the community gets involved was one such story. They have to move fast because the print team’s deadline looms. ### The Print Team Comes Together The designers in print showed us their concepts — “look at the ideas, not the details” — in typography, warm colors and people-centric photos. Ignoring the technique, we saw the message: Many elements coming together to a single purpose. ### Web Design Jams Through Ideas The web team challenged themselves to work fast. Each member created 10 concepts in 10 minutes, and spent as long reviewing each other’s work. After an hour they’d developed three style tiles, or the general look & feel of how the site should *feel.* To see more, have a look at the Opportunities in Influence

Sketches, Sketches and More Sketches!

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 13:00:00 -0700

The dream team combo of ZURB + Sacred Heart CS is pluggin’ along and gettin’ things done at ZURB Wired!

We're moving along quickly and have taken the next step in ideation in the form of opportunity sketches. These explore the possible directions where our next round of refined sketches will go. They’re rough, but they’re ready to drive the action forward. We’re only four hours in and we’ve already accomplished so much!

The drawings are telling us a story about donating, giving and figuring out how to involve people that are getting aid. They start as rough ideas, but it's getting us closer to figuring out how to bring Sacred Heart CS closer to the community that they've created. The messaging that they've had trouble with is the perception of charity vs. lending a helping hand. It's easy to receive food then just come back for more, but it takes more effort to create a self-sustaining individual who can give back. These opportunity sketches are bringing us closer to that goal as we move forward with ZURB Wired!

Check out some more of our sketches!!

Jamming With Ideas and Concept Reviews

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:00:00 -0700

After the morning scrum everyone jumped into groups of four or five people to jam on ideas for the overall campaign. After an hour everyone went to each team’s office in turn to review each other’s work. Each brainstorming group — which had a mix of many disciplines — had to answer certain questions. “In one sentence, what is Sacred Heart?” “What is the theme for this holiday program?” The nonprofit’s purpose, outreach, brand identity … everything was queried and rethought over the next hour. When time was up, we ventured to each other’s offices to see the ideas on sticky notes and whiteboards. The results were posted to Influence — want to see? Check out the Theme Brainstorm Kickoff.

Cranking Through Ideas, Discovering With Teams

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:00:00 -0700

We’re going hard here at ZURB Wired! The whole team is in the ideation phase. This is the initial step of the design process where we brainstorm ideas and fully flesh out what Sacred Heart CS does. The goal is to find the core meaning of what they stand for.

For our first deliverable, the ZURBwired team got into smaller groups of 4-5 people to brainstorm on the different components for this project.

Part 1:

What is the theme for this holiday campaign?
Anchors the campaign: headline, imagery

Part 2:

What is Sacred Heart, in one sentence?
things people should know about Sacred Heart
SH purpose in a few sentences
of SH identity: Colors, Feeling, Language, Imagery
tagline for SH

The team is wrapping up as I type! It seems like we’re “Making Hope a Tradition.”

Here's what we came up with in our mind-mapping session!

How 24 Hours Will Make a Difference

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 10:30:00 -0700

Bryan Zmijewski and Jay Pecot introduce us to the idea behind this year’s ZURB Wired: its goals, and most of all, its importance. Sacred Heart Community Service helps more than 7,000 families in the Bay Area, and while the holidays are the focal point of their mission, their efforts help people in need all year long — just as they have for the past five decades.

Wired Begins With Breakfast, Ice and Understanding

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 09:00:00 -0700

This is it! Here we go! ZURB Wired 2014 is officially underway, and everyone’s stoked to make a difference with our friends at Sacred Heart CS.

This is our seventh annual ZURB Wired — and Sacred Heart CS’s 50th anniversary. We started the day with a hearty breakfast, a kickoff meeting and a crazy fun icebreaker. ZURB Designer and Friday 15 leader ibie gave everyone five minutes to sketch three gifts they’d share with the world. All 33 folks from ZURB, Sacred Heart and our volunteers put Sharpies to paper and came up with some great ideas. Popular topics included:

Housing
Happiness
Vacations
Opportunity
Food (especially pizza)
Clean water

Net access
Apple gear
Cats
Corgis — “the cat of dogs”
Legos
Canons that shoot gifts

After the icebreaker we broke up into brainstorming teams to break down and understand the problems we’d tackle the rest of the day. In spite of potentially rainy weather, the day looks bright for ZURB Wired 2014. Twenty-three hours and counting…

ZURB Wired 2014 — here we go!

Tue, 16 Sep 2014 16:00:00 -0700

We've officially kicked off ZURBwired 2014 with Sacred Heart!

Over the course of the next 24 hours, we'll publish our progress through blog posts, photos and videos. If you haven't seen our previous wireds, you can check out the previous years to see what an amazing group of people can accomplish under a 24 hour ticking clock.

Our goals for Sacred Heart CS are pretty ambitious, but we'll power through and get it done!

Complete website overhaul
New print materials
Digital media including social messaging and newsletter templates

Follow along with this blog over the next 24 hours as we race to help this nonprofit create an amazing marketing campaign for both their 50th anniversary and holiday drive!

ZURB Wired Ends With All Flags Flying

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 09:00:00 -0700

The past 24 hours was a whirlwind of creativity that demanded our resilience and tested our nerves. To call it "challenging" belittles the amount of work required. But we saw it through. At 7:40am Friday, the whole team gathered to watch the freshly-rendered promotional video — more than 1,400 long minutes after we began.

We also saw the newly-launched website, live at 25.rebuildingtogetherpeninsula.org. Take a look:

Everyone did an amazing amount of work. Materials we had printed included:

Promotional posters
25th anniversary invitations
Thank-you cards
Information brochures
Inserts for the brochures — an item outside the original scope

Our print team also developed collateral that will be delivered digitally for print at a later date. These included:

3x6 Banner design
Bus ad design
Yard and 18x24" vehicle signs
T-shirt
25th logo design
Letterhead for 25th
6 branding Sticker designs

The microsite turned out to be quite a lot of work. We created and finished a fully-functional responsive site with:

A secure event enrollment form
Responsively-designed emails
Auto-generated PDF tickets

They also produced a CMS that let administrators:

Schedule and manage events
Review ticket holders
Enter and manage "special case" attendees

The content team developed:

A strategic marketing plan
Facebook cover images
Twitter backgrounds
And content for all of the teams above

We'd like to thank everyone who dedicated their time to make this awesome event possible. We would especially like to thank Rebuilding Together Peninsula for joining us for our sixth ZURB Wired!

Rebuilding Together Peninsula - Celebrating 25 Years: The Video

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Our 24 hours of sketching, coding, brainstorming, editing and recording is winding down and coming to a close. In our earlier blog post, we introduced you to Jordan and Arthur. The mad men behind the visuals for Rebuilding Together Peninsula's 25th anniversary celebration. In the early stages of production, they went out into the community and spoke with people who have been touched by the work of Rebuilding Together Peninsula. Combine that will archival footage of their humble beginnings and some new interviews with key players and you have a vision. A voice. A video. 25 years is a long time and telling their story was very important to Arthur and Jordan. They wanted to get it right, down to the very last frame ... and when you put your heart and soul into a project like they do, it really pops off the screen. Unfortunately, encompassing 25 years of helping the community into a 7 minute video, in a 24 hour period, is quite the tall order and sometimes it just isn't enough time. Luckily for us, they are up to the task and the end result will reflect their dedication. Kudos gentlemen. Keep plugging away. There's a bed at the end of that tunnel.

Houston, We Have Landed

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 07:00:00 -0700

Even with deadlines rapidly approaching and sleep deprivation kicking in, we never gave up. We never surrendered. The smoke is clearing, and although the last 24 hours have left us all a bit exhausted, the results are well worth the effort. With our veins screaming for rest after hours of I.V.'s filled with coffee and energy drinks, ZURB and Rebuilding Together Peninsula came together to find a voice for 25 years of volunteering, community outreach and home repair with safe housing assurance. In the beginning, we gathered to brainstorm. Once those brainy storm clouds were created, we put pen to paper to create tangible ideations. Those early sketches and whiteboard renderings became wireframes. Those wireframes became front-end code. The front-end code met the back-end code and they made beautiful music together to create a fully functional website. The sun has risen to signal the beginning of a new day. And with this new day comes a new chapter for Rebuilding Together Peninsula. Complete with a brand new microsite, promotional video, print materials and a vision for their 25th anniversary soirée. Now, after hours of blood, sweat, tears and caffeine we present to you the microsite. Rebuilding Together Peninsula: 25 Years of Giving Back Home.

Coffee + Brainstorming + Whiteboards + Content = Print!

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 06:00:00 -0700

Call the ball. Roger. ZURB has the ball.

Zazzle has just pulled up. The coffee we mainlined has worn off, but both Team ZURB and Team Rebuilding Together Peninsula came together and printed the voice celebrating 25 years of safe housing and community outreach.

Home is where the poster is hung. With fierce determination the print team fleshed out new posters, ready to be posted around the Bay Area. Now the community will have an image telling the story of what this non-profit is about.

Designed for a black tie affair, these new invitations convey casual and sophisticated flair. Attendees will feel the exclusiveness of sharing in the greater good by giving back and honoring 25 years of that history.

The facelift is complete and the new brochures are ready to go out. With clear expressions of authentic emotions from real stories, unveil what’s behind the house … the home.

Thank you is expressed in many languages, but nothing breaks through that barrier better than an image. The thank-you cards for Rebuilding Together Peninsula capture that true message of gratitude from this community.

Sprawled out on our ZURB furniture, with laptops and iPads in hand, the team of Rebuilding Together Peninsula is wiped out. But when we see the print material for the first time, our eyes light up in spite of 24 sleepless hours. “It's absolutely amazing. All the colors and typography looks beautiful,” says Seana O’Shaughnessy.

Building a Better Email Template

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 05:10:00 -0700

It’s easy to dismiss email notifications as a minor feature. But our experience has taught us to take small features seriously and the serious features lightly. The latter might explain our spontaneous Nerf dart battles. The former lead to responsive email templates.

Responsive web design usually refers to, well, websites. But emails use HTML and CSS too, and appear on a variety of devices. An increasing number of people check their email on smartphones — including many ZURBians. So a while back we created our responsive email templates: Code that designers use to create messages that adapt to different screen sizes, just like websites.

The microsite we’re building for our non-profit partner sends three different emails to people:

Daily sign-up reports to administrators
Confirmation emails to people who buy tickets for an event
Reminder messages three days before the event takes place

Volunteer Daniel Ranzi Werle, Interaction Designer and Partner at Nextt, took on the task of pushing our templates a little further. Namely, to Gmail and Outlook.

He and Arthur used Litmus.com to test the revised HTML and CSS across many platforms and operating systems. It took some tweaking, but they got it to work.

So what are you waiting for? Pull out your smartphone and check out the wonderful world of responsive email templates.

Thanks to Our Friends and Family!

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:45:00 -0700

Support comes in many different forms tonight as we focus our sights on the finish line. We would be remiss without a shout-out to many of the supporters who have been with us throughout our 24-hour odyssey. These are the people holding the cups of water at the sidelines, ready to replenish our sagging spirits as we dig deep and remember that the temporary state of sleepy is outweighed by our desire to make a difference.

Our neighborhood Starbucks shop here in Campbell is as awesome this year as they were during last year’s ZURB Wired in providing delicious refreshment just before they closed at 10pm. We bow to their excellent beverage creation skillsets.

Many different ZURBians’ family members stopped by to say an encouraging word, bring in renewed energy and lift our spirits. We couldn’t do this without their support and enthusiasm for Wired.

And our new favorite fantastic superhero massage therapist Shelby Bearschild has been here for a solid eight hours and has provided individual deep tissue attention all the ZURBians that signed up for a turn. We’re trying to figure out a way to adopt her into a permanent rotation for ongoing attention to our shoulders and neck tension areas, but think she might only be a special-occasion kind of treat.

Working together is one thing, but getting outside support is what helps make us super awesome and spectacular! Thank you all for helping to make ZURB Wired 2013 a great event!

Website Building: Never Give Up, Never Surrender

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:30:00 -0700

The content management system is well underway. Month-long websites rarely go without problems and this one-day project was going great for 16 hours. Not bad.

We had planned features for the CMS earlier in the day, as ideation sketches became specific screens in the website. These features included the ability to:

Manage events
View who signed up
Send emails
Check in people who arrived at events

Things were looking good. But a problem occurred when our engineers uploaded the code to Web Faction, with whom Peninsula was already hosting their main website. The plan was to keep the microsite to a subdirectory — rebuildingtogetherpeninsula.org/25. But it didn’t work. The Rails app assumed it was at the root level of the site. When we moved it, it couldn’t find the assets.

The engineers brainstormed ideas. First on the list of ideas was to use a subdomain instead of subdirectory. Another idea passed around was purchasing a new URL. Then someone pointed out that the print material was already at the press… with the URL. Scratch those ideas. We just have to push through now. So they got to work. Stay tuned …

16 Hours In. 8 Hours Left ... and Deadlines Rapidly Approaching

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:30:00 -0700

This is where rubber meets the road. 8 hours left. That's one shift in normal, working hours. But we're far from normal. We push through, adapt and overcome. 16 hours isn't anything we can't handle. We're just starting to warm up. Earlier in the day, we checked in with all of our leads to get a blueprint for their 24 hours. Now that we're well beyond the halfway point and slowly starting to creep to the finish line, where are we at? Is everything coming together, or is it quickly becoming a debacle? Judge for yourself.

Mark is not only an extremely talented engineer, he is also an early candidate for parent of the year 2033. Congratulations Mark, well deserved. You just can't bridle the enthusiasm of a man in classy pajama bottoms. Speaking of classy pajama bottoms, stay tuned for our next post regarding the beautiful new micro-site for our friends at Rebuilding Together Peninsula.

What happens when sleep deprivation starts to sneak in? A photo shoot, of course.

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:15:00 -0700

It's midnight. You're starting to lose your mind. The lack of sleep is starting to grab hold and the coffee is hardly working. What do you do? Have a photo shoot of course! There's a reason why Bryan is known as the Head Instigator of ZURB. He likes to get in there and stir it up. So he took his camera, a box full of props and caught some of the finest moment in insomnia history. Where can you find the Mad Hatter, a horse-man, a newscaster squirrel and a rubber chicken coexisting in peace? No, not under the influence of psychedelics ... it's in this video!

And there you have it. The lack of sleep is clearly starting to set in. Even the horse-man looked exhausted. He better pull it together because we've still got some work to do. Keep refreshing the blog because coming up is an update with our leads, with only 8 hours left. Will it all stay on schedule or are we camping in the janitors closet until Sunday? We'll find out soon!

ZURB Wired Photobooth Photos

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:00:00 -0700

An annual tradition at ZURB Wired includes a late night photo shoot. If it's not clear from the photos, things tend to get a little silly after fourteen hours of working. It's a great release and fun time for all (mostly the photographer)!

Check out the photos on Flickr:
ZURB Wired Flickr Photos

What Does Home Mean to You?

