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Awesome “Site down for maintenance” design – Home Depot!
Home Depot is down for upgrades, check out their page, Awesome :
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Home Depot is down for upgrades, check out their page, Awesome :
When I first pitched photomash they either loved it or it was met with a “huh, you do what?.” Photomash lets an iOS or Android user take a photo and erase parts of the photo. After erasing a part of the photo you can see through the hole revealing what the camera sees. At that point you line up your shot again mashing the two photos together. You can keep erasing and mashing. It’s extremely simple yet a bit confusing to explain.
After getting the app prototyped it became obvious to me that some users needed some creative help to understand what was possible with Photomash. The idea of a tutorial seems kind of annoying. So, I had the idea of showcasing all the stupid and wacky things my colleagues and I came up with while testing the app. We built a system that solved two problems, making it social and teaching users how to use the app in creative ways.
The challenges ranges from simple things like replacing someone’s face with someone else’s, then sharing it. Others get crazier like creating a “Frankensteined” version of someone. Overall the challenges needed to be simple tasks that only took a minute or two.
Many of the challenges like teabaggin came from playful explorations. I stumble upon the teabaggin challenge while testing. I happened to take a picture looking down at my nethers while I was sitting. I erased a bit then pointed my phone at a developer and started to laugh uncontrollably. Slowly while testing challenges began to show themselves organically.
One night me and my fiancé were taking turns playing around with ideas. She ingenuously came up with my favorite, the lollipop head. Take a picture of someone, then erase a huge area where their head was and move closer to take a shot. The results are hilarious and super simple.
Another one of my favorites was inspired by people defacing signs and billboards. The sign anagram challenge introduces people to the idea of taking a picture of a word and erasing letters to make a new word.
“ Bubny loves fairies,
my daughter
and him have that
in common ”
The icons for the challenges were inspired by xbox achivement icons. Conveying the challenge in the icon was pretty funny in a few instances like man baby and teabaggin. The icons also servers a purpose of letting users know which challenge they are on while taking photos.
The day was coming for a while now, and it’s finally here, Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO and Tim Cook the COO will take over. Looks like stocks took a bit of a hit as the news came out. Hopefully Apple won’t go the path of Microsoft after Bill Gates stepped away, but we really won’t know until he’s completely done with Apple. Steve will still be there as the Chairman of the Board so I’m sure his very necessary input will be taken 
Here’s the link to the text from his resignation letter:
http://news.yahoo.com/text-letter-steve-jobs-resigning-apple-ceo-225627625.html
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to the homepage.
PSD Tuts+ has a post with some quite stunning Photoshopped space paintings.
This one one is by Greg Martin
Great new site our here that is a collection of interaction patterns for prototyping Android apps.
Ran into this when I was looking at verifyapp.com which is one of their products, check that out too, great product. Zurb is the company that created verifyapp and of course in my search to see who made it, I found their playground area where they keep alot of cool useful stuff for web design and development companies such as ours. They have CSS3, buttons, sketch documents and JQuery of course. Check it out here:
http://www.zurb.com/playground
Challenge
Avis Yates Rivers, President and CEO of Technology Concepts Group International (TCGi), called us with a challenge. She and her company were being featured in Minority Business Entrepreneur magazine for being the only minority and woman-owned IT infrastructure company in the country that serves Fortune 500 businesses. To boost the impact of this new publicity, the company needed to redesign their website and present themselves as the leading-edge technology company that they are.
Design
From our design discovery process we drew a vision for a website that looked “uniquely familiar.” In other words, the website layout should be similar to the corporate websites of their clients, yet showcase the distinctive culture of Avis and her company. We started by creating a simple content flow that stemmed from their services, into their values, and ended on establishing contact. Our creative was rooted in the icon of the TCGi logo using it as ambiance throughout the website. The design ultimately focused on short, to-the-point copy that complemented the TCGi no-nonsense business approach.
Develop
The website was developed within a WordPress blog using Jquery and PHP. Due to the timeline to launch, copy was being written as the website was being developed. This helped copywriters see their copy directly on the website and make edits accordingly. Because of this, testing went much quicker making QA and launch a breeze.
How did it go?
Using WordPress for the website gave the TGCi public relations team easy-to-use content management capabilities, a means of posting a stream of technology and business related articles, and opportunity for content to be shared over a host of social networking sites.
We forged a true partnership with TCGi, and launched on time. Avis and her team love their new website because they can confidently send their URL to the CTOs of Fortune 500 companies and know that the site reflects the strength, quality, and savvy of TCGi.
LWers
RJay Haluko (design)
Melissa Penta (develop)
Tracy Severino (project management)
Derrick Larane (account management)
Gilang Chandrasa posted an article on komunitasweb.com housing a collection of 9 very nice presentations on User Experience. Very good read for beginners to get a foothold or experts to take a step back.
I’ve been waiting for Nobuo Uematsu to come back to the United States so I can see him in concert. Yea, nerd alert! I found 1 show in 2011 at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As I was in the purchase funnel and trying to figure out were I’d be sitting and what the stage would look like, I found their 3D seating selector.
1. I pick from the area where I would like to sit based on the view of the stage vs. the amount of money I’d like to pay
2. I pick the specific seat that I’d like to sit in while having a true understanding of what my view of the stage would be
Great job Chicago Symphony Orchestra!
It’s time for our family to grow.
2010 has been a great year for Local Wisdom, and 2011 is looking even better.
We are on the lookout for talented, fun and dependable Internet-folk in Central New Jersey to join the Local Wisdom team.
We are seeking freelances (and if all goes well, eventual fulltimers):
If you, or anyone you know is looking for work in interactive design, development, or project management, please get in touch with us at resumes@localwisdom.com.
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