Talk about a kick to the ego. These are some of my first projects out of college. I plan on keeping these around to remind me where I was when I started, especially when evaluating job candidates.

These were made as part of a loop for an arcade machine called the GATE. We had hooked up a webcam, mouse trackball and a keyboard to a computer in a custom cabinet. The idea was that you could play new computer games with people in arcades around the world. You could hear them and watch them in little windows around the game you were playing.

This was back in 98-00, way before YouTube, podcasts and ventrillo. It was pretty amazing that we could squeeze 8 videos through a tiny pipe along with game data. Alas, noone told the owner, an old exec from Atari, that arcades were dead in America.

He should have put it in Japan.

“I have a fax from Sam for you.”

Those words struck fear into my heart. Sam was supposed to be on a plane halfway around the world. He wasn’t supposed to be sending me new things to do. Plus I was pretty sure that he didn’t even know how to work a fax machine. With him it’s iPhone or nothing. Here is what he sent me. It’s a little blurry but trust me, you wouldn’t be able to make it out even if it weren’t.

A bit later he attempted to explain his latest wild idea. The Enterprise Octopus had reared it’s head once again. It has done so several times. This time a new illustration was needed.

“I need you to draw the anatomy of the enterprise octopus with a bunch of people inside and you are on top with Doppler for a head. The tentacles are grabbing all this stuff. Then I need you to draw the octopus as bowl, upside down, with a man drowning in paperwork.”

Did I mention he was insane?

Fortunately at the time I had David Carroll working for me and he took the first stab at it. That’s what a good minion is for after all. David’s idea was to make Octi into a sort of enterprise machine, with its eyeballs and mouths on hinges with people popping out to say hi. It was a very creative idea and I really think he did a great job on it. I added a little cherry on top, translating Doppler into Radar and making it a man’s head. as well as a few touches like the rubber grommets. I also really dug all the rivets David added and how precise the seams were.

David also drew the safe and the screen by hand. The truck comes from a Yellow Icon icon pack.

Of course Sam had asked for two drawings, so I took a stab at the back. The idea was an enterprise that had collapsed under its own weight. The standard array of office apps aren’t getting the job done and pure chaos reins supreme. I went with the idea that the tentacles were literally crushing people, perhaps having been chopped off in places. People are trying to work with files but have no idea what to do or can’t work with them. Others have given up. Oh and Sam wanted a man with a bag over his head representing the employee, lost in a sea of files and confusion.

Here are the steps I took in creating it. If you’d like to see these in full res you can check out my Skitch account. I worked in chunks, sending progressive updates to Sam to be sure I was on the right path. That way if something was wrong he could stop me early and set me back on the right direction. Sam and I work best like this, especially for complex designs or illustrations and allows for a lot of feedback throughout the entire process.

As you can see, the first stab at the piles of paper looked a bit like rice. I ended up biting the bullet and drawing 10-15 unique pieces of paper and then cloning them all over the pile. I then unified them by giving them a universal light sorce.

You can also see where our styles diverge a bit. I used a more traditional illustration method, painting the scene with a Wacom pen and tablet. David used vectors and a much more controlled and precise style. His people are a bit stiffer, like what you’d see on a bathroom door. Mine are pudgier, luke plastic bags filled with blue jello. Neither way is right or wrong and I really liked seeing our different interpretations of the same subject.

David had given us a great start but Sam was a bit concerned that the Enterprise Octopus was looking too machine like. He wanted something a bit more organic. I went back and retouched it, removing many of the machine bits. To give the COLORS acronym a bit more contrast I added a wavy blue banner. This helped the words stand out a bit more.

To see them at full size and to get a bit more context check out Sam’s blog post explaining this madness. It goes into a lot of depth explaining what each represents and is a fascinating analysis of how enterprises work.

I appreciate the feedback that everyone gave on my previous video slamming on the Dungeons and Dragons’ website.  It seems that it is something very important to many of us.  Some of you had some excellent questions and I felt that there was no better way to answer them than to show you what is possible.

But before we get to that…

It’s fair to say that my previous video was a bit of rant and not the most constructive form of criticism.

As I commented online, it’s not just about margins, gutters, grids and the like. Wizard’s web site should be about making a rich experience that showcases and harnesses the power of their content, entices visitors and is a joy to use and navigate. Their website is one of the primary means in which new gamers learn about D&D and we existing gamers find the latest information about our hobby.  Their print material is absolutely fantastic but unfortunately their online presence does not have the same level of quality.

With these thoughts and your comments in mind, I spent the weekend figuring out how to put my money where my mouth is. 