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:45:00 -0700

It could be the inspiration of still being in close quarters with co-workers and new friends. Or it could be the mellowness of all ZURBians everywhere. But when put on the spot and asked about where home is, for each of us the answers are universally ZURBified! See for yourself:

Our homes are where our families are, where we are free to relax and recharge our batteries while walking our dogs and thinking our deep thoughts. We like what we do for a living, and so it would parallel what we define as our homes — family, fun and the freedom to design our lives. And until we call this adventure done and get back to our homes, ZURB is where the WIRED is!

It Takes an Army

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:00:00 -0700

Each and every year at ZURBwired we go through quite a bit of coffee. The machine at work is in constant motion and anything in the fridge with caffeine is quickly put to use. However, sometimes you need to bring in the experts. The few, the proud, the Baristas. We have a pretty legit coffee machine here at the office. It's got those little cups that do single serving coffee ... pretty fancy, but unfortunately it doesn't add whipped cream or caramel deliciousness. So where do you go at 10pm when you need a little mocha iced whipped cream super dopeness? Starbucks, of course! We had well over 30 individual libations to prepare and the 3 wizards at our local Starbucks didn't hesitate one single bit to get in there and get to work. You'd think that with that many drinks, there would be at least one mistake, but no! They got every single drink right ... complete with names. That just doesn't happen! They need to head up to Seattle to teach some corporate training. They really were that good. 30+ drinks in less than 10 minutes. Gotta be some sort of record! So here's to you magical Barista's of the Starbucks next to Whole Foods in Campbell, CA. We salute you! We'll see you next year ... with even more drink orders, filled with whipped caramel magic!

ZURB Wired Evening Photos

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Twelve full hours of working can do a lot to a person. It's a true test of a person's will to keep working. But would you look at these faces? Intensity and happiness abound. The next part of the day gets tougher.

Check out the photos on Flickr:
ZURB Wired Flickr Photobooth Photos

Shawna Shares Her Baggage with ZURBians

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

What do you get when you have Shawna passing around bags filled with bottles of mouthwash, toothbrushes, toothpaste and deodorant? Her way of telling us we all smell and require a bath. Unfortunately we have no time to bathe so Shawna punted a McGyver move with gift bags of these items for all of us.

When asked why she chose to ensure our cleanliness is next to ZURBliness she said, “Just keeping my snowflakes bright and shiny”

Now the fear of stale coffee, pizza, muffins, hot sauce, beer, chips and anything-in-the-fridge breath is no longer a problem. Thanks to Shawna we are all so fresh and so clean.

What Do Wireframes and Massages Have In Common? This Video

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:05:00 -0700

ZURBwired is getting into the evening hours are we're still chugging along with our friends at Rebuilding Together Peninsula. We've got engineers working on code, wireframes and making sure everything is responsive (which, of course it is! Foundation works like a boss). Caleb is a man of many talents. As a native of Indiana, he can tell you when to pick an ear of corn, down to the minute. In addition to his corn whispering prowess, he can also put together a pretty slick wireframe. It's true! Check the video for proof... about the wireframes. The corn stuff is still up for debate.

What you're seeing is a team coming together for an amazing cause. Including the unsung MVP of ZURBwired 2013, Shelby Bearschild, the massage therapist. Her hands are filled with magic and the sign up sheet for her services is longer than the line for Space Mountain on the first day of summer. She's been going strong for HOURS! Big ups to Shelby. You deserve a trophy.

Update this Print Update!

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 21:00:00 -0700

Project Leader and fellow ZURBian Alina rallied her wolf pack, banging out the first initial brochure, invitations, posters and thank you cards. Can anyone say Hell Yah!

New Brochures for Unique Homes

We wanted to give Rebuilding Together Peninsula's previous brochures a much-needed facelift that still focused on the lives of the homeowners. During the process of defining the content we discovered many powerful stories and ideas. With this in mind, we added a simple "Home is where ___ is," because the story is different for everyone.

Thank-you Cards With Human Impact

The cards were designed with a backdrop to reach people in a very casual way. Adding a backdrop of the homeowners and volunteers — bridging between two different sides of — allowed us to capture the authentic emotion of the lives of the homeowners and the volunteers this non-profit affects.

Posters Generate Visibility

A message. A photo. We designed the posters to reach a wide range of people in as little time as possible. The posters will spread the campaign’s “home is where _____” message throughout the community.

Formal Invitations to an Important Anniversary

We chose to go a bit more sophisticated with these to reach donors: restrained colors and a more formal serif typeface. To make sure Rebuilding Together Peninsula's new human message came across, we added images of the people they have helped.

What happens when we hit a SNAFU?

We call on Ryan Riddle to superman us to the rescue! During this phase we ran into a snag with the copy on specific dates. Donning his cape, Ryan used his powers of the cell phone to call the printer before it was too late, and with rapid speed the problem was fixed! Whew, that was close.

Wireframes to Visuals With Some Give and Take

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:25:00 -0700

It usually doesn’t go this way.

Our designers are responsible for writing the HTML and CSS behind their designs, a practice that keeps Photoshop artists honest. Or at least practical. But with only 24 hours from start to launch, today’s sprint to design the 25th Anniversary microsite calls for a less traditional approach.

Our design process calls for iterations of low-fi before leading into high-fi comps, both of which happen before anyone touches code or Photoshop. Today the lines between low and high weren’t as clear. There was a lot of overlap, made possible because everyone used a common framework, each other, and the ticking clock.

The designers broke into two teams: front-end coders and visual designers. With ideation sketches in hand, the code-writing team took a breakout room downstairs while the visual team took desks among the pods upstairs. Then ZURB Designer Ghaida noticed the visual team inventing interfaces that didn’t quite jive with what the her fellow coders thought was coming.

Ah … no.

Ten minutes later both teams were bumping elbows in the open space upstairs, comparing notes to make sure that everyone was facing the same goal. And they kept at it all afternoon.

The designers created coded, responsive wireframes — mockups of exactly each screen would show, and when, and how. Foundation, our CSS framework gave everyone a common visual layout on which to base their work. The visual designers began developing pixel-precise comps that matched the brand.

It all lead to a strange process. One team gave the other wireframes. The other team gave visuals back. It may seem redundant, but this back-and-forth teamwork allowed both groups to stay in sync and, more importantly, aligned to goals that fit the project.

A Video of Video People Talking About Making a Video

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:00:00 -0700

No, there isn't a glitch in the matrix, you read that right. Jordan and Arthur are multi-tool players. They can both code up a website with a quickness, as well as record, edit and curate all the video content your heart could possibly desire. In between coffee breaks and massage sessions, these two talented gentlemen have been getting some spectacular stuff from our partners at Rebuilding Together. 25th anniversaries, whether for a marriage or a non-profit, are always a big deal. The silver anniversary. While we don't have any bling to give out, we do have this quick video update ... about how the video is coming together.

Were the matching outfits an accident? They would like you to believe so. They're so coordinated and in-sync with each other, they just so happened to serendipitously wear the same orange shoes. Yeah, we're not too sure either. Want more behind the scenes of the video process? Well, you're in luck. Our next update really dives into the finer aspects of the brand spanking new video for Rebuilding Together Peninsula. It's gonna be a good one!

ZURB Wired Afternoon Photos

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:45:00 -0700

The teams have been hard at work this afternoon trying to put the pieces together of the website, print collateral and video. Amazing effort so far. It's validation that being human is pretty darn cool.

Check out the photos on Flickr:
ZURB Wired Flickr Photos

Lights, Camera, Action! With The Video Crew

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:15:00 -0700

Downstairs at ZURB headquarters the video team of fellow ZURBians Arthur, Roland, Jordan and volunteer Jason have just returned from a road trip out to Rebuilding Together Peninsula's warehouse. With camera in hand their mission was to create a story through film. They shot key backgrounds to give the video a sense of place. They also went to a few building sites to conduct interviews with clients of the non-profit.

Project lead Roland mapped out the plan with an outline and a storyboard using our famous design sketches. They broke the video down to three segments: history, stories and the future.

ZURBian Arthur created a structure for the interviews before they left on their road trip. Meanwhile a few stayed behind to review videos from the 90s of news stories, board of director interviews, and footage of volunteers hard at work with our community. The team is hard at work capturing the story of Rebuilding Together Peninsula — we’re still filming, even as we post!

Between 7pm to 2am the team plans to be deep into post-production. They'll turn their footage from today, the videos from years past, and interviews into one solid piece of film that conveys all of what Rebuilding Together Peninsula is.

Before dawn the film crew will have produced, directed, edited, and scored a film in 24 hours. Take that Quentin Tarantino! We just made a film for Rebuilding Together Peninsula's big gala event to celebrate 25 years.

Brochures, Wireframes and Front End Code, Oh My!

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 16:00:00 -0700

At ZURB we pride ourselves on tackling any potential problems from a design perspective. From Afton, our accountant, all the way to Chris, our marketing guru, when we have an idea, everybody grabs a Sharpie and gets in the mix.

But sometimes, it's good to let the experts do their thing. Our engineers, while great at sketching, knock it out of the park with all things code. Front-end, back-end, middle-end, they're in the thick of it, making sure everything ads up to a beautiful page for Rebuilding Together Peninsula.

While our engineering bad-asses are in the trenches, coding up the jams, our print team is coming together to help our partners come up with the new hotness in print media. Alina, our design lead and creative director, is calling the shots, giving directives and keeping the team focused and motivated...which can be difficult with a flurry of Nerf darts whizzing by your ear.

So without further delay, another video update. A little something for everybody. Some design speak and code freaks. Lets get in there!

Now that you've seen the visuals, seen Matt and his team do their thing, keep it locked to the blog for our next update. Getting in depth with Engineering. The nuts and bolts of ZURB Wired 2013

Engineers Code Deep Behind the Scenes

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 16:00:00 -0700

Forging a microsite from zero is no small task. Even with focused goals, we expect our engineers' keyboards to tremble under their constant typing.

On the surface, back-end code is $('mumbo').jumbo. But when we approach it with goals, the process becomes clear. The site needs to let users buy tickets for upcoming events. That's its job.

By 2:30pm Matt and his team had completed a data model. Based on user processes fresh off the whiteboard, the model is a map to creating the underlying Postgres database. The database holds the content. Content frames the design. Design informs the code. And off we go.

Actually, our engineers are building two systems. There’s a microsite and a web-based tool to manage the microsite. The content management system — also built from scratch — allows people at Rebuilding Together Peninsula to create and schedule future events.

Future? You bet. This isn't a one-off web project. The back-end is written so our non-profit partners can use it for future events, or even future microsites.

Testing Code with Code

Our engineers know that at 8am tomorrow — less than 16 hours away — they’ll hand their code over to our non-profit partners … and that’s it. Once it’s live, it’s live.

In the past we’ve tested websites as you might expect: by trying them ourselves. If a website works, great. But we also try to make them not work. We leave required information out of a form to make sure error messages work. We try layouts on many different devices. We try to imagine everything that can go wrong.

But “everything” is a big word. When we have weeks to test everything, we do. But now we have less than 16 hours. So our engineers decided to use a technique called Test-Driven Development. In non-geek speak, they write code that tests code.

And while they write code, test code, code databases, test the code that writes to databases, the rest of the team continues to develop content, flesh out designs, and prepare front-end code that will all come together very soon. Where did the day go?

Making the Transition from Concept to Design. And Lunch.

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 15:00:00 -0700

Earlier this morning you met the team and saw the beginnings of ZURB Wired 2013. We spoke to our team leads and introduced you to our friends at Rebuilding Together Peninsula about kicking off our long sleepless, endeavor together.

The food is in the kitchen, the fine folks from Spread in downtown Campbell are here making the office smell delightful, so here's another video update. Hey guys and girls! How are you feeling? Whats happening? Have you found that intern yet?

4 hours in and we're still pushing and going strong. We're going to go shove some nom's in our food holes, but don't worry, we'll be back soon with an update about the heaps of content being pushed out by Ryan and his team of word wizards.

Putting Flesh on the Skeleton - Content Creation

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 15:00:00 -0700

Content is easy to get wrong. You could have the most well-thought-out prototypes and wireframes, but without the right text and voice, your message will get lost. We wanted to make sure we got this right. Ryan, our lead editor and resident wordsmith, broke out the word-whips and laid the smackdown to finely tune every single syllable and character for Rebuilding Together Peninsula. Anyway, back to the content. Here's a video updating you on our progress. It's content of content. Like Inception, except with less DiCaprio and more Red Bull.

Content makes the web go 'round. We've established how to set a mood using words and colors in an earlier post. Now we're bringomg content into the equation. We're building bridges over here. Word bridges. Saucesome. Our print deadline is rapidly approaching. Wonder how the print team is doing? How are the engineers holding up staring at a matrix of code all day? Find out in our next update.

Content and Caffeine Flows Through Our Veins

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 14:10:00 -0700

We're into the third hour of our design process and at least our second gallon of coffee. The team is busy brainstorming ideas to pinpoint an overarching theme for the non-profit's 25th anniversary. The question now is, what content will engage an entire audience, reach out to the lives affected, and tell a history from stories past? How do we tell the story of those who Rebuilding Together Peninsula has helped, who lent a hand, and those who lead?

Through opportunity sketching the print team defines ideas as they move into the ideation design phase. Next, they narrow down key ideas as starting points for tangible proofs of content concepts. They'll use these key concepts to create enriched information, for the brochures, invitations and website. Some of these ideas baking, like hand prints in cement and a memory quilt as a visual display, are beginning to take shape.

Content is what drives a business, says Ryan, our chief editor. "Content gives us shape and form to the concepts we have. For all of us the over all theme is clear. It's about giving homes back, and the history of the lives impacted."

As we flesh out the content, it's clear that homes mean more then buildings to Rebuilding Together Peninsula. They are a swath of emotions with a deep history, a strong presence and a clear future emerging.

We are going strong, and the copy team is drafting all of these ideas for Rebuilding Together Peninsula's new brochures, invitations, and posters.

"I am amazed how easily ZURB could take what they had from their website and redefine it for the next 25 years," said Cari Pang, Program Director of Rebuilding Together Peninsula.

ZURB Wired Morning Photos

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 14:05:00 -0700

One of the cool things about ZURB Wired is that we capture the entire event with photos and videos and edit them real time. As the day goes on you can see the tiredness set in... but spirits always remain high. Check out the photos on Flickr:

ZURB Wired Flickr Photos

Finding a Voice for 25 Years — The Moodboards

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 13:00:00 -0700

Tone, vibe, feel, mood — whatever you want to call it, is an oft overlooked step in the design process. Sure, anybody can pick colors, but which? What emotions are you trying to push through your pixels? That's where moodboards come into the equation. What's a moodboard? Here's our Senior Designer, Anthony, to explain his process.

"We got together with Rebuilding Together Peninsula and held an initial brainstorm session to pair some words together to convey a mood. We paired words like 'special' and 'celebration' together to evoke thoughts of a sophisticated soiree."

Not a designer? Want to know what a moodboard looks like? Words and explanations are great and all, but where are the pictures? We got you, homie!

