Communiqué

The booth is up, the iMacs are webby, the staff is caffeinated, and the Cube of Truth is ready to do its duty.

Drop by and get a sneak preview of the new Massachusetts Biotech Council web site — it's even better than Spiderman 3!

More updates (and photo) as the show continues — check back tomorrow. If in doubt, subscribe to our RSS feed (learn more).

In previous articles our design progressed from an idea on paper, to grey boxes in Illustrator, to an actual comp in Photoshop. The next step was to turn that design into a website.

The design comp in Photoshop is simply a picture of a web page. You can't click on anything, it's just one big image. Going from a comp to an actual web page is a process most people call "cutting up" the design. In our case, Patrick and Will dissected Craig's Photoshop comp, separating the appropriate images and recreating the structure in CSS and (x)HTML.

From there, we apply the "cut up" design to all the pages of our site using a basic PHP template engine. All of this is done on a development server, allowing us to tweak the new design and content without breaking our existing site.

However, applying the design to the HTML pages is just the beginning. Things that look great in a Photoshop comp don't always translate perfectly to the web. Differences in font rendering, CSS/HTML limitations, operating systems, and browsers open the design up to a host of issues.

Read More

I can't believe that I have to do this. It's been so long since I've actually had to put on my boycott shoes, but recent events have forced my hand.

I don't pretend to know how to run a website. I've been running one on and off for the past five years, but the most I ever saw was 700 members. Then I stopped paying attention and the members got angry at me for not being there. However, following this HD-DVD story nonsense, I'm done with Digg. Read More

We're getting closer. We have comps.

Read More

Here's a quick list of some of the tools we're using to redesign our site. Of course, if you hire us we can use these same tools to build a site for you.

Planning, Business Development

Most projects start out in Microsoft Word as a description of pages. Word is useful for tracking revisions and creating PDFs to send to clients.

We use Inspiration to create sitemaps. Inspiration is a really easy to use program designed for kids. There's an example of one of our Inspiration sitemaps in part 3 of this series.

Almost all our internal notes are recorded on our Wiki. We use Wikka Wakka Wiki.

Read More

Yesterday, Christian and I were talking about contrast in design. I believe that I was advocating for more contrast - make the the big type bigger and the small type smaller, or something like that.

It reminded me of this story...

Read More

iMarc is pleased to announce the addition of Melissa Maguire to the staff.

Melissa will be working with the creative team to help develop innovative web designs and unique branding. Melissa is a graduate of The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and worked as a Graphic Designer for a digital printing studio down in sunny Florida.

We're excited to have her here and look forward to her contributions.

After ironing out the website architecture, we moved on to grey box comps.

Grey box comping is a design methodology that foces the designer to think about layout and importance of content, without worrying about colors, typography, images, wording, or any other design elements. Grey box comps deal with pure high-level layout and nothing else.

Read More

Right now "stand up" meetings seem to be all the rage. More popular than Steve Ballmer in a room full of developers, stand up meetings have infiltrated every aspect of daily productivity.

Stand up meetings, as I understand them, are quick, non-scheduled meetings. These meetings usually have just one or two items on their informal agendas. Someone calls an impromptu meeting, the team quickly huddles up and the the stand up meeting begings.

The thing I find particularly odd is the enthusiasm that is behind this concept. If you say that you don't like stand up meetings, you better watch out. [the record scratches to a stop while an agile evangelist runs up and brands you with the Scarlet Letter].

On Martin Fowler's site, contributer Jason Yip, advocates then breaks down the stand up meeting. He talks about the high energy, the quickness, the supportive team building, but ignores the interruptive nature of stand up meetings.

In a recent blog by Seth Godin, the author states, "It's a huge mistake to just show up in a conference room and have a meeting".

Why? Most meetings at iMarc follow a more traditional concept...

Someone sets an agenda and schedules the meeting at least a hour in advance.
This gives participants time to find a logical pausing point in their work. After the meeting, they pick up where they left off. With stand up meetings, the participants are pulled away from their work arbitrarily. After the meeting they spend a decent amount of time just figuring out what they were doing and where they left off.

The meeting is held in a conference room with the doors shut
Participants are forced to get up, walk away from their computers, telephones, coworkers, and distractions. This puts them in a different state of mind. They aren't tempted to answer their phone if the stand up meeting is huddled up around their desk.

The reason why stand up meetings seem to have taken off is because they're short. People like short things (like Pedroia at second).

It is, however, possible to have a short, scheduled traditional meeting. Meetings are intrusive and interruptive enough. Stand up meetings take the interruption to a higher level.