This was the Netflix homepage as it was when I originally did the new concept. I contacted anyone I could at Netflix and showed them the new conceptual redesigned homepage (below). I’m not saying I had any kind of influence, but it’s an awful coincidence that the homepage has since changed to a slightly nicer looking “design”.

I went ahead and took the dive into the unknown and became a member of Netflix despite my reservations about how technologically sound and quality such a poor design could be. Once I was in I was hooked and quickly moved from 1 to 3 movies out at a time, streamed any and all Doctor Who I could get, and became a big fan of the service Netflix offers.

All that said, I still felt like the design was done as more of a working, developer design (nothing against developer, after all I’m one too), rather than a real quality, usable, and astheticly pleasing design. I thought it could be better, so here’s what I put together for a new homepage design.

With this design I’ve incorporated everything in the current site, minus the bland, ugly, dated design. Right away the user knows what this site offers, movies. The color scheme works off of the Netflix red and provides a much richer, touchable look. The new design keeps everything the user needs to have quick access to on the homepage, and removes the clutter and the harshness of the bright red used in the current background.

In closing, we at BeOriginal think Netflix offers a great service that keeps getting better. The current design really doesn’t show the quality, nor get the turnover that they deserve as a great company providing a very current, high quality, and tech related service. A new, updated, “web 2.0-ish” design could drastically improve the new user growth, as well as the current user moral and organic spread.

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IndieFeed wanted an iPhone version of their site to go with their awesome new Wordpress based site, designed by, plug, BeOriginal. Thankfully, we didn’t have to create the iPhone version from scratch, not that we couldn’t mind you. It’s just that the folks over at Brave New Code already provided the Wordpress community with a handy little plugin by the name of WPTouch. With that in hand, rather than wasting time and effort (and the client’s budget) building an iPhone site from scratch, we were able to have a complete, custom, working iPhone version up in no time flat.

While the WPTouch plugin helped speed up the process, it didn’t take care of everything. It did give us a base template to start from. We then had to take the design from the main site and incorporate it into the new iPhone optimized site. To do that we used a complex series of lasers, microscopes, science, crazy mathematical equations, three sour apple jellybeans, and two boxes of plutonium schmear all to miniaturize the design to best fit the iPhone. We think everything turned out pretty great. Our client, IndieFeed, loves it, and that makes it all worth it.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch we highly recommend you try it out.

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Most great inventions come from necessity. I’m not saying our web app SuperLame is anywhere near as important as say, the microwave or I don’t know, energy drinks, but it has it’s place. About a year ago I thought to myself, self, there’s not anywhere on the internet to go to quickly and easily add comic word balloons to photos. Yeah, it’s not a revolutionary idea, but if you search the tubes for an app like I’ve just described you’d be hard pressed to find anything as fast, easy, or quality as Superlame.com.

Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?

OK, so SuperLame was an internal project done by us, BeOriginal. We funded and created the site and continue to support it. What is it? Well, I was about to tell you. SuperLame is simply an online web tool/app for anyone to upload a photo, add comic balloons, then save that photo to use for whatever. That’s it, simple right? When did all this nonsense start? Well, I was hanging a picture above my toilet when I fell and hit my head, the next thing I remember was waking up and building the flux capacitor, wait… no, sorry, different story. So, from idea to working beta, because it’s not web 2.0 if it’s not beta, the app and site took around eight (8) days to develop. Since then we’ve continued to update and improve the site, adding such features as comic style sound effects “Whoopa!”. As for the where… well that’s kind of stupid, I’ll just say, the internet. Why? I kind of already covered that in the first paragraph. Basically, whether there was a need or not, I saw one and wanted to do something about it, if for no other reason than to just do it. Now we get to the meaty stuff, the how. Simple answer, computers.