For what it’s worth, I am full-time web designer working for Jive Software.  I am also very involved in the Portland tech community.  This exercise is just a way for me to share my knowledge with you and the D&D community at large.

The Design

So here it is...my interpretation of the Dungeons and Dragons website.

Whether or not you find this attractive, I believe I have very successfully solved several of the issues with the current design.

Global Nav

Starting from the top, my overall objective was to reorganize the information so the site was easier to use.  I wanted to showcase the artwork and increase the content on the home page without losing existing information or sacrificing any of their branding.

At the top we have the global Wizards of the Coast navigation.  I retained the positions of the Dungeons and Dragons logo and the DnD Insider login, while removing much of the clutter.  This removed some noise from the branding and made the login form much more obvious.

The next thing I did was to move the navigation bar.  This frees up horizontal space in the content area and provide a navigation in a single location.

The Masthead

Next we come to the primary focus of the page which is the large promotional area.  Here we showcase some great art which helps set the tone of the page and provides a large space for promoting the world wide D&D game day.  I pulled content about the game day here so the user doesn’t have to click to learn about it.

The Magazines

Similarly, Dragon and Dungeon magazine gain a much prominent position.  At a glance, the reader can see what the latest issues are all about.  I thought it was also important to retain prominence for the D&D FAQ, one again pulling more information to the homepage.

All of this fits “above the fold” of a 1024x768 screen.  In other words, all of this content is viewable on most monitors without scrolling. I’m not a huge believe in the importance of “above the fold” design on the web but in my analysis of the current D&D website it seemed like it might be a requirement.

News and Features

The largest change to the site is the news and features area. It is currently quite difficult to navigate new articles and content as they are released. The way I solved this was to take all of the latest content and combine it into a date sorted blog roll of sorts.  At a glance, the reader can see which content is newest, where it belongs, and what it’s all about. This is heavily inspired by news and magazine websites with similar amounts of content for readers to filter through.

The news and feature header was inspired by the new 4th edition titles as seen in the recent photos of the Player’s Handbook. It helps to tie their print and web materials together.  You may also notice that several of the titles use the same typeface as the magazines and products. Also on the header is a clear link to subscribe to an RSS feed of new content.

You may notice that I did add links to the latest content up in the masthead area. This is for users whom might not want to scroll through the page.

Right column

To the right we have another area that can be used for anything.  In this design, I’ve included the 4th edition countdown, the 4th edition game demos, and the product release schedule.  This area is very flexible and could easily be used for any periodic content. In the product release area I’ve increased the size of the images and included additional text describing the products.

The footer

At the bottom, I made sure include Sage Advice, links to the Community, and submission information.  I felt that it was a nice terminator for the page that still providing meaningful content.  Again, I’ve respected the Wizards brand and have included their global footer, terms of use, privacy statement, and other links.

The big picture

As a whole, I wanted to make the site feel like Dungeons and Dragons.  I’ve used as much artwork as I possibly could without losing focus on the content. I’ve also used the deep red color scheme with blue and gold accents found in the D&D logo, Dungeon and Dragon magazines, and the upcoming rulebooks.

But is it usable?

I also did what I could to respect the workflow of content contributors.  It is not only important that the site is easy to use by visitors, but that it’s easy to update and maintain.  In fact I feel that this design requires much less photoshop foo by contributors to update the site.

The Grid

One of the most important aspects of web design is to draw the readers eye from one section to the next smoothly.  One way this is accomplished is through a strict grid system.

This helps align content and reduces visual fatigue as the user looks for content relevant to them. Another way this is accomplished is through focal lines and a visual heirarchy that draws the reader to important content, such as the angle of the sword or the flow of background imagery and masks.

Conclusion

This is one designers idea of what this could be like.  With more information and some collaboration with their team, this design could be made even better. I love Wizards direction with 4th edition and am looking forward to their new releases.  I can only hope that they eventually put as much time and thought into their online presence as they do their print products.

Whether you love it, hate it, or just don’t give a crap I’d like to hear from you in our comments or forums at dragonavenue.com. 

Chibbell out.

Wizards of the Coast has been doing it’s damndest to convince us that they can provide an excellent online experience. They are offering up a new online magazine, character generator, mapping program and online game area.

Yet time and time again WotC has proven to us that they have absolutely no idea what their doing with the web. They’ve failed us with their website and I’ll show you why.

In preparation for my presentation at Beer and Blog I hastily put together this list of useful design resources. I hope people find them helpful. I’m also quite positive I’ve left off quite a few things that are obvious. Please feel free to leave suggestions.

Pixel Pushers

Pixelmator (OSX) - http://www.pixelmator.com/
Great low cost image editor for the mac. Very much like photoshop though in its infancy.