Have we piqued your curiosity? Want to see more moodboards for Rebuilding Together Peninsula? Check out these visual concepts, typography and color samples.

And keep your eyes peeled for our next update, pictures of this mornings shenanigans and festivities. Get a look at us with bright eyes, as thats about to change as the sun darts across the sky.

Print Team Hits the Whiteboards Running

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 12:30:00 -0700

Print is a large part of this year’s ZURBwired. After generating mood boards in the ideation phase to get the campaign’s overall theme, the teams are jumping into their assigned projects. One team is especially eager to go.

Rock, Paper, Deadline

The print team’s under pressure now. While the web team has ’til dawn to hack code, all printed material needs to get to the press before sunset.

"The print team will be busting ass," Jon tells everyone. "They need to be done and to the printer by dinner." Tick-tick-tick, that's an entire final product — invitations, a brochure and a poster — in seven hours. That means lo-fis and sharpies.

Keeping Up the Pace

Lo-fi sketches are critical to the ZURB design process — and for good reason. With so many people evaluating ideas in few short hours, we find our best friends are sharpies and paper. Best friends aside from each other, that is.

You’ve never seen a group of designers more focused on markers and shaders. Design Lead Alina keeps tight schedule, knowing that a slip in timing now could make mayhem later. Her phone says 11am precisely, and she puts down her sharpie and looked at her team. "I'm done. That means you're done." It sounds tough, but she says it with a smile and everyone knows she's keeping them on track. Time to review the work before heading into the next phase, a deeper look at the moodboards for our friends at Rebuilding.

There's a Brainstorm on the Horizon...and We're About to Make It Rain.

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 11:00:00 -0700

ZURBwired continues at a breakneck pace. Thus far everybody is holding up pretty well … with the exception of that intern we lost at around 10am. We think he may be hiding in the janitor's closet. We'll let you know when the search party returns. We would look ourselves but we've kind of got some stuff going on today — like turning ideas into tangible sketches, wireframes and mockups. Curious about the process? Good. We just so happen to have another video for your beautiful eyes.

So without further delay, meet the team from Rebuilding the Peninsula, our partners for this year's crazy 24 hour experiment of joy, happiness and caffeine.

Pretty sexy, right? Brainstorms in stunning 1080p. Keep your browser pointed here for more updates, pictures and video. Whats up next for the wired blog? Some super sweet pictures and finely crafted words on the print process. Get in now so you can track the symptoms of sleep deprivation as they happen! Now, to find that intern …

Three Cups of coffee and 3000 ideas defined

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 10:30:00 -0700

Six groups have just finished brainstorming for about an hour to discover which message speaks the loudest for Rebuilding Together Peninsula 25th! Can anyone say brains on fire?

The amount of ideas that they're producing is amazing! This cumulative mind power between two talented groups could fuel a nuclear reactor. On the 25th anniversary Video, which will be featured at their upcoming event, Jason Spencer, Content Video expert, and ZURB Engineer Jordan drive key points about the nonprofit's impressive history, story and the next 25 years. The question on the group's mind is: What one word sums up Rebuilding Together?

Two cups of coffee into the morning, ZURB Designer Caleb and Board Member Dan O’Brien have smashed it with their group, coming up with a single-page site for the 25th anniversary event. The theme is bringing people together to celebrate a sense of home.

Executive Director Seana O’Shaughhnessy is jumping into each room listening in and adding key points that drive the message of the strength of how the community is beyond just the hammer and nails. And its clear that idea is picking up with all of us as both ZURB and Rebuilding Together Peninsula speak as one about this project.

Driving the helm of content, Ryan Riddle, our Chief Editor, leads his team on creating the invitations and posters. From cool animations to imagery, the team seeks anything that:

Conveys order and health
Alleviates stress
Keeps communities strong
Drives a sense of togetherness

All this leads to the answer — that one defining word.

The team agreed, “There is a powerful difference between 'house' and 'home' that transcends an entire community.” Alina Senderzon, Design Lead and Creative Director of ZURBwired, pulled together this defining idea. Her group blew through tons of sketches to capture this simple yet powerful message.

We'll be excited to see how this message will come across.

Brainstorming for Rebuilding Together Peninsula

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 09:30:00 -0700

ZURBwired 2013 is in full swing! We're about an hour in, have broken the ice, made our introductions and now we're off to the races. It's time to put those beautiful minds to work.

Lets brainstorm.

Partner and Design Lead Jon Smiley leads his group through ideations for a new brochure with Cari from Rebuilding Together Peninsula. Coffee is going fast and people are having fun. What happens when coffee and fun have a baby? A great brochure, of course! We'll check in with the team later and have photos of the end result of their brain clouds.

Meanwhile Design Lead and Creative Director Alina Senderzon is joining forces with the Executive Director of Rebuilding Together, Seana O'Shaughnessy, to procure ideas for the Rebuilding website — navigation, pictures, overall feel and vibe. Keep an eye out for that in a blog post a little later today.

Engineer, Videographer and office wizard Jordan Humphreys leads his group through putting together a video presentation for our partners. Like footage of hammers, nails and Jordan? Fret not, it's all in the pipeline!

Caleb Winters jumped in with his league of extraordinary gentlemen (plus the biggest gentleman of them all, Designer Ghaida Zahran) on a micro-site for Rebuilding Together's upcoming 25th anniversary. Just because "micro" is in the title doesn't mean its a small undertaking. Good thing Caleb is a master of his craft. He and his team are bound to crush it.

Ryan Riddle, Lead Editor and 5 star general of the whiteboard, put his team through their paces to come up with ideas for posters, signage and mailers for the aforementioned 25th anniversary. With so much design talent in one room, those posters are bound to look awesome. We can't wait to get everything back from the printer so we can share our brainstorm babies with the world!

Now … where did I put my coffee?

ZURBwired, Here's What to Expect

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, children of all ages — ZURBwired 2013 is in its first tilt. Ideas are hitting paper, paper is becoming computer markup and the entire process up until now has become a video. So without further adieu, here is our first video of the day. Meet Bryan. Our Head Honcho and Chief Instigator. Hey Bryan … what are we doing today, anyway?

And there you have it! Bryan has such a contagious enthusiasm, it's hard not to get the ZURBwired fever. No cowbell required. Keep an eye on the blog for our next video featuring the entire team brainstorming for future greatness.

8am — Here We Go!

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 08:30:00 -0700

Coffee is on-hand and the enthusiasm is contagious as we start ZURBwired 2013 with continental breakfast, fresh green t-shirts and an icebreaker.

Icebreakers are more than fun group activities — they build trust and familiarity while getting us in the mood to do all sorts of creative work. ZURBians Ghaida and Elysse are leading today’s session. Everyone has five minutes to draw — appropriately enough — their dream houses. With such a creative group, it’s no wonder we’re seeing all sorts of dwellings, including:

Volunteer Engineer John Madhavan-Reese’s straw bale yurt

Design Intern Geoff’s two-story house mounted to a van

A habitable jellyfish by Safe-at-Home Program Manager Lily

Oops… One minor glitch just caught us off-guard. Jon’s computer went to sleep before he could break us into our six groups.

Update: Luckily Jon is our resident cyborg, and recovered quickly. The groups are:

Ops
Content
Visuals
Print
Web
Video
Engineering

Fed, caffeinated, and excited, we’re hurrying into our groups, each with a specific goal that will support Rebuilding Together Peninsula’s mission and 25th anniversary. They’re off to brainstorm sessions.

2013 ZURB Wired Kick Off!

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 08:00:00 -0700

We've officially kicked off ZURBwired 2013 with Rebuilding Together Peninsula! Over the next 24 hours we'll publish our progress through blog posts, photos and videos. If you curios about how this will unfold, check out our previous years to see what amazing groups of people can accomplish in 24 hours.

Above is our logo for the event which is emblazoned on our t-shirts and internal materials- we're quite happy with it. Alina, a design lead at ZURB, was instrumental in making this happen!

Expect hourly updates!

Our Work With Rebuilding Together Peninsula

We'll help Rebuilding Together Peninsula with a brand strategy and design for their anniversary celebrations. Here's a breakdown of some of the stuff will be doing in the next 24 hours:

A landing page for their 25th Anniversary
Invitations (web and print)
Posters
A video presentation for the event
And designing other print collateral, such as bus ads and yard signs

Using our design process and goal-oriented teamwork, we'll get it all done in a tight 24-hour timeframe. Our philosophy behind Wired is that anyone can use design to breakthrough barriers and create something wonderful.

Beating the Clock with Rebuilding Together Peninsula

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 18:30:00 -0700

We're on the cusp of embarking on another ZURBwired, our coffee-fueled, 24-hour design marathon where we work side-by-side with one nonprofit. Every year, we work with a dedicated nonprofit team and a group of passionate volunteers to accomplish the impossible — create an entire marketing plan from scratch. The catch: it has to all be done in 24 hours.

This year, we're working with Rebuilding Together Peninsula, who had the right mixture of high energy, strong mission and clear goals that we look for in a nonprofit. They've got a pretty scrappy team who's gonna come in, kick butt and take names.

Volunteers from Rebuilding Together Peninsula working on a home.

Rebuilding Together Peninsula has a simple mission: ensure everyone has a safe and healthy home to live in. To accomplish their mission, they aide in minor and major home repairs for less affluent folks around the Bay Area. Last year, some 3,000 volunteers helped to repair 67 homes and community facilities. Next year, will be their 25th Anniversary, which will be helping them celebrate!

Our Work With Rebuilding Together Peninsula

We'll help Rebuilding Together Peninsula with a brand strategy and design for their anniversary celebrations. Here's a breakdown of some of the stuff will be doing in the next 24 hours:

A landing page for their 25th Anniversary
Invitations (web and print)
Posters
A video presentation for the event
And designing other print collateral, such as bus ads and yard signs

Nonprofits Benefit from Design Thinking

This is our sixth Wired! We were crazy enough to do our first event in 2006. But we weren't just pulling a stunt. We actually saw a huge educational opportunity where nonprofits could learn design thinking and push forward!

Working with nonprofits over the years, we've seen that they need every detail worked out before taking action. There's a time and place for detail, but it can paralyze a project just getting off the ground. That's where design thinking can help.

And that's what we'll be using when working alongside Rebuilding Together Peninsula, showing them our process and techniques to speed past humps. In the end, we'll be giving them more than just a site or a handful of invitations. We'll also be giving them the tools to do this again on their own for years to come! So get ready, cause the next 24 hours are going to rock around the clock.

ZURBwired Mission Complete, Final Pieces Snap in Place

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 08:00:00 -0700

Its been quite the race over the past 24-hours. Despite holding this event in the past, each event comes with it's own set of challenges and rewards. There were definitely times some of our team members felt that they weren't going to make it, but we pulled through and are happy to announce we have completed what we set out to deliver. Here's a look at what we were able to accomplish:

In addition to the project pieces, we were also able to document the entire process:

8 Videos (real-time editing and posting)
Over 400 Photos
37 Blog Posts

Here is a screenshot of the final designed website:

Here is a screenshot of the old website before we spent the last 24 hours redesigning and launching the new website:

We'd like to thank everyone who was a part of this amazing event, whether you were here or sending us happy thoughts. We would especially like to thank Family Giving Tree for joining us for our fifth ZURBwired!

30 Minutes Later, Invites, Thank You's, and Brochures Get Delivered

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 07:45:00 -0700

Wow, it's all coming together- every one of our printed pieces arrived on time. They turned our really good. A big thanks to our friends at PrintHQ.com for a stellar job turning these pieces around in our 24 hour time constraint. Here are the print pieces:

The Posters and Stickers Arrived

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 07:15:00 -0700

Thanks to our friends over at Zazzle, we were able to get our posters and stickers completed by 7AM. In less than 24 hours we created the concept, creative direction and finished the implementation. Amazing! Here's a peek of what came through our door:

Early Morning Photos

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 07:00:00 -0700

We're in the home stretch to wrap up ZURBwired- it's been an exhausting 23 hours so far... We're going to hit our project goal and it's great to know we also had a little fun during our event. Arthur is actually happy deep inside, but in this photo, he's just a little tired. :)

A Quick Shout Out to Our Awesome Community

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 05:00:00 -0700

It's not easy staying awake for 24 hours, let alone, working the entire time to complete a task. Luckily our neighbors in the community have been a great help along the way.

Meet our lovely Starbucks Baristas!

They were amazing in accommodating quite a large order just before closing time and even extended a few of there staff a little past there quitting time. We were very appreciative!

Later in the evening, we made a run to Taco Bravo. Arriving just after they finished cleaning up for the night, they were still willing to make us 10 super tacos, 7 regular tacos, 3 soft tacos 2 chicken tacos, 3 bean and cheese burritos and still served them with a smile!

We couldn't have made it through this event without our community! We express out sincere gratitude to these businesses who gave us our caffeine and taco fix.

Video: Early Morning Website Updates

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 04:30:00 -0700

The website is coming along nicely. With most of the assets in place, we are gearing up for QA testing and final touches.

Things are Getting Weird in the Middle of the Night

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:30:00 -0700

We're ZURBians, so of course a photo session was completely necessary. But wait, this isn't any typical photo booth, there are props... lots of them!

While many of our ZURBwired team members posed with typical props you would find around our office, such as boxing gloves or giant polka dot clown tie, we were also encouraged to bring a wacky item from home! Take a look at some of the more eccentric props in this video!

Five Hours to Go and the Website is Coming Along

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:00:00 -0700

About nine or so hours ago, we were first putting the skeleton of Family Giving Tree's new website together. Here's what it looked like:

That's the homepage, by the way, the first page that vistors will see when they go to the site. But the Design Team has been cranking on the scaffolding, dressing it up and making it look pretty. Here's a sneak peek, just for you all:

And here's what the Design Team is working toward:

Jonathan, whose been overseeing all of the work, says it's coming together well.

We're working to integrate visual design into the scaffold that we completed earlier. We're also working through the mobile component and most likely moving into QA in about another hour and a half.

It may be a little late in the night, or early in the morning depending on how you look at it. But the designers aren't letting a little lack of sleep slow them down. As Jackie, one of our designers put it:

I crashed a little bit around 11 but now I'm getting my second wind. Also, I'm really excited for the "Soldier Boy" dance off.

Well, we'll see if that dance off happens. In any case, Caleb has tapped into his own super powers.

I feel so strong right now. I feel pretty much invincible.

All of us have tapped into our super power reserve so we can race toward the finish line.

Video: Bringing the Pieces Together

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:45:00 -0700

Our team didn't slow down just because the sun went down. We were only getting started.

T-Shirt Designs Brought to Us By an Amazing Volunteer!

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:30:00 -0700

Jocelyn, a Design volunteer, has furiously been working on putting together a new t-shirt designs for Family Giving Tree.

As usual we started out with a couple low-fi sketches to present ideas to the Family Giving Tree team.

After a couple of iterations, Jocelyn was able to finalize the design for the shirts.

Before finalizing these designs, the location of many of the elements of the tee had changed. Originally there was a front image on the purple tee along with a large logo on the back. However, due to concerns that while working in there donation warehouse, the elves (as the Family Giving Tree team members call themselves), wear vests that may cover up the design.