More On How We Did It

Yeah computers were involved, but computers don’t do squat without fingers to mash keys and a brain to tell those fingers what keys to mash. I forgot what I was saying. Anyway, the main SuperLame application was built in Adobe Flash using Actionscript 3. If you know what that is great, if not, it’s basically the tech on the web that let’s you watch all those stupid lip syncing videos on YouTube. Flash allows the creation of very feature rich and interactive web applications and web sites, and that’s why we used it. With that said, while Flash played a large role in the user experience and front end of the application, PHP, another very popular and useful web language played a pivotal role behind the scenes. PHP stands for… well, I’m not exactly sure, in fact I don’t think the first P stands for anything. Hold on, let me “wiki” it… OK, yep the first P is stupid, but the rest supposedly stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. Guess it should technically be HPP, but that just doesn’t roll of the tongue the same way. <sarcasm>Anyway, I’m sure that helps you understand it better.</sarcasm> Oh, and if you didn’t get that last joke, the one with the <tag> stuff, it’s just stupid web developer “humor”, I’m sorry. And on that note, I think I’ll wrap this up before I go even farther off course.

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We recently finished a complete overhaul of the Washington, D.C. based indiefeed.com. IndieFeed provides a music discovery service to the indie community through a number of daily downloads in various music genres. The idea for the site overhaul was not only to provide a fresh, energetic look to an out of date site, but also to make the music discovery process much easier for the user. One of the many features we added in the redesign was an option to play the song directly from the browser via a small Flash audio player.

Taking it to the iPhone

One of the biggest differences to this site than many others we’ve done is that IndieFeed wanted a version of the site designed specifically for the iPhone. Since the site was built on the ever flexible and extensible WordPress engine we were able to simplify the process of conversion from normal site to iPhone based site. The WordPress community is always contributing new and innovative tools for extending the power of WordPress. We were able to take advantage of one of these innovations using the WPTouch plugin as provided by the amazing and generous developers over at Brave New Code. This not only helped streamline development of the iPhone version of the site, but also speed up the process considerably.

And Finally…

What we ended up with was a site the client IndieFeed can now be proud to display as more of a showpiece than a simple utilitarian, get-the-job-done, kind of site. As with all the projects we take on, we always try to blend form with function. We beleive good design should pave the way to a good user experience.

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Everyone has their individual idea of a great vacation. One person may want to veg out and read a book, while another prefers to enter a triathlon, just to push their limits. Weather it is relaxation or acomplishment you look for in a vacation, the ultimate goal is satisfaction.

That is exactly what we found this summer, satisfaction as a family. As with many families today, we live apart from those we love in separate areas of these united states. That changed for a brief week, this past summer. During the dog days of summer we all set our sites on a brief retreat, in beautiful Destin, Florida. After a few days, all had arrived and settled in for a little R&R as well as family chatter. That’s when we all get caught-up with what is exciting, new, old and is going on in the lives of one another. At the end of the chatter was a challenge. My brother-in-law, an avid hunter, had seen an ad for the Browning company. “Show your Buckmark” So, he asked if I could come up with a way to impress Browning. After some thought as to the medium we had to work with (sand), I decided size is what was needed. And that is where family came in.

From New York, South Carolina and Georgia, we all pitched in for over four back breaking, sun baking, sand shaping hours of fun in the sun. At the end of the day, we had a sand sculpture over 25 feet long, 12 feet wide and almost 3 feet deep. Now that’s what I call a vacation.

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If a picture is worth a thousand words… a one minute video can deliver an encyclopedia of information to your prospective clients via the web. We are going to cover some Pre-Design topics and three main pitfalls to producing a video for delivery on the web?

Who Gets the Information?

Consider how much information you truly want to broadcast to everyone before you start developing your video. If you decide you need to limit the information to only people that have paid for it you can set up a password system. If there are specifics that you want to enphisis yet details you need to keep close to the vest, usually you can discuss that with the art director and achieve your goal through the shots you choose and the editing process.

Decide Before You Design

This is a subheading that appears in most every article. The reason is that if you do not have a clear understanding of your ultimate goal for the project, no matter what medium it involves, you will not be able to achieve a satisfactory result. So, start by asking yourself a series of questions.

Ask Questions

Who is my target market. What about my product or service would appeal to them. Is there a call to action.

Those are the basics for any project, yet there are additional and very important aspects to producing a video for web delivery that you must consider before you start.

Pitfall One

Just because you can – doesn’t mean you should. A video allows for a wide realm of expression. However is that what will sell your product. Do you really need to show transitions that take up value download time, rather that showing how your product works? Decide ahead of time are you selling a “look” or a product. If the “look or style” of the video is bad, your customers may assume your product is also.