Paint.NET (PC) - http://www.getpaint.net/
Free image editor for the PC. Been seeing it garner traction lately. An undergraduate project that’s grown up a bit. Source code available too.

Picturesque (OSX) - http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque/
A very quick small, focused image editor for the mac. Easier to make rounded corners and reflections with it than photoshop. Batch processing can be quite useful.

The GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/
Completely free and works on anything. Started its life on Linux I believe. I’ve never been a huge fan but some people LOVE it. Of course they also tend to love writing their own drivers and other scary linuxy things.

Screenshots Galore

Snipping Tool (Vista) - http://snurl.com/25025
Great article on Life Hacker on how to use the new built in screenshot tool for Vista. Glad Windows finally built in something better than Print Screen.

Print Scr (PC)
For those without Vista, you can also take screenshots by tapping Print Screen on your keyboard. This will capture the screenshot onto you clipboard. No mouse point though. Pressing Alt + Print Screen will capture JUST the active window. Great for sharing screenshots of how badly your website is broken in IE6.

Shift + Command + 3 (OSX)
This will automatically capture a screenshot of the current screen onto your OSX desktop. If that’s too awkward of a key combination, you can always go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. There you can see all kinds of helpful shortcut and change them to your hearts content. I also highly reccomend "Alt + Shift + Command + 4". Then you can copy a selectable (click and drag a box on what you want) picture of the screen to the clipboard. Even better, before you click, press the Spacebar. Your mouse will turn into a little camera and you can click any open window to get a screenshot of just it, window shadow and all.

Skitch (OSX) - http://skitch.com/
My current face. They just make it far too easy to take a screenshot, mark all over it, upload it and share it. Useful for spreading ideas quickly. Too bad that its mac only. Their file organization and page layout could use some work though.

Screengrab! (Firefox Extension) - http://www.screengrab.org/
Another great tool, this time specifically for Firefox. Great for grabbing a screenshot of the entire contents of the page, not just what you see on screen. Can copy straight to clipboard or save out to a file.

Paparazzi (OSX) - http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/
What I used to use for grabbing screenshots of pages on the mac. You input the url and I believe it uses Webkit/Safari to generate the screenshot. Nice part is that it lets you specify exact width.

SnagIt (PC) - http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp
Probably the better known screen capturing utility for Windows. Paul Biggs swears by it, though I haven’t messed with it much myself.

Screen/Video Capture and Video Hosting

Screen Flow (OSX) - http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/
A great new app for capturing video of your screen, mouse and mouse clicks, camera, mic, system sounds. It has some pretty simple built in editing too so that you don’t have to open up iMovie. (Why did you have to ruin iMovie, Apple!? Why!?!)

Camtasia (PC) - http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
Also from TechSmith, the same people that make SnagIt. I’ve used it once and it was pretty adequate for my needs at the time. Again, I think the PC users are missing out on some really good, simple apps. This one is a bit more of a heavyweight.

Vimeo - http://www.vimeo.com
Need a place to host video that has higher quality content and feedback? Vimeo has to be one of my favorite sites on the net. Really great atmosphere, excellent web design and even the option to upload High Def video. Hard to beat. Great for hosting video-blogs, short vidcasts and your own homegrown videos. Not the place to host your marketing materials.

Blip.TV - http://blip.tv/
Now this is the place where you can host your marketing materials. Or you developer videos. Or anything you want really. Really great for hosting say your own online product reviews or something of that nature. Anything episodic in nature works well with their interface.

Image and Design Resources

Flickr - http://flickr.com/photos/chibbell/
The goto resource for hosting your photos online. Also a great place for me to host all my screenshots and keep them organized. Also a great resource for free photography if you pay attention to what license the photographer is using. Surprising amount of people are ok with you using their photos. Also a good resource for finding random objects, textures and effects that you could manipulate or cutout and make your own imagery with.

stock.xhang - http://www.sxc.hu/
Great resource for free stock photography. Not quite as nice as flickr but a lot more of your typical stock photos can be found here. If you’re on a budget or just need something simple, this is the place to check. Site can be a bit on the slow side at times.

iconBase - http://iconbase.com/
Great free icons from the people of Yellow Icon.

Silk Icons - http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
A set of 1,000 16x16 icons from Mark James. Realy great stuff. Heck, we use some of it in Clearspace.

Designer’s Toolbox - http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/
Recently found by my colleague, John Lascurettes. A really great collection of resources for design. Everything from PSD’s of form elements from every modern browser to templates for CD labels. Never forget the dimensions of a A10 envelope again!

Open Source

Open Source Living - http://osliving.com/
Hands down one of the best designed and organized resources I’ve seen for open source software. A lot of potentially great apps in there that I’ve yet to try. Gotta thank Chris Kalani for this one. 