To circumvent this issue, we moved the logo to the sleeve so that it will always be visible. Expect to see a Family Giving Tree team wearing some new dapper gear in the near future!

We would like to thank Jocelyn and all of our volunteers for their hard work!

Updated Newsletter for Family Giving Tree

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:00:00 -0700

Using Constant Contact, Anthony has put together an updated newsletter for Family Giving Tree.

The newsletter pulls in elements from the all the other branding aspects, focusing on the logo and purple blocks for brand recognition. Other elements have been pulled in to make the newsletter more in line with the new website.

Video: Meeting Our Print Design Deadlines

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 01:15:00 -0700

It was close, but we made our print deadlines earlier today (well yesterday)!

Photobooth Antics

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:45:00 -0700

Every year just after dinner we set the light strobes up for a little photobooth action. This year has some great moments. And here are more from the set. Somehow the chicken made it back into the series this year.

Late Night Engineering

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:30:00 -0700

The engineering team at ZURB has had their heads buried in code since the morning. So when asked for a comment, things can get a little interesting. Jordan, Engineer at ZURB, responded, "Hopefully, there are protractors in the backpacks," referring to Family Giving Tree's mission to hand out supply-filled backpacks to children who need it the most.

Jordan is responsible for putting together Family Giving Tree's online donation platform, Virtual Give Tree. Come heck or high water, or the sun coming up first, he's committed to finishing the project on time. Currently, Jordan is integrating the Virtual Giving Tree into the established design scaffolding that our design team put together.

The Virtual Giving Tree will be used by all of Family Giving Tree's registered companies and friends to gather donations. While any amount of money can be donated, you can provide a complete backpack full of goodies for just $30.00 or a buy supplies for $15.00.

Jordan explained that his biggest challenge has been re-acclimating himself to using PHP. That's because ZURB primarily runs its stuff through Ruby on Rails.

Other engineers are also hard at work. Matt, Partner and Product Lead at ZURB, has been integrating Google Maps into Family Giving Tree's new site. This will make it easier for people to find the donation sites closest to them.

While talking with Matt, the idea of the map expanded and will now be featured on a few more areas of the website. This will replace the old bulleted list of locations that was on the site.

Mark, Engineer at ZURB, is also hard at work automating the deployment process. He's double checking the CSS and also spending down time helping our Design Team with JavaScript.

Mark explained his biggest challenge has been writing a custom solution for automation with PHP. He explained that he is used to using Ruby on Rails, which comes with several built in helpers, and he is trying to implement in the PHP automation.

Our Engineering team is extremely excited about their work! Let's cheer 'em on during the final stretch!

Frost Spread a Little Bit of Love On Our Office

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:45:00 -0700

Our friends at Frost Cupcake Factory were nice enough to donate all of their end of the day cupcakes to our ZURBwired event! Take a look at these tasty cupcakes! Thanks Frost! The cupcakes were delicious!

Is This The Most Amazing Moment In ZURBwired Photo Booth History?

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:00:00 -0700

The ZURBwired 2012 Photo Booth is open for business! ZURBians and Elves are tagging each other into an awesome scene with a lot of props involved. These include, but are not limited to: a purple witch hat, big pair of green sunglasses, a rubber chicken.

But the grandest moment of them all may have just occurred — yes, at the photobooth. Jonathan swooped in with a massive photobomb of the Family Giving Tree team, who were trying to coordinate a jump photo. It was nothing short of epic.

Unfortunately, this gem wasn’t captured on any video that we know of — but we did get the photo!

You be the judge of Jonathan’s timing.

The Team Behind the Messaging

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 21:30:00 -0700

ZURBwired is a unique experience for our Designers and Engineers here at ZURB. They have a lot of pressure to be creative and implement their design ideas immediately. But they aren't alone with the stress as our content team is hard at work writing everything for our print and website projects. Ryan, Editor at ZURB, stated, "The biggest challenge is trying to match content to what the designers are going to create." Moving into the website stage, Ryan explained, that the content needs to be of a particular length, which will become easier as the design team gets further along in their design process. The content team, which also includes Kelsey, ZURB's Customer Service Advocate, and three representatives from Family Giving Tree have written multiple iterations of content for our design team to work with. Earlier today, Kelsey drove the content for our printed invitations, thank you cards, and posters, while Ryan sat at the helm creating content for the brochures. For a little look into there process, I've included a page of Ryan's notes below (Which also include a few awesome ZURBian sketches):

Afternoon Work Session Photos

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:30:00 -0700

Whew, this afternoon the teams we're cranking. Here's a photo update from the groups today.

Halfway Home!

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:00:00 -0700

It’s official: We’ve reached the halfway point of ZURBwired 2012! Only 12 more hours to go before our 8am launch.

Not a whole lot of new updates at the hour — the teams continue to crank away at the components for Family Giving Tree’s new website.

The design team has finalized their web visual explorations and are currently in the review process. The front-end development team continues to integrate content.

Engineering continues to crank away at the scaffolding. Mark (Engineer) notes that the team is “making sure that all plugins work, the pages are connecting and the Sass is compiling as expected.”

We'll report back soon with some *delicious* news.

Breaking For Pizza And Right Back To It

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:00:00 -0700

Our team took a momentary break from our hard work here for a nice pizza dinner. We had a nice range of pizzas and salads from Campbell’s own Blue Line Pizza.

Shortly after we finished eating, Jonathan called everyone together and discussed next steps. “We’re not even halfway done,” he said — a big reminder that our 24-hour goal is indeed a monumental but completely-worthwhile goal.

The initial print materials are on the counter, and they look great. The completed product will arrive at 7am tomorrow morning. For more on these, make sure to check out Tony’s post, published right before dinner.

The focus now shifts to the work of the web team, who are faced with a slew of different hurdles over the coming hours. Shortly, the focus will shift to content integration.

The print team is working on visual explorations for the Family Giving Tree homepage. Jonathan (Partner, Design Lead) expects these to be completed shortly!

Video: Getting Started on the Website

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 18:30:00 -0700

Katie and Shannon from Family Given Tree spoke with us about what's important for their new website.

Video: Our Morning Brainstorm

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 18:00:00 -0700

After getting to know each other this morning by discussing our fantasy burger, we didn't waste a minute and jumped directly into brainstorming. Jonathan broke the team into groups and we instantly started throwing out some ideas!

Whew! We Met Our Print Deadline

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:30:00 -0700

The first set of visuals are completed and sent to our printer, Print HQ, who graciously gave us a 45-minutes extension. Our team is definitely feeling the pressure of our looming deadlines, but are performing excellently under the extreme conditions.

The first completed elemented are the One Millionth Child campaign stickers, which will be heavily used in conjunction with the other printed material. The stickers will be printed in four different colors.

George, our Design volunteer, who also created Family Giving Tree's new logo, worked hard to meet our print deadlines for with the One Millionth Child campaign stickers. Inspired by the sticker design, each element includes a glyph image, whether its an elf boot or wrapped present to tie the brand together.

Alina, Designer at ZURB, and Jocelyn, Design volunteer, worked furiously to develop Family Giving Tree's new brochure. Two designers were necessary to complete this task on time as it includes the most amount of content, images and sketches. Alina explained that many elements in the print material include hand drawn circles and lines. This was used to create texture and focus.

Anthony, Designer at ZURB, explained that many of the print assets include block colors to draw more emphasis to the design. This allows many of the photos in circles to pop. You may remember, from our previous post that Anthony created a leafy design for the Thank You cards. After a couple of iterations, all print materials focused on more simple and direct circular shapes.

The Thank You cards in particular maintain a playful vibe through their photography and font choices.

Finally, we have Jackie's, Invitation for Family Giving Tree's One Millionth Child event on December 10, 2012. The design is simple and less bold than the other elements, but draws in consistency with its color choices and rounded text box corners.

Caleb is still working on his poster for Family Giving Tree, but has a deadline off 6:00 PM to send the design to our other printer, Zazzle.

Here's The Early Peek At Family Giving Tree's Prototype Scaffold

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:00:00 -0700

Our design team is hard at work on the Prototype Scaffold for the Family Giving Tree site. Here’s a sneak peek at what it currently looks like:

Just for comparison, here’s last year’s scaffold for Rebekah’s Children’s Services:

Our Volunteers Are Wired In

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:30:00 -0700

George, one of our Design volunteers, has been hard at work iterating and cleaning up Family Giving Tree's logo.

Here's a look at the before and after of Family Giving Tree's logo. Click on the image for a closer look.

In the iteration above, you can see creating a new logo wasn't about starting the process over, but instead iterating on an existing design. We decided to go with a more streamlined logo by cleaning up lines and simplifying the color palette.

The new logo will be used on Family Giving Tree's new and improved website, now in development, as well as on many print materials.

Projects In Full Force

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:00:00 -0700

We’re only about 8 hours in, and while the conversation has quieted quite a bit, there is no sign of any slowing down. Our design and development teams are hard at work.

The design team has recongregated in their traditional workspace and have shifted their focus to final print visuals and web layouts. A Foundation prototype is rapidly being developed.

Luckily for them, some dial tone dubstep just started blaring on our office speakers. What could be better?

When asked about the music selection, Neil (Developer Intern) made it very clear: “People love to rock out to 56K dubstep." While we may not necessarily disagree, our team is too focused to stop cranking away at their various projects.

What's a Deadline If You Aren't Racing Against It?

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:00:00 -0700

With our design team a little behind schedule we just completed our first review of our print materials. Our marketing intern, Likhita, has been working with our printers to extend our deadline just incase. Regardless our team is pushing forward and looking to reach the 4:00 PM deadline for printed materials.

Anthony, one of the ZURBian designers, showed a couple different versions of the "Thanks a Million" cards to send out to donators. The team at Family Giving Tree seem to really enjoy the playful nature of the cards!

Thankfully, Bryan, ZURB's Chief Instigator, was able to snap a picture of Anthony's work before he ripped it off the wall and went back to work. Check our his playful designs and his cool leaf motif idea!

Caleb, Designer at ZURB, explained that one hurdle that needed to overcome was that each of the print deliverables needed to work well both with and without the stickers. As our print work will be both for the One Millionth Child campaign and for regular usage. Here's a first glimpse at a poster layout, which will need to work with and without the One Millionth Child stickers.

Our Print Deadline is Looming!

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:30:00 -0700

With our print deadline looming our team has moved into production after defining all deliverables and finalizing all ideations and sketches.

Our team will only have about 35 minutes to complete and submit their first drafts for Family Giving Trees brochures, invitations, thank you cards and stickers for their One Millionth Child campaign.

Take a look at one of our sticker and brochure designs heading into production:

According to Jonathan, “The trickiest part of the print deadline is that it requires so much before [you] can begin to produce print materials.” That means the team needs to know what they are doing and have other work done, such as logos and copy written, before finalizing and producing a product. In other words, everyone has to work in tandem to make sure we actually get all the materials to the printers by 4 PM! It's tight but we're going to make it.

To see all of our sketches though out the day be sure to check out our extranet at http://www.zurb.net/zurbwired2012

Cheeseburger in Paradise

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:00:00 -0700

Jackie, Designer at ZURB, is famous in the office for running our Friday15s, where each Friday at 4:30 PM we get together as a team and due a quick 15 minute team building activity. For ZURBwired, Jackie introduced her team building flare to Family Giving Tree and our onslaught of volunteers.

She asked each person to grab a crayon and draw his or her dream burger. Take a look at what our creative ZURBwired team came up with!

No Post-Lunch Lull Here

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:30:00 -0700

To kick off the afternoon, Chris (Design Lead) led another session with a variety of sketches. The group outlined what the site could look like with the mindset that Family Giving Tree reaches a global audience. After laying out a few quick sketches on the board, the team broke off and started final sketches. They’ll jump right into coding after these finish up!

After migrating from the Fox Hole to the Lion’s Den, the print-focused team gathered around Anthony (Designer) to hear him present his sketches. In the span of minutes, the room went from intense focus to erupting in laughter. We assume this is a good thing!

Sketches and a full print rundown are on the way...

Nearing the Quarter Mark

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:15:00 -0700

We're about a quarter way through ZURBwired and pieces are already starting to materialize. Over the morning the teams worked to define the print goals. The deadline is fast approaching, but we have a direction. Ghaida expresses this...

We're Broadcasting ZURBwired on YouTube

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:00:00 -0700

Check out our first video (of many) to come throughout the day. We have a videographer on site following our every move, which is making us feel like we are on reality television!

Jonathan, ZURB Partner & Design Lead, Jennifer, Queen Elf and Executive Director of Family Giving Tree, along with other ZURBians chat about what we have in store for the day.

You can follow our day on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/zurb.

Our Print Team Pushes Forward to Meet Ambitious Deadlines

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:30:00 -0700

Our print team is hard at work trying to meet an ambitious print deadline of 4:00 PM for most of our deliverables such as brochures, event invitations and thank you cards and a 6:00 PM deadline for posters and stickers.

The team has been brainstorming ways to create all new print content and iterate on existing content to align it more with Family giving Tree’s branding and One Millionth Child event.

Photos of the Team Working Together

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:15:00 -0700

The first batch of photos are up on Flickr. This set of images captures the morning scrum as we present our burger sketches for the ice breaker.

The Teams Consolidate, Ideas In Full Force

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:00:00 -0700

We’ve consolidated our breakout groups into two bigger ones and started building out our initial ideas into deeper ideas and actions.

In one of our rooms, Matt (Partner, Product) and Chris (Design Lead) led a brainstorming session for the new Family Giving Tree sitemap. The sitemap identifies key components and page structure. In addition, the team also brainstormed content needed for each page.

Ghaida, the team’s notetaker in this session, noted that they were rapidly developing new ideas to grow the Family Giving Tree community.

Caleb, a ZURB designer, emphasized the importance of enhancing the web presence and drive donations for the organization. When asked about how he feels, Caleb said, “I feel wired, I feel awesome dude!”

Early Morning Concept Testing

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 10:30:00 -0700

We were given the fairly open ended task of developing a campaign for Family Given Tree’s One Millionth Child Campaign.

In our first brainstorm, we yelled out some crazy ideas from a dancing backpack gif image on their homepage to a snowman with pencil hands and a protractor mouth. Then, we decided to focus the campaign on specific deliverables, including logo refinement, stickers and brochures to hand out for the campaign, social media outreach strategies and direct marketing templates.

Want to be an honorary ZURBian and donate your time to this awesome cause? It only takes a few seconds! Take this quick Verify test and let us know which sticker/logo concept you like best.

We'll let you know the results soon!

Breaking The Ice And Kicking Off Brainstorming

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 10:00:00 -0700

We kicked off this morning’s scrum with a nice icebreaker from our Friday15 specialist, Jackie. The task: Draw up an ideal burger, introduce yourself to the group and explain the creation.

While we had some fairly crazy combinations (a salmon-based burger, “Moon Burger”), it was a great way for all of us to get to know each other better.