Pitfall Two

Probably one of the most important aspects of a video for web delivery is the technical side. Will everyone be able to view your investment in a video. Does your designer know who your target audience is, what computer systems, browsers and plug-ins will reach the greatest majority of people?

Pitfall Three: Time

Take a look at how you browse the web. Would you spend the time it takes to download a 60 meg file? That’s approximately 10.8 minutes with a DSL or cable modem, would you take the time – maybe not. So no matter how nice the video is, you are better off trading size (high resolution) for size (small file for quick download).

There are additional constraints that come with producing viable video for the web.

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Slides

The business standard for many years. The upside is slides are relatively inexpensive to produce by almost anyone in your organization using off the shelf software. However if your slides are just text or non-descriptive photos with clip art, it may take five to ten minutes to explain a key point or process. If the person presenting the material is not a polished speaker he may quickly lose the audience. So, what would be an alternative?

Training with Video – DVD

A simple 15 second video clip can relay a complex concept without losing your audience. The clip can be presented on VHS or DVD. Because DVD’s are menu driven they are a more efficient delivery of video than standard VHS. And with the drop in price of a basic DVD player to $40 the market is quickly catching up with VHS players. As of March 2003 there was an estimated 58 million units sold and the rate of units sold per month was estimated at 3 million.

Online Training

A rapidly growing segment of training is now being done using the internet as a pipeline for delivery. Why? Cost. After development cost, there is virtually no difference in the cost of training 5,000 people as opposed to training five. Additionally, the people you are training can be in almost any part of the world. This form of training also allows for feedback and interaction. Another way to use the internet for training is to post for download PDF files (Adobe Acrobats – Portable Document File – format) with built in indexing and search capabilities for text books and research materials. This makes research convenient so your employee or student does not have to continue going online to find answers. Also they can print out any single portion of text or illustrations needed. As with most technology there a few pitfall and precautions that you should be careful to avoid, such as making sure you set permissions and passwords on documents you post online.

Visual Aids

If the service, product or training you need to do is more visual than technical, this too can be accomplished via DVD, CD or online. A good format for online delivery of illustrations and how-to-information is Flash. Most all browsers now come with this plug-in pre installed. The stats from Adobe, the owners of the Flash player, say it is on 96% of all computers. One caveat to using Flash is to make sure the version you publish in, is the version everyone has or you will need to provide a link to Adobes website. Not only is it visual, it also allows sound, so adding voice over can strengthen your presentation. All of this at a relatively low bit rate for downloading.

Bottom Line

With the new avenues for delivering compelling sales, training and marketing materials it makes sense to take your company to the next level.

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Should I use a “Gang Printer”?

We would first like to state that there is a place in the market for all levels of print quality and delivery. This article is going to focus primarily on “Gang Printers”. So, what is a gang printer and what should be considered in balancing the cost of such a printer?

What is a “Gang Printer”?

A “Gang Printer” is a printer that has a large printing press that handles a large sheet size of paper, possibly 22″ x 26″ or larger. The printer will take on print projects from as many as 20 different customers, all with the same print project – such as post card. Then once he has enough to fill the print sheet he will run 1,000 sheets or more of paper with all 20 customers on the same sheet. This makes economical since, however it doesn’t leave the press operator with much leeway to make corrections in color density to any one of the post cards.Decide Before You DesignWhether you are the marketing director or the designer, a few basic decisions need to be made before ANY concepts or designs are put to paper.

Consider Your Time

First is, how long of a lead time do you have. This is critical due to the fact that “gang printers” wait until they have enough projects to put on press to make it profitable. Thus their lead times are usually longer. So if you are not pressed for time you can consider saving money.

Consider Your Content

Second, is color a critical criteria on this particular project. There are a few inherent pitfall that should be considered in the concept and design process that will either improve or reduce the quality of the finish piece if you choose to use a gang printer. If possible do not use models or show people in the deice, as skin tones are more difficult to reproduce accurately if the press mans hands are tied. Very small tones and hues in skin color can make a big difference in the final quality of the printing.

Consider Your Layout

An additional pitfall you should be aware of is where you place large areas of solid colors on the final design. This can lead to a ghosting of a color across an area that should have no ink on it at all.

There are additional factors you should keep in mind before considering using a “gang printer”. Gang printing can make good economical sense if you approach it with all the facts. If not you could get burned.