After the final burger was presented, we broke off into 7 groups to get team brainstorms underway. Each group focused on a different design component. My group specifically focused on brainstorming up new ideas for Family Giving Tree’s millionth-child campaign, celebrating 1,000,000 children helped. The milestone will be hit before the end of the year!

Here’s a snapshot of our team in action:

And here are some supporting sketches of some of our ideas:

It’s shortly after 10, and we’re already moving at a quick pace. Stay tuned to the Wired blog for the latest updates!

Kick Off Scrum

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:30:00 -0700

Our first scrum of the morning was kicked off by Partner Jonathan Smiley, who will be leading this years ZURBwired. He's a veteran designer with 4 ZURBwired events under his belt. We're totally pumped to get things started! The team enjoyed some coffee and bagels before jumping into the first exercise. Everyone on the team was given the task of drawing their ideal burger- it was a light exercise to get people comfortable introducing ideas and themselves. Lots of revealing profile information :). Our engineering intern Neal had an interesting approach: Light on the bun and include meat from every fast food chain. It's going to be a long day for him if that is indicative of his eating habits.

ZURBwired 5 has Begun

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:00:00 -0700

ZURBwired 2012 has officially kicked-off. The 24 hour marathon will be awesome and we look forward to your comments! Over the next 24 hours we'll be tweeting and posting images of our work as it progresses. In addition we'll be posting photos to our Flickr account and editing videos so you can catch the action as it unfolds. Here's the t-shirt design for this year:

Newsletter Design

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:20:00 -0700

Around Midnight we made the decision to create a template newsletter form that the team could use to connect with their donors and followers. We're pretty stoked with the result as it works well with the website design. We ended up using our favorite email newsletter company, Campaign Monitor.

Bonus Print Materials

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:00:00 -0700

Not that we already had enough on our plate... we got the crazy idea to also whip up some identity pieces at 3AM. We went through a few iterations of the business cards and ended up with this as the final direction.

We also put together a quick letterhead.

Mission Complete, Final Project Pieces

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:00:00 -0700

It's been an amazing race to get everything done in the last 24 hours, but we we're able to pull it off and more. We paced ourselves evenly throughout the day by using lessons we've learned from the last three events.

After 24 Hours, we we're able to finish:

Full website visual redesign (http://www.rcskids.org/)
Fully updated website back-end on Joomla
A responsive, mobile version of the website
Rewrote entire website and print messaging
Two tri-fold brochures (printed)
Post card (printed)
Two logo updates
Newsletter template
Letterhead and business card templates

In addition to the project pieces, we were also able to document the entire process:

11 videos (real-time editing and posting)
Over 350 photos (real-time editing and posting)
40 Blog posts

Here is a screenshot of the final designed website:

Here is a screenshot of the old website before we spent the last 24 hours redesigning and launching the new website:

Nighttime Worker Bees

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:00:00 -0700

The morning light is starting to emerge and the team is putting the final touches on the website. Over the last 6 hours we've been testing the technical components to make sure the website transition is smooth. There are a number of potential problems that could still go wrong, but we're confident the website will be rock solid for launch.

Check out the photos from early in the morning:

Brochure Design

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:00:00 -0700

The printed materials arrived early this morning from PrintHQ and look great! We had a number of last minute changes, but they turned out really well. Here's a sneak peak of the final printed piece:

To see how we got to this point, check out the sketch prototypes and visual iterations: Brochure Sketches and Visual Design Explorations.

The Print Materials Have Arrived (3am)

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:00:00 -0700

Eight hours after submitting the proofs to the printer, we returned to ZURB HQ with the printed materials. After a short break and celebration of our collaboration to get these finished, it's back to jockeying code as we head for the home stretch.

Worker Packet

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:00:00 -0700

Earlier in the morning yesterday, all the volunteers and staff were given a packet to help them understand our process. In an event that moves so quickly, it's important that we're sharing not only what we're doing, but also how we're doing it.

Here are pages from the packet:

Boosting Energy with Antics (1am)

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:00:00 -0700

As we enter the early hours of the morning and continue to string together endless lines of code like crazy monkeys, it was time to take a moment in the photo booth for a little fun.

Finalizing the Website Design

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:00:00 -0700

As we finished up the print pieces earlier in the evening, we also had to wrap up the final direction on the website. It was actually a great exercise because it forced us to nail the visual details and create consistency across the print and web pieces.

Here are a few of the early explorations of the homepage.

It's now 4am and we're working on fumes, but we're in good spirirs. We have four hours left to wrap up the website and get this thing debugged!

Photobooth

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:00:00 -0700

Every year after dinner we assemble the team for photos... and after a long day of working, we let loose with crazy antics (not to be confused with our 2AM shots). Check out some of the photos and don't hold us accountable to our actions!

Logos & Most of Designs Done, On To Code (10pm)

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 01:00:00 -0700

The logos and most of the site design is done at this point. We're heavy into coding the site up as we pour over all the copy and the pretty colors to the already working skeleton. Just did the Taco Bravo run to gear up for the long night ahead of us!

ZURBwired Kids

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:00:00 -0700

When we started this crazy event in 2006, we were a pretty young group with a lot of single employees. As the ZURB family has grown, so has the number of kids. It's incredible. Last night at our pre-ZURBwired dinner, we set up the photobooth to capture shots of the kids. Chem 'em out!

Checkout the photos of the kids

ZURBwired Mobile Prototype

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:00:00 -0700

For this year's ZURBwired we're not content to just build an awesome desktop site - we're going to build a mobile site in tandem, using a front-end framework we've been developing called Foundation. We just finished building the static prototype (layout for all pages), so that next we can bring in the copy and then the visual style.

With the pages complete on the desktop we'll then work through the mobile component. Foundation takes care of a lot of the mobile layout, but by doing interactive reviews of the screens on different devices (iPhone, Android phone, iPad, etc) we can adjust the layout and style to suit these views.

You can check out the prototype on our extranet (the mobile, responsive view is still a work in progress):

Website Prototype

Logo Refresh

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:00:00 -0700

As part of the design process we posted some sketches earlier in the day. The logo on the current website definitely needed a little love. We're happy with the update.

After a bunch of iterations, we stayed with a concept very similar to their existing brand, but freshened it up a bit. Doing so allows Rebekah Children's Services to utilize a lot of their existing materials.

You can see the rest of the logo process pieces here:

View the Logo Refresh

Starting to Crank on the Code (8pm)

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:00:00 -0700

As the sun goes down and the daylight fades, we are starting to crank out all the code for the website. Working from the sketches we created earlier in the day, the site was dropped straight into code using the Foundation framework. The CMS templates are almost finished and the designs are starting to come into focus.

Pushing the Website

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:00:00 -0700

We made a sitemap earlier in the day to capture the main parts of the website. We used the roughed whiteboard drawing to drive our prototype development and help shape decisions on the fly. In many cases with client work, we opt to minimize the importance of the sitemap by keeping it a sketch. We embraced that fully today :).

View the Sitemap

Afternoon Photo Update

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:00:00 -0700

Check out the latest uploaded photos from this afternoon's work session. ZURBwired photos in the stream

Postcard Sent to Printer

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:00:00 -0700

After working through multiple passes at the visual design across the post card, brochures and website, we wrapped up the post card. It's now in PrintHQ hands and awaiting a proof check to make sure it's set up right. We're pumped to be working with PrintHQ as they are donating they're expertise and print services to ZURBwired. Thank you so much!

We're excited about the direction and can't wait to roll the visual design details into the website.

Prototypes Coming to Life As We Code (3pm)

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:45:00 -0700

The team is firing on all cylinders as they work through some of the concepts and turn out completed designs. Working in tandem we are slowly but surely tackling the design challenges in front of us. We also had a visit from an alumni of the program and got to see first hand the impact that Rebekah's has on the community.

28 Minutes Left Until the Print Materials Deadline! (5:32pm)

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:00:00 -0700

We're making a push while the team tries to get all of the print materials finished before 6pm. The heat is on with only 28 minutes remaining...

Website Prototype Update

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:00:00 -0700

Earlier in the day the engineering team started prototyping the website. Right now they're transforming prototype page templates provided by the design team into working Joomla templates. So far we've coded up the blog index and blog show pages.

At this point it's not a visual masterpiece, but we're not worried about the refined CSS until we have a solid framework to work from. The team is making some excellent progress.

Early Prototypes of the Print Brochure

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:00:00 -0700

As part of our design process, we print our design pieces out to make sure we have the elements on the page working together. Here's a quick peek at what the design team has put together for the brochure. We're still in the process of iterating... we're going to be cramming to the last minute to hit our print deadline!

In the last review, we used elements from the web design to influence the visual design of the brochure.

Lo-Fi Wireframes Pages Complete

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:00:00 -0700

Earlier in the day we went through a ton of opportunity sketches- 50+ to be exactish. This afternoon we then started to put more definition to the screens. Often times in our design process we'll just do sketches of web screens before jumping into code.

We're simultaneously creating coded prototype pages while we sketch out ideas. In the next update we'll reveal parts of how this is unfolding. In the meantime, browse the wireframes.

Lo-Fi Wireframes

Turning the Corner at Lunchtime - 12pm

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:00:00 -0700

At 12 noon we passed through the first major decision point of ZURBwired 2011. After taking a break to have a quick bite to eat, the completed concepts were presented to the group and everyone voted on which ideas they like best. The teams broke apart for the afternoon and started to work on creating and implementing the ideas developed during the morning.

Analytics Revealed Opportunities

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:00:00 -0700

In our design process we look at analytics to help us understand general trends. Rebekah Children's Services had only been collecting data since April, but we came across a few pieces of information that helped us brainstorm some opportunities.

Analytics Opportunities

Finalizing Opportunities Before Lunch - 11am

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:30:00 -0700

As we near lunchtime, the designs and structure are really starting to take shape. Rebekah Children's Services is diving in to help the ZURB team push the envelope with some of the design concepts. Each team is working on identifying opportunities and racing to formalize their ideas to present to the group after lunch. At 12pm we'll break for lunch and finalize the Define Phase and choose which ideas make the cut moving forward.

Rebekah Children's Services Web Audit

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:02:00 -0700

The high-level takeaways from the audit were:

Over abundance of navigation - We want to make sure the new site leads users organically rather than relying on navigation as a crutch.
Few ways to take action - Within the current site there are very few ways to support the program, very few ways to get involved, and very few ways to actually engage their services.
A lot of unnecessary divisions - A number of pages have similar content and are split up but don't really need to be. We'll work to consolidate related pages.

Rebekah Children's Services Web Audit

We're on CNET Homepage!

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:00:00 -0700

"Companies everywhere get stuck. A lack of resources or passion--as well as any number of dysfunctions that can plague an organization--can all get in the way of building great things online. Today, a close-knit Bay Area design firm called Zurb is trying to help one lucky nonprofit get unstuck." Check out Dave's Article on CNET

Hitting Stride Mid-Morning - 10am

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:30:00 -0700

Two hours into ZURBwired and the teams are well underway developing their concepts. After getting over the first few obstacles, everyone is starting to hit their stride as we work towards the 12pm deadline to finalize opportunities and start cranking out prototypes.

Competitive Reviews

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:25:00 -0700

We're cranking on all cylinders to hit our afternoon print deadline. One of the results of our morning sessions was a competitive review to help us shape our website. Take a look at our reviews of similar services (in a corporate environment this is useful to understanding a market. All of these non-profits are providing amazing services!)

View our competitive reviews on the extranet

Big take-away from the competitive reviews? Donation and Adoption are important concepts on homepages.

Ice Breaker Morning Photos

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:00:00 -0700

We're busy editing videos and photos from this afternoon's breakout sessions- here are the images from this morning's ice breaker session. Boy we have some good looking faces! Follow the uploaded images on our Flickr stream.

First Few Hours In Video - 8am

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:10:00 -0700

As you have seen on the blog lots has happened so far. We lost internet temporarily, we divided into teams, set our goals, got feedback on our logo concept ideas, and generated 54 opportunity sketches for the website design and the profiles. We're getting ready to present the opportunities and vote on ones we should run with. Here is the first few hours of the event condensed in 40 seconds of video:

Logo Sketches

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:00:00 -0700

We posted a bunch of opportunity sketches for the logo on the extranet. The goals of the logo refresh is to represent Rebekah Children's Services in a more modern and playful way Check them out.

Goals are Set

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:20:00 -0700

As part of our ZURB process, we publish our work to a website we call the 'extranet.' We'll capture all the work pieces for this event as it unfolds during the day- you can view these pages on the extranet here:

http://zurb.net/zurbwired2011/projects/zurbwired2011/

The first document to be published in the extranet is the goals page:

Goals Page

Here's a snippet from the Goals page:

What's all this?

This is a focused presentation of goals defined by ZURB and Rebekah Children's Services. As part of these goals, it's important to highlight issues and questions that might prevent completion. Some of these points might be obvious, but they need to be captured.

Ways this document adds value:

Keeps team on track
Calls out potential problems
Focuses effort around strategy
Highlights the WIN
Defines the playing field

When should we use this?

A goal document should be created any time there is a shift or advancement in strategy. We should update this document on an occasional basis..

Logo Concept Test

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0700

We're throwing around some logo concept ideas internally here and we're using our product Verify to collect feedback. We'd love your feedback on these sketches!

Please Give Feedback

Video Key Frames Completed

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0700

Part of the magic of ZURBwired is that we edit and document the event in real-time.

In the first hour all the groups broke off and started brainstorming while the documentation team got started with our video assets. Here are a few screens that play off the t-shirt design (this won't be the creative direction for Rebekah Children's Services)

Breakout Brainstorms

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0700

Jeremy kicked us off this morning by inspiring the group to jump into the work head first. As part of the kick-off, we broke into 8 teams. Here's a list of the ZURBian team leads that are currently directing the first phase of work:

Creative -- Tanya
Print & Logo -- Chris
Messaging -- Jackie
Nonprofit -- Anthony
User profiles -- Jonathan
User metrics/traffic -- Louis
Documentation -- Jeremy and Jordan
Engineering -- Matt

Our first leg from 8:00am to 12:00pm is the most structured to get a running start to the day. From here we'll build off the opportunities the team's find and make ad hoc project teams. The teams broke out with 2-4 people with a ZURBian leading.

Creative team- Goal is five mood boards with color, typography, asset and photo examples
Print team- Goal is at least five prototypes of each print piece
Messaging team- Goal is to do our Positioning with five tag lines, four bullets, and one description for each web property and print piece
Nonprofit goals team-Goal is 45 opportunity sketches around their services, to visualize their service strategy, and do a competitive review
User profiles team- Goal is to build Web Audit, Customer Profiles, and 45 opportunity sketches
User metrics team- Goal is Analytics insights, 45 opportunity sketches based on them and focused on creating traffic
Documentation team- Goal is to gather and present the team's work to our extranet. We'll link to these from the blog to help promote our process during the day. We'll need more help as the day goes on because we'll be doing a lot!

The big milestones we're working backward from should be pretty simple and easy for everybody to keep track of, but hard to hit!

8:00AM- Kickoff, short preso, Define phase teams, Print team, Creative team start
12:00PM- Opportunity preso, post-it votes, break into project teams Lunch!
6:00PM- Print file deadline + first big code merge
8:00PM- Website rough prototype up + Page List up in Foxhole
Wee hours- Print materials arrive!
Wee-r hours-Website launches
8:00AM Friday- Wrap up celebration of what we've accomplished.

Ice Breaker Starts the Day

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:00:00 -0700

What would be your last meal in the event the world ends?

Everyone is the room spent a couple minutes drawing an image of what their last meal would be. In project groups, this is a great ice breaker to loosen up the room. We often use techniques like this to break up the tension and allow everyone to be open with their ideas. Neil Torrefiel, a volunteer, picked blue Jello!

ZURBwired 2011 Kick-Off

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:45:00 -0700

ZURBwired 2011 has officially kicked-off. We're excited for this 24 hour marathon and look forward to your comments! Over the next hour we'll be posting images of our first tasks.

Here is the t-shirt that everyone is wearing for the event.

Congratulations Rebekah Children's Services!

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0700

The ZURB team and I are excited to announce that Rebekah Children's Services is our 2011 nonprofit selection! The combination of their strong mission, high energy, dedicated team, and clear goals won over our team amid a very competitive field of worthy organizations doing good for the people in their community. We want to thank everyone who made the effort to submit a proposal this year!

“When we got the call from ZURB that we had been chosen we flipped our biscuits!”

Meet the Rebekah Children's Services team of Melissa Driscoll, Scott Olson, Christine Balancier, and Roy Melendez. They will be spending 24 hours with the ZURB team and its volunteers from 8AM on August 18th, to 8AM the following day!

“ZURB tried to intimidate us with the 24-hour challenge, little did they know who they were signing up to spend 24 hours with; the challenge is definitely on them."

Wow! With ZURBwired we believe we can help nonprofits get unstuck in a timeboxed 24-hour creative burst. We'll use our unique design methods and goal-oriented teamwork to help them breakthrough and get stuff done that creates a ton of value for the people they serve. We believe anybody should be able to do this. Our real goal is to help Rebekah's focus on their mission, follow their hearts, and get great things done in the years to come.

It just might happen that in those 24 hours we'll also make a new website or a brochure happen that clarifies their mission or connects with their audience in new ways they didn't realize were possible. Can we pull it off? With our team and Rebekah's, we'll take our chances over most.

Rebekah Children's Services was founded in Gilroy, CA in 1897 where it is still based--that's a long time! They also now have offices here in sunny Campbell where ZURB is located as well. They work with kids and their families by providing adoption, foster care, therapy and other services focused in Santa Clara County. They even offer a thriving culinary academy that gives youth vital work experience and a leg up in the food industry.

We join together a week from tomorrow to make it all happen. Stay tuned here on the ZURBwired blog for updates in the run up to the event, as well as lots of goodies showing our progress on August 18th!

Thank You to All Our Nonprofit Candidates

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:20:00 -0700

The submission period for this year is now closed! It's been inspiring for us to see each submission roll in from nonprofit organizations with a goal to make the most out of our crazy 24-hour event together. We wish we could help them all, but a tough decision on this year's winner lies ahead for us next week!

This is our fourth year hosting ZURBwired. We know our approach is ambitious (can we really pull it off?) and also wildly effective (we usually exceed our expectations!), but also that the most important part of the event's success is the can-do spirit and enthusiasm of the nonprofit, the volunteers, and the ZURB team who believe they can pull it off.

The ZURB team will begin evaluating each nonprofit on Monday and we plan to announce the winner as soon as Tuesday, August 9th. We want to thank all 20 nonprofit applicants who applied to ZURBwired 2011!

1. USA Together
2. CoFED
3. Merspi
4. India Community Center
5. NCIP/Veritas
6. Rebekah Children's Services
7. Rebuilding Together Peninsula
8. Benetech
9. The Crossroads
10. DAVAI
11. MountHermon
12. The Monterey Institute
13. Champion Access
14. Little Kids Rock
15. Center for Transformative Change
16. Dependency Advocacy Center
17. Bloggers Without Borders
18. Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch
19. JobTrain
20. CityTeam

Four Days Left to Submit Your Proposals for ZURBwired

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 -0700

Reminder: Deadline for nonprofits to apply is Friday August 5th.

Yup, we're back for our fourth ZURBwired 24-hour event this August! We have helped our nonprofits participants raise over $100,000 across our first three events, something we're incredibly proud to say! We hope to increase this figure by a significant amount this August.

If you haven't heard about the event here is how it works: each year the ZURB team and the nonprofit select one mission to accomplish for their organization. It can be a new website, publicity for a new fundraising campaign or something else entirely. For 24 caffeine-fueled hours we work together with the nonprofit and participating partners as we rethink the project from the ground up. At the end of it, the nonprofit participant is left with both valuable outputs, as well as a new approach to the design process they can employ every day.

There are four days left for non-profits to submit their proposals. Deadline is August 5th. The event will take place two weeks later as we go around the clock from 8AM Thursday, August 18th to 8AM Friday, August 19th!

Submit your proposal now

P.S. To get the feel for the event check out this video of last year's ZURBwired kick off.

ZURBwired 2010 Wrap Up

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:00:00 -0700

We're exhausted from all the hard work, but excited about what we accomplished today. On behalf of ZURB, I'd like to thank everyone that worked so hard to get this project completed. It's been an amazing 24 hours working with the RAFT team. We're extremely proud of the effort everyone put in to make this event a success. This is our third ZURBwired event and we're excited about the awareness we we're able to create for this special non-profit. It's great to know that our RAFT effort has helped make it just a tad easier to put together classroom materials for Bay Area teachers. Thanks again for everyoneâ€™s hard work! We hope parts of this experience will rub off on other non-profits that are looking to drive their organizations forward. Progress doesnâ€™t always have to happen in 24 hours- but with a little inspiration and a motivated team, quite a lot is possible. Heck, corporations might learn something! Over the last 24 hours we created:

New website
New website structure
Wide scale SEO improvements
New front-end framework merged with existing one
Rewrote most of the site's content, including a donor interview
Rebuilt Idea Sheets search on the new site
Ported over existing form functionality
Redesigned the look and feel of the website
Email newsletter redesign
Email newsletter content
Social media strategy and tools
Blogging and Newsletter strategy
Annual Report sticker and six inserts
Volunteer 'Thank You' Postcard

We'll make sure to update our post to show the actual results. On the marketing side we published: - 8 edited videos - 230 images on Flickr - 40 tweets - 19 blog posts Another special thanks goes out to Jeremy, Dmitry and Amanda of ZURB this year- they successfully helped us through another event. Super job guys.

Website Completion

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:00:00 -0700

After nearly 24 hours of working on the website, we've completed the new RAFT website. There are some odds and ends on the engineering side that required going through a lot of old code- and we made it through most of it, but we don't want to launch the website without a team that is fully alert and ready to handle the bugs. Here is a screenshot of the completed site: Here is the old homepage: It's a bit difficult to see the navigation improvements, but once the site goes live we'll get to see the full benefits of the work.

Photobooth

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:00:00 -0700

Dmitry gives us his classic pose after a hard day of working on marketing materials. As part of ZURBwired tradition, we photo team members halfway through the event. While we sometimes have to drag people to the "booth," it's a great way to commemorate the event. Here is a video capture of us taking pictures: Here are a few more gems from the series:
Thanks to Ashley Batz for taking these great shots.

Website Visual Design

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:00:00 -0700

It's 2:30AM and the final print pieces are coming together- we've arranged to get the last items sent over for early morning printing. ChaseVP is stepping up to help RAFT get their materials printed. As the final print pieces are completed, the creative team looks to finish the website visual design. Here is the first design page coming from the team- very impressive! We used our own Notable to highlight specific feedback in first visual designs.
Here is a shot of Robert Konves working through some icon ideas for the site:

Nighttime Coding

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:00:00 -0700

The website team continues to work on building RAFT website skeleton as the visual design elements are constructed. The engineering team was able to fix a few problems with the backend while Matt, our lead engineer, stepped out. The printer files are almost complete and the editing team is reviewing the work. Whew, so many moving parts. It's going to start getting interesting around 3AM.

RAFT Website Skeleton

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:49:00 -0700

The website front end team has been working throughout the evening building the RAFT website skeleton for the visual design elements. We have an incredible team that has worked together designing both in Photoshop and HTML- this is possible by utilizing a common grid system and structuring the CSS to be flexible enough to handle design elements. Here is a loose sitemap that the team is working from: Here are some screenshots of the rough CSS that is shaping the website. In our process, the design elements will slowly be added and refined as the content elements get plugged in to the framework. In order to put this website work in perspective, there are 5 engineers and 5+ website designers working simultaneously. Anyone in the web world will understand the complexities of working like this on a project!

Website Wireframes

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:30:00 -0700

Earlier this afternoon two groups combined to hash out the new RAFT sitemap. After accepting a general flow, the teams created a series of wireframes to visualize what the website pages structure would look like. By shaping the pages, the content teams were able to get started brainstorming new copy. If you look at the pages, the structure on this new website is dramatically different than the current www.raft.net. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't put dummy text in these wireframes, but there are too many moving pieces to coordinate at the same time. You can still get a good idea of what we're trying to accomplish. The above wireframes were quickly created from low-fi sketches. Here is an example of the how the team used sketches to convey functionality to the engineering team.

RAFT Newsletter

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:58:00 -0700

Earlier in the day the team was able to put together a newsletter structure for RAFT. Here are a few tips that we pulled from the document: ----------------- **From:** Email should be addressed from CEO, Founder or Marketing Lead. *must be from an individual. **Subject Line:** Should be specific and include the words "Newsletter" and the edition information. *More info on newsletter subject lines here: http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email_marketing_subject_line_comparison/ **Body Content:** The body content of the newsletter should fit into one of these three categories:

Life- Remember, we're talking to people! Start each blog post with a short anecdote, story, timely quote or other piece that reminds the reader you're human, approachable and may even enjoy a laugh from time to time.
Industry Specific- We're experts and people know that. If they've forget it, let's remind them. Each month this section should validate our expertise by highlighting something specific we're doing to change Education, Community Involvement, and Non-Profiteering.
Raft Specific- What about Raft? Here's our opportunity for a little horn tooting and celebrating. This section can be used to highlight the success of past events, drive attention to future events, or just generally update folks on Raft happenings.

RAFT Content Strategy

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:44:00 -0700

Earlier in the day the content team brainstormed on the different ways the RAFT team would use advocates to create content for the website. What started as a brainstorm and loose sketches, ended as workflow diagrams created by Greg James. Here is a more complex flow diagram:

ZURBwired Halfway Point

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:21:00 -0700

Mary from RAFT and Jeremy from ZURB give updates on our progress. We have some of the printed pieces at the printer and the website is now being built. The team spirit is still very high and we just finished dinner. Here are some photos from the Flickr stream:

Sneak Peek at Printed Pieces

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:28:00 -0700

WooHoo! The team has been working diligently on the print pieces all afternoon— it's been a grinding process. Here are a few pieces that capture the overall feel that was established in the morning style guide sprint. We've opted for a rich and colorful palette, but we've used the color in a very selective way. The beige offers a subtle background that helps the color elements on the page pop. We haven't committed these to the website yet, but expect a similar treatment. It's amazing to see our talented team put these pieces together so quickly!

Video Afternoon Update

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:00:00 -0700

The team spent the morning working in groups to capture ideas. In the afternoon each one of the eight groups spent three minutes presenting their ideas—here are a few recaps from the session: Once the presentations were done, the respective teams went off again to start working on specific deliverables. The print team is under the largest pressure to hit their goals, so we're doing everything we can to support their efforts. Here is an update from each team:

Amazing People

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:21:00 -0700

We're over 9 hours into ZURBwired and the group has shown amazing teamwork. About an hour ago we spent sometime outside trying to get a breather and refresh. We're all working hard to hit short deadlines so that the work later tonight happens on time. Here are some of the most recent photos on Flickr:
Part of the challenge of ZURBwired is forcing the body to perform under intense stress. We don't recommend doing this on a regular basis... but for ZURB it's a chance to bond with our teammates and RAFT, commit ourselves to the community and learn about our own skills. Besides the ZURB and Raft team, here are some of the additional volunteers: Jonathan Hung, Designer
Mark Otto, Designer
Rob Konves, Designer
Naoko Kudo, â€œMake-Happierâ€
Greg Janes, Designer
Emily Eisenhart, Designer
Hunter Block, Instigator
Phillip Kelly, Developer
Susan Hwang, Marketer
Tiffany Yang, Designer
Chase VP, Offset & Digital Printer
Thanks Guys!

Web Strategy

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:44:00 -0700

The web strategy team focused the morning on structuring the goals of the website. RAFT has clear goals, but the website doesn't reflect all the great things the organization is doing. As the afternoon progressed, this team transitioning into creating the sitemap and website workflows. The collaboration is tedious, but critical for the engineering team to have a solid structure to work from. As part of the web strategy, the donor team put together ideas on how to grow its base. Here is the pdf of the donor opportunities: RAFT donor opportunities.

RAFT Creative Direction

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:50:00 -0700

The boys on the creative team have put together some great visuals to help us shape the rest of the afternoon. We're under a time crunch to meet our print deadlines, so these files are extremely helpful to enable different groups to stay consistent with their work. These files we're put on the server for the rest of the team to use while creating assets. A style guide is a great way to empower individual team members to follow through on projects while insuring a consistent look and feel.

RAFT Media Strategy

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:16:00 -0700

As part of the website development, we're working on putting together a cohesive social media strategy to help RAFT connect with teachers, volunteers and donors. Dmitry from ZURB and Aimee Theron from Raft put together an awesome series of sketches that capture potential media opportunities. A successful social media strategy is all about relationships, but without original content it's hard to sustain ongoing conversations. We're helping RAFT use assets and content that they already produce in order to make these conversations more exciting. Here are the RAFT social media accounts that will be updated before 8:00AM tomorrow morning:

First ZURBwired Video

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:12:00 -0700

Here is the first video from the ZURBwired event. We quickly put together teams that are working on different projects.

Teams Split in Groups

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:45:00 -0700

We started the day off by splitting into a bunch of small groups in anticipation of short presentations at noon. The groups include teams of 3-4 people- event, engineering, creative, print, volunteer, donor, educators and non-profits. Dmitry and the marketing group work through different social medai tactics and strategies for RAFT.

ZURBwired 2010 Kicks Off

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 03:46:00 -0700

We're excited to announce the kick off of ZURBwired! Everyone should expect a flurry of blog posts documenting our progress over the next 24 hours. ZURBwired is a 24-hour design collaboration, hosted annually by ZURB, where we complete a marketing effort for one lucky nonprofit. This year we selected RAFT. RAFT is a non-profit organization that provides educators with the tools they need to engage their students in powerful hands-on learning experiences. We'll be helping them redesign their entire website and create new printed materials for their annual report. Jeremy Britton, partner at ZURB, kicked off the event with an 8:00AM scrum. We have over 30 volunteers working today from as far as New York. We're incredibly excited to work with such a talented group. We also have some ZURB alumni- Hunter, Mark and Rob here to help! Stay tuned for the next update.

ZURB Teams Up with RAFT for ZURBwired 2010!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:26:00 -0700

We want to say a special thanks to all the nonprofits who applied to participate in ZURBwired this year, as well as to all the volunteers who've already committed to spending a crazy 24 hours at ZURB HQ on April 8th.

Less than three weeks until ZURB hosts our annual 24-hour design collaboration effort: ZURBwired— and we're happy to announce that we've selected the 2010 nonprofit organization.

ZURB will be teaming up with the folks over at RAFT (Resource Area for Teaching), whose mission is to make hands-on teaching more accessible and affordable through the many resources they offer educators. They are able to continue this mission through their website, San Jose warehouse, and their newly added Redwood City warehouse.

Get to Know RAFT

RAFT is a nonprofit organization that creatively transforms donated business materials into packaged classroom kits on hundreds of curriculum topics. Teachers use these affordable kits to teach important concepts in science, math, literacy, and art. These kits are designed to provide each student with a powerful â€œhands-onâ€ learning experience. Last year RAFT provided over 43,000 classroom kits to teachers in the Bay Area.

Members shopping bins of school supplies and hands-on activity kits at the RAFT warehouse.

"The state of California has continuously cut their education budget causing teachers to often end up spending their own money on classroom supplies and materials for their lesson plans. RAFT is able to provide teachers, at a low cost, classroom kits focused on their curriculum so that they can be the best they can be in challenging economic times."RAFT's ZURBwired application

The Project

The ZURBwired team will be tackling the bulk of the RAFT.net website, paying special attention to their donor pages, and helping them reach out to a new donor base through not only their website, but through updated print collateral as well. And— for those of you not already familiar with our event— we'll be doing it all in 24 hours.

The whole event begins at 8:00am on April 8th and ends at 8:00am on April 9th (after which we all go home and sleep for a day!). ZURB and our partners will cover all the costs associated with the project, an opportunity worth over $30,000.

It's Not Too Late To Get Involved!

We're still looking for partners and volunteers to join us on this adventure. Volunteering opportunities include:

Photographers (both on and offsite)
Writers
Designers
Videographers

If you run an offset or digital print shop, a custom products shop, a videography business or any other company that could offer useful products or services, then you're a perfect fit to partner with us. If you'd like to be part of a great project with a great team, head on over to our website and fill out a volunteer form.

Get Involved »

Watch the Event Unfold

When April 8th rolls around, we know you'll want to see what's going down at ZURB HQ. Lucky for you, we'll be sending out updates, live, for the whole 24 hours (though they get a little less eloquent around 3am).

Latest news of the event: http://www.zurbwired.com
Latest photos of the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zurbinc
Latest video footage of the event: http://www.youtube.com/zurb
Latest tweet from All Participants of the event: http://twitter.com/zurb/zurbwired

Attention Nonprofits: Get in in Gear, Open Submissions Have Begun

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:39:00 -0800

The ZURBwired plans are in full swing now, and we're happy to announce that open submissions for nonprofits are running now through March 18th! All nonprofits interested in participating in ZURBwired have from today until March 18th at midnight to submit their interest to the team at wired@zurb.com.

What is ZURBwired?

Siming Wong and Brice McGowen work on the menu template.

ZURBwired is a 24-hour design collaboration, hosted annually by ZURB, where we complete a marketing effort for one lucky nonprofit. It's 24 straight hours of doing what we do best, all to benefit one special nonprofit organization, and all at almost no cost to them. That's right; maybe it's a new website, maybe it's posters and invites for an upcoming event, whatever the materials involved, the nonprofit will walk away at the end of the day with all the completed and printed collateral—literally hot off the presses—and it will cost only their time and commitment to the event.

ZURBwired is an opportunity for ZURB to use it's skills to give back to our local community. The idea is to collaborate with a nonprofit organization using our design expertise to produce something great. This year will be our third ZURBwired and every year we're more overwhelmed by the results, as well as the number of people volunteering to help us make the event a success.

What can you really get done in 24 hours?

A lot more than you would think thanks to ZURB's talented team and our dedicated partners and volunteers. You can get that sweet new logo along with a website relaunch. You'll finally get that newsletter campaign going and setup those AdWords landing pages you've been meaning to do. And print collateral? We can design and produce all the cool schwag and marketing brochures you need, all in 24 hours. They'll be in your hands that very day. For real.

It's at no expense to your non-profit if you're willing to join in with us and work just as hard as we do for it. And did we mention it's for 24 hours straight? It's crazy, but as our last ZURBwired showed, it's exhilarating and creates results fast.

What do I need to do?

If you're a nonprofit, you need to gather your core team—those folks who will be here with us all day (and night!)—and send us an email at wired@zurb.com that includes:

The project you need ZURB's help with
The team who's going to be here for 24 hours helping us make it happen
Why your organization is a fit for ZURBwired.

If you're a vounteer or a potential partner for ZURBwired, you just need to email us (wired@zurb.com) and tell us what skills or services you'll bring to the event and why you think you're a fit for ZURBwired.

Find out more about ZURBwired »

We'll be announcing our ZURBwired 2010 nonprofit partner on Friday, March 19th.

It's Time! Announcing ZURBwired 2010 on April 8th

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:54:00 -0800

It's that time of the year again. ZURB has started planning our annual ZURBwired design marathon for April 8, 2010.

What is ZURBwired?

It's 24 straight hours of doing what we do best, all to benefit one special Bay Area nonprofit organization, and all at no cost to them. That's right; maybe it's a new website, maybe it's posters and invites for an upcoming event. Whatever the materials involved, the nonprofit will walk away at the end of the day with all the completed and printed collateral—literally hot off the presses—and it costs their team nothing but their time.

We'll team up with area volunteers and vendors who will all spend the day (and night!) at ZURB Headquarters powering through web and print collateral for the nonprofit whose proposal is chosen for this year's event.

What Do I Need to Do Now?

The event's not until April 8, but open submissions for nonprofits will be March 4-18.

In the meantime, we're looking for volunteers & partners to participate on the big day. We need people who want to work with the ZURB team and our chosen nonprofit from 8:00am April 8th until 8:00am April 9th. To be considered, just shoot an email to wired@zurb.com to tell us what skills you'll bring to the day, and why you want to participate.

Vendors interested in partnering with us should also send an email to wired@zurb.com to let us know how they can help provide the goods and services donated to the nonprofit.

Last year's partners included Zazzle, Tradewinds HD, and Chase VP, not to mention our long list of volunteers who stuck it out with us during ZURBwired 2009:

Patrick Briggs
Alvin Cheung
Justin Holbrook
Michael Horn
Jonathan Hung
Kim Kooyers
Brice McGowen

Jeffrey Rix
Anthony Saenz
Alina Senderzon
Amy Sirota
Pim Techamuanvivit
Siming Wong
David & Jeff from Chase VP

Let's Make Sure You've Got This

The 24-hour design marathon is April 8th, 2010.
Volunteers & potential partners should start sending us emails today.
Interested nonprofits should be ready to send us their proposals during
open submissions: March 4-18.

For more information on this incredible event, or to see what we did for ZURBwired 2009, check out zurbwired.com.

The team is psyched to get the ball rolling on this year's event. Will we see you there?

Please Stand Up

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:59:00 -0700

In a recent conversation with a client, we made the suggestion that the company should remove the chairs in the conference room. The suggestion got a little bit of a chuckle, but the reality is that chairs in a group discussion rarely help the team get stuff done. Removing chairs isn't a solution to the meeting problem, but it's a fantastic tactic to improve the quality of most meetings. Seth Godin has a nice blog post on fixing the meeting problem. Seth takes a broader view of the problem, but ZURB would agree on most of his points. Removing chairs happens to be number four on his list. So why do standing meetings work?

The first obvious reason is that people don't like to stand for long periods of time, so it creates a sense of "moving on to the next thing."
Standing gets more blood flowing and this activity encourages participation.
Long meetings standing up are tiring, so people will tend to keep them short and productive.
Standing encourages people to do something other than talk. Whiteboards become a new opportunity to drive the meeting.

Just to prove the chair point, here is a great example of standing "meetings" from ZURBwired last week. If you watch this time lapse video over the second part of the 24 hours (10PM-8AM), you'll notice there were many standing scrums. There's a great one around 1:30am where a flurry of activity around whiteboards is followed up by individual efforts and smaller scrums (keep in mind this was only one big room- there were other breakout rooms where more projects were being worked on). If your company has a problem with meetings, start removing chairs. Get your team invested in getting projects done. Tell everyone to please stand up.

ZURBwired Wrap Up

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:00:00 -0700

I've got a coffee in one hand, but the eyelids are still a bit heavy. On behalf of ZURB, I'd like to congratulate everyone that worked so hard to get this project completed. It's been an amazing 24 hours working with the Pie Ranch team. We're extremely proud of the effort everyone put in to make this event a success. This is our second ZURBwired event, so I'll just go ahead and call us the craziest design team in the world. It's great to know that our efforts have helped Pie Ranch get closer to their goal of raising 5 million dollars. Thanks again for everyoneâ€™s hard work! We hope parts of this experience will rub off on other non-profits that are looking to drive their organizations forward. Progress doesnâ€™t always have to happen in 24 hours- but with a little inspiration and a motivated team, quite a lot is possible. Heck, corporations might learn something! Over the course of 24 hours we created (we'll link to these over the coming days): - Functional website with blog - Newsletter template - Content for donor packets and website - Donations self-mailer with envelope - Invites and envelopes - Thank you cards and envelopes - Round stickers - Donor packet label - A Poster - Zazzle store - Letterhead templates - Envelope templates - Pocket map template - Farm dinner menu template - Facebook page - LinkedIn profile - Twitter page On the marketing side we published: - 9 edited videos - 300 images on Flickr - 50 tweets (90 total zurbwired mentions) - 19 blog posts Special thanks goes out to Jeremy and Amanda of ZURB who put in the extra effort to pull this event off. Great job guys.

Website Completion

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:13:00 -0700

It came down to the last hour, but we have a fully functioning website launched at PieRanch.org. It's a fully redesigned site that includes new pages for their upcoming events and campaigns, better donation page flow, integrated social sites (YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter), and a clearer mission. Here's a few pages from the website:

Late Night Video

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:34:00 -0700

Michael has been rockin the video segments- here is a great one documenting Hunter's arrival with the printed materials. It was something special to see the completed pieces when Hunter walked into the office.

Web Pieces Come Together

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:35:00 -0700

The web team has been diligently working on copy, visual design, front-end code and a modified wordpress backend all night. Most of the work started at 8:00pm with the teams breaking into separate groups to tackle the navigation and marketing concepts. It's been amazing to see the ideas and critiques happening- awesome work by the entire team. The content team is adding content directly in the admin screens: Part of ZURB's process is to start stubbing out the CSS and XHTML before the visual design is complete: Here is another screenshot of the in-progress work: ...and for a sneak peak of the final design, here is a psd screenshot:

Printed Materials Completed

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:08:00 -0700

Getting all the print materials completed today was extremely stressful, but the Pie Ranch and ZURB team pulled through. Hunter was our print man and went down to ChaseVP to supervise the job. Those guys did an awesome job on all the pieces. While Hunter was working with the ChaseVP team (Anthony, Amy, David and Jeff) in Morgan Hill, he was able to take some shots of our job on the press. Very cool stuff! Here is a thank you note (custom envelope not shown): Here are the pages from the donor booklet: Here is a shot of the invite (going to be cut at 7:30 am) and the folder sticker:

Website Visuals and Update

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:47:00 -0700

The team has been hard at work on the website as all the other pieces come together. Here's a video update from the past few hours. As part of the design process the team put together five different layouts that we're presented to the group on the whiteboards. After reviewing the designs, the team decided to do another round of concepts before meeting up again. We'll be posting a visual of the final design in an hour.

Late Night Photos

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:36:00 -0700

While the energy goes up and down, spirits have remained amazingly positive. No major fights yet. Unless you count the rapid escalations and repeated "sneak attacks" that result in a face full of Nerf darts. Everyone's still hanging in there, although Amanda has a sleeping bag stashed in the corner and Jered is seriously considering a power nap in the Lion's Den. Keeping us powered are serious amounts of Red Bull, fresh ground coffee and a chocolate beet cake that Selina brought us. That's right chocolate beet cake. With real beets. We're fully immersed in the web elements now and with 6 hours still left to go, we think things are just going to get crazier. Check out the photo stream. We have over 200 images from the day so far.

Beautiful Chicken #142

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:49:00 -0700

We've reached that point in the day where a solid +12 hours of work starts to do funny things to your brain. This video segment has a little of this and a lot of that. Great stuff. Chicken #142 from the ranch is also included.

Donor Packet Design

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:21:00 -0700

Okay, we're catching up on a few pieces that were sent over to the printer within the last couple hours. One of the larger pieces we put together was a donor packet. A big thanks to Alina Senderzon for her efforts on this piece of the project. Mark and the Pie Ranch team also played a big role in making sure the packet looked great. Here are two pages from the packet: Each page was slightly smaller than the next so that they display the headers in the folder.

Poster Completed

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:01:00 -0700

After a bit of running around, we've finally completed the poster design. Besides the donor packet, this was one of the last pieces remaining to be set-up for printing. Thanks to Zazzle for helping us out! Great work by Alvin- we call him of the marketing materials to whip this out!

Halfway Point

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:18:00 -0700

Now halfway through ZURBwired, we've sent part of the print pieces along to the printers but still haven't finished the collateral for the donor packets. Almost all of the team is now working on the remaining print pieces and catching a bite to eat at their stations. We were lucky enough to receive a visitor: one of the Pie Ranch chickens is on site and posed a bit for the camera before settling down for what is apparently a very strict bedtime. Moving in to the second leg of the day, we'll be focusing on the web pieces and overall experience for the farm dinner. We're expecting the graveyard shift to arrive any minute.

Print Deadline Looming...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:00:00 -0700

Hunter left for ChaseVP, our print partner, to finalize the printing of the invitations, thank you cards and donor remittance form (due to the internet outage we have to hand deliver files). We've still got the donor packet to put together, stickers and a poster! Here's how the envelope turned out: Here is the invite right before we we're told no bleed (cards had already been cut!): Wish us luck with the remaining print pieces!

Photos of the Team

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:24:00 -0700

We're in a low point before dinner, but we're looking for a second wind. Some of us have already had 5+ cups of coffee. But we're still chugging along, the first print pieces are almost complete (far from our 3:00pm deadline) and Hunter's ready to drive the files down to Morgan Hill to Chase VP. Things are getting loud and a little crazy as the pieces start coming together and the doors occasionally have to be shut to maintain concentration. A Nerf dart gun has also surfaced in addition to our regular artillery of ZURBalls. And we're just over one hour until the halfway mark and a delicious dinner.

ZURBwired Progress Report

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:04:00 -0700

We're 1/3 of the way done, but a ton of things have been completed for Pie Ranch. Here's an update from each one of the teams. Dinner w/ Adelaide team They've got time line and agenda for the evening based on a target audience. The dinner has a focus (yeah!) and plans have been created to raise money. Here's a piece from their work:

Barn Happy Hour
5:00 Arrive

Pie Ranch slide show playing continuously. Images of Pie Ranchers projected on inside wall of barn.
Barn happy hour- appetizers, wine
Informational stations where dinner goers can learn about Pie Ranch. Mission, projects, successes etc...
Music! banjo, fiddle, washtub bass, keytar,

Design Team The invite prototypes have been completed and the final designs are almost complete for the invite. Below is a mock-up of the design before a critique. Content Team They've made some great progress creating a mission statement based on the morning session brainstorms. Donor Packet Team A prototype design has been created and the guys are writing content. This is a larger effort, so it will be going to the design team later today.

Afternoon Progress

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:43:00 -0700

Wow. Teams are head down working on their assignments in each room. The first print milestones have passed, but I think we're still OK to get things printed tonight.

The Experience

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:08:00 -0700

In this video segment, Jered Lawson, of Pie Ranch and Jeremy Britton talk about the ZURBwired experience. Within the first couple hours of ZURBwired, it was clear that the team is full of amazing talent. Pie Ranch has a dedicated team. While the product team is creating design pieces, the marketing team has simultaneously been recording the event. Michael Horn of Tradewinds HD has been doing an exceptional job capturing video and quickly putting together segments. Alvin, ZURB's intern, also put together a great little animation to front up this video.

Design Team Cranking

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:11:00 -0700

The design team is working furiously on layouts to hit our print deadlines. The concepts have been roughed out, but the final designs need copy from the invite team. Check out the extranet to see the visual design concepts from the team: Visual Concepts.

And design is not the only thing we're crazy enough to try and finish in the 24 hours. After taking team shots of people working, we set up the lighting to take photos of isolated objects. Since all of the rooms at ZURB currently have people working in them, we decided to set it up in the middle of the Support side workspace. The team from Pie Ranch was kind enough to bring over some supplies and fruit from the farm- wheat, strawberries, baskets, and pie were all used. Check out some assets from the photoshoot:

Team Work Sessions

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:24:00 -0700

Things are starting to take shape in the ZURB office. Six groups were created (user needs, biz goals, creative, print, web/ext, and marketing). After an hour of brainstorming the team got together to discuss ideas. Here is our first video that documents the start of the ZURBwired. On a side note, all internet and phone connections are shot in Santa Cruz and south of Blosom Hill road. Vandals cut the the fiber line. So........looks like we'll be jumping in a car to get our files to the printer!

ZURBwired 2009 Has Begun!

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:02:00 -0700

We've Begun ZURBwired!

The morning began with a group scrum where everyone introduced themselves with an inspirational item. Jeremy, our chief instigator for the day, got us on track with the goals of the event. You can follow the event at ZURBwired- we'll be tweeting, uploading photos to Flickr and YouTube, and posting blog entries over the next 24 hours.

Chalk sign welcoming volunteers early morning.

Mary Schmidt and Jered Lawson also gave us a great overview of Pie Ranch and the goals for this event. During the day we'll be posting our work to the extranet. Below are some of the high level print goals for the day:

###Priority #1: Reach for Pie Campaign materials ####Goals: - minimum 100 copies to take away, up to 500 if pricing works. - organized, easy to locate information, materials not falling out. - reflect pie ranch mission, vision, values - minimal use of resources - ok to print letterhead blanks but hold off printing any content that still requires major revision. Deliverables: 1. Presentation folder (ideally this functions as the folder that holds everything AND is an external envelope)- smart packaging. substantial. double as mailing envelope using self-closure and adhesive mailing label. eye catching exterior to make it stand out in mail. inside design- stepped pockets on left side for easy viewing of donor inserts; one pocket on right side for 8 1/2" by 11'' campaign case materials. 2. Letterhead for letters, envelopes, thank you cards- includes font, color palette, reach for pie campaign logo (separate from pie ranch logo), color headers for different donor packet inserts. Donor packet inserts include: campaign budget, financials, donor recognition, pie ranch leadership, naming opportunities, guide to giving, construction and renovation (some of these may be able to be grouped together). 3. Campaign case-need a fancier front sheet, like the cover of a book. want it to be evocative right away/ transport people to Pie Ranch. Ideas: use a map or a single evocative image. we need to place Pie in space and create connection/relevance to donor's life. 4. Self mailing pledge form 5. We also discussed custom stamps; stickers for envelopes, egg cartons, etc; face book and web presence although not on jeremy's list below ... 6. Pocket guide to Pie Ranch- not a priority right now, can wait on this. ###Priority #2: Dinner with Adelaide ####Goals: - secondary priority - up to 500 copies to take away - reflect pie ranch mission, vision, values - minimal use of resources - ok to print materials, if we have final date, but if we can hold off, lets do so (~to be discussed) Deliverables: 1. invitation 2. tickets (digital mockup) 3. menu (digital mockup) 4. some form of place setting (digital mockup) 5. emails and web presence at the meeting last week although not on jeremy's list below...

Why a 24-hour Design Marathon Works

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:27:17 -0700

These are volunteers pitching in at Pie Ranch's chicken coop raising. That same spirit will help drive ZURBwired to create print materials and a web presence all in one day.

Only two short days away from [our crazy 24-hour, coffee-fueled design-a-thon][1], we wanted to spill the beans on why this event will be a success for Pie Ranch: it's the rapid teamwork formed by bringing **passionate people** into a **culture of design**. Any nonprofit can repeat what we'll do Thursday by applying our methods to any group committed to making a positive change. ###Passionate People We've generated a level of support from partners and volunteers that already has our office buzzing. Everyone involved has expressed excitement and shown a commitment to doing something great by offering their time and energy. Meet our team, including partners, volunteers and members of Pie Ranch: - Anthony Suez, Amy Sirota and the **[Chase VP][2]** team, off-set printing - Michael Horn of **[Tradewinds HD][3]**, videography - Bhaskar Roy and **[Qik.com][4]**, live mobile video - **[Campaign Monitor][5]**, email newsletter campaigns - Patrick Briggs of **[Zazzle.com][6]**, custom products of all kinds - [Kim Kooyers][7], writer and ace task master - [Jonathan Hung][8], multi-talented cognitive psych grad - [Pim Techamuanvivit][9], blogger extraordinaire - Justin Holbrook, CCA student and resident Pie Ranch cartographer - Leanne Liang, CCA student with a fashion background and a flare for maps - Jeffrey Rix, Pie Ranch supporter and fireman - Brice McGowen, CCA design student - Siming Wong, CCA student with a knack for textiles and Disney songs - [Jered Lawson][10], Co-Director of Pie Ranch - Mary Schmidt, Development Director of Pie Ranch - Susan Petersen, Creative Design for Pie Ranch - Sky DeMuro, Current Webmaster, but really just wants to farm! - And of course Jeremy, Bryan, Hunter, Amanda, Alvin, Mark, Ryan, Jonathan and Matt from the [ZURB team][11]! ###Nine Tricks of the Designer's Trade It's not just the people that make will make this a success for [Pie Ranch][12], it's **a certain design culture**. Some of our ways of doing things may be unique to designers, but anybody can use them effectively. Here's a sneak peak at some of the ones we'll be using for ZURBwired: 1. **Create Icebreakers** - Bring in an object of inspiration to introduce yourself. 2. **Define Opportunities, Not Answers** - Start by doing your homework. Identify problems to solve and seize on opportunities no one has thought of yet. 3. **Brainstorm** - Know the [rules of brainstorming][13]: defer judgment, encourage wild ideas, build off the ideas of others, stay focused on topic and quantity rules. 4. **Visualize Ideas** - Sketch the ideas you want to share. Can't draw? Even better (it's true). 5. **Build Mockups** - Be like MacGyver, grab scissors, glue and a partner. Build mockups so other people can feel your idea out in their own two hands. 6. **Timebox everything** - Our entire event be a big 24 hour timebox with a lot of little timeboxes throughout. [Timeboxing][14] is a vital ingredient to successful design. 7. **Poll the Team** - At certain points the team will vote with their post-it notes. Sometimes the team's expertise trumps the vision of even the brightest individual. 8. **Empower decision-makers** - You need people with the power to decide who can make gut calls on the spot. Get leaders involved and set them up for quick wins. Teams need to be able to call their work 'done' and move into the next thing. 9. **Trust experience** - Design experience can take you a long way in stressful situations, especially when the decisions you have to make are far from black and white. These are all methods you can bring into your own organization. We'll document what we do and share it at [www.zurbwired.com][15] on Thursday, April 9th in a blog posts, pictures, video and more. Stay tuned! ###The Team Said... **Kim said,** > "hey this looks cool. i'd do just > about anything for a good piece of > pie. need a writer?" **Patrick said,** > "Sweet! I want to get in there and > twitter with these folks and about > everything we are doing, blog it and > just the whole nine yards." **Pim said,** > "Ok, I'm in. I'm thinking I must be > mad, but hey what's news there. It > sounds like great fun, and a great > cause no less." [1]: http://www.zurbwired.com/ [2]: http://www.chasevp.com/ [3]: http://www.tradewindshd.com/ [4]: http://www.qik.com/ [5]: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ [6]: http://www.zazzle.com/ [7]: http://www.oneroofcom.com/about/ [8]: http://jonathanhungworks.wordpress.com/ [9]: http://www.chezpim.com/ [10]: http://www.pieranch.org/about-pie-ranch/ [11]: http://www.zurb.com/team [12]: http://www.pieranch.org/ [13]: http://www.zurb.com/word/brainstorming [14]: http://www.zurb.com/word/timeboxing [15]: http://www.zurbwired.com

Meet Pie Ranch: Our partner for ZURBwired 2009

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:34:30 -0700

ZURB is embarking on our second annual ZURBwired; a 24-hour coffee fueled marketing marathon, during which we select one local nonprofit and help them accomplish a huge goal. We accepted proposals from many nonprofits and then came together as a team to pick one project. ZURB and our partners cover all the costs associated with the event, including printing, delivery, productions, photography purchases, etc. And everyone on the ZURB team is excited to announce that we've selected this year's nonprofit! Meet Pie Ranch, a thriving, hands-on farm and food education center. Their mission is to inspire urban and rural people to know the source of their food and to improve the health of our food system from seed to table. Their team of five will be joining the ZURB team of eight and a half on April 9 here at the ZURB headquarters in Campbell. In addition, we have a dedicated core of volunteers to pitch in, as well as partners like Chase VP and Qik to help us make this event a success by printing materials and helping broadcast live video. We'll start work at 8:00am April 9 and wrap it all up at 8:00am April 10. And you can follow the whole event start to finish via images, videos, a blog and Twitter online at www.zurbwired.com.

We received proposals from many worthy organizations throughout the Bay Area and thank them all for their effort and ambition. We hope to find the opportunity to work with you in the future. At the end of the day Pie Ranch's ambitious goal of a fundraising dinner on their farm for hundreds, as well as their "Reach for the Pie!" capital campaign captured our team's imagination. We think this is a perfect fit.

Dinner with Adelaide

The bulk of our work on April 9 will done helping Pie Ranch come up with a theme, menu, web presence and all the necessary collateral to host their largest farm event ever. The Pie Ranch team is already visualizing a long dinner table in the field that can seat hundreds of people and be filled with the bounty of a late summer harvest.

Reach for the Pie! Campaign

Currently, Pie Ranch sits on 14 acres above the historic Issac Steele Ranch. Their Reach for the Pie! campaign is a capital campaign to raise the $1.25 million necessary to buy the historic farm and homestead, which is being protected from development by the Peninsula Open Space Trust until then end of this year, at which point Pie Ranch hopes to have raised the money to buy the land.

About Pie Ranch

Pie Ranch is determined to teach and remind Bay Area residents of where food really comes from (not just the supermarket) and the work and pride involved in planting, growing and harvesting that food.

They grow and raise everything they need to produce scrumptious pies, including the wheat to grind into flour, the fruits for filling, chickens for eggs and their newest edition: Adelaide the cow, for milk. Many of the pies are sold at their partner project Mission Pie, located in San Francisco. They also host a variety of educational programs that allow Bay Area youth to experience first-hand, the cycle of food from seed to table.

###Join our team for a day! We're looking for volunteers and partners who are willing to contribute their time, goods and/or services to ZURBwired. What we're looking for:

Volunteers

Energetic and creative people!

Videographers
Writers
Illustrators
Web Developers
Crafty People

Partners

Goods, services, and time to donate

Professional Photographers
Custom Product Producer
Image and Video Host
Email Newsletter Support
Blog Engine

####What do I need to do to join? Send an email to wired@zurb.com that includes the following:

A catchy subject line
Why you want to work on ZURBwired
The type of service you can offer
Three reasons why ZURB would want to work with you
Your URL

Nonprofits and Volunteers, Just One Week Left for ZURBwired '09 Submissions!

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:38:00 -0800

Get involved! Deadline for nonprofit and volunteer submissions is March 11th.

Nonprofits and volunteers, there is **just one week left for submissions** to the ZURBwired 24-hour marketing marathon. If you're a small team of dedicated individuals working to make a difference in the world as a nonprofit, this event may be perfect for you. Go to [http://www.zurbwired.com][1] and submit your proposal to be considered. The deadline for submissions is March 11th and the actual event will be held April 9th. **Interested in volunteering your time or goods or services?** The team needs energetic writers, illustrators, print designers, a videographer, a video editor, photographers, and anybody with a creative streak and MacGyver-like can-do attitude to get things done. We'll be working quickly in a large group and small teams together as we go around the clock (twice) from first concept to last sticker or line of HTML for the brand new website that will come out of this. Forward this on to people you know who might be a good fit. And don't be shy about volunteering yourself. You have a rare chance to work with a talented group and make a big difference in a remarkably short time. Visit [http://www.zurbwired.com][1] to learn more. [1]: http://www.zurbwired.com

Announcing ZURBwired 2009: A 24-Hour Marketing Marathon for Nonprofits

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:40:00 -0800

The entire team is excited to announce **[ZURBwired 2009][1]**, a single, coffee-fueled 24-hour marketing marathon at [ZURB Headquarters][2] on April 9th, 2009 that will propel one nonprofit organization years forward. We have done it before and can tell you it's amazing what a group of motivated people get done in one day together. It's a lot of fun, and yes, it's a little bit crazy. We aren't going to do this alone. If you work with or run a nonprofit organization and think you'd be a perfect fit for this, [submit your proposal (PDF)][3] by Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 to be considered. We're making our decision within one week. Care to join the team for a day and contribute goods, services, or elbow grease that can put this event over the top? We need to hear from you. Head on over to [http://www.zurbwired.com][4] for more details on how you can get involved. [1]: http://www.zurbwired.com [2]: http://www.zurb.com/contact [3]: http://www.zurb.com/downloads/ZURBwired-2009-Nonprofit.pdf [4]: http://www.zurbwired.com