Today the twittersphere has been driven to a bit of a furor over some of Jeff Croft’s recent twitterings. It appears that a colleaugue of his has recently been frustrated and even somewhat offended by a client.

Ever had a client take your design, “rework it” and send it back to you so you can do the rest of the site their way? How did you handle it? I don’t want to be someone’s pixel prostitute. If they want to push my pixels around, they can do it themselves, after I’m done. My job is to give them the best possible solution I can come up with. They don’t have to use it if they don’t want to. It’s work for hire. They hire us, we do our best, we give it to them. PERIOD. If they want to redesign it AFTER that, fine.

I can certainly feel the pain and only years of making mistakes has helped me find ways to avoid that sort of situation. It’s good to see that his design bud’s have his back but I do think we designers can get a bit snooty about these situations at times. Especially when it comes to our work.

Here is the response I left on Bryan Veloso’s blog, Avalon Star:

This reminds me a lot of the ‘93 interview with Steve Jobs discussing Paul Rand’s work. Steve asked Paul to provide them some option. Paul responded with:

No. I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people...you can use it or not, but you will pay me.

A great interview all around.

I also think Zeldman had some great points during his presentation on Selling Design at An Event Apart ‘07 in San Francisco. There is a certain amount of legwork that has to happen upfront before you can really engage with a client. You have to establish a certain amount of trust with the client and make sure that there are no unclear assumptions about the project.

Assuming you’ve done all this and a client still does what they did to Croft’s unfortunate colleage—after your through throwing your computer through the screen of course—you have to assess what it is that client is asking. We have to put aside our feelings and think about what the goal is that the client is trying to accomplish by sending you a grossly disfigured copy of your work.

Does he simply not understand or respect the process? Or is it something else? Are you not meeting some unknown criteria that the client hasn’t made apparent? Are they unhappy with something? Sometimes it really helps to go back to the basics and do a gutcheck.

I also think a lot of this is can be avoided if you walk a client through your work. The client obviously doesn’t know everything we designers implicitly understand. They don’t know why Garamond is the proper choice and Comic Sans is not. So whenever we send work to them we should always be sure to take the time to show them why we did what we did and how it is making them successful. Just because we’ve already signed a contract doesn’t mean we’re done selling.

Of course, sometimes the client is just the wrong client and you find out too late.  It’s unfortunate but obviously it happens more than we’d like. All we can do is hold our heads high, be the better man and exit stage left as swiftly as possible.

I hope everything turns out well. I truly feel the pain of a fellow designer’s frustration. We got your back.

I woke up to another Twitteriffic morning. It wasn’t a month ago that I thought Twitter was a useless waste of time. Now I find it to be just as important to my daily activities as IM, email and Clearspace. I’ve made some very interesting and valuable connections through it. It gives me a certain sense of connection to the community. I love how brain-dead simple it is. That little 140 character box has forced me to become much more succinct and focused. Alas, it’s another giant time-sink that I find can be distracting. Like anything else, sometimes you just need to turn it off.

The new Jive Software site is finally up and kicking. It was a fantastic effort from our entire team to get to birth this whale and I couldn’t be a prouder father. We completely pitched out our old site and started completely fresh. Chris Kalani and I started on the new designs about 4 or 5 months ago, with a lot of careful analysis and planning. We garnered feedback from the whole company as to what they liked and disliked about the old site and how we could improve. Then we set out to make the best site we could.

We had some very specific design goals and ideas in mind. These were all goals that we could not and would not compromise on. We could argue about colors, layout and content till our faces were blue, but if it didn’t meet these goals, it was out.

• Be super easy to update, both content and presentation.
• Use the minimum amount of HTML and CSS needed.
• Keep the layout flexible using a solid grid system.
• Make screenshots understandable at a glance.
• Use minimum colors for the pages so that imagery, icons and screenshots really stand out.
• Don’t make the user hunt.
• Must be SEO-friendly.
• Build it for an enterprise user. Treat them like a human being.
• Our site must reflect our products commitment to cross-browser functionality

To start out we browsed the web to see who was doing it right. I believe strongly in the philosophy that, “Good designers borrow. Great designers steal.” You can see most of our influence in my Flickr set, Web Design Inspiration.

We actually printed all of them out and posted them up on our wall so that we could always see them and reference them quickly. Then we began the process of generating wireframes and mockups. I don’t believe there is ever a completely linear path for designing a website. We’d jump back and forth between sketching ideas on paper, scribbling something up on a marker board or editing something in photoshop. We were never really done with sketching or mocking something up. If something needed changing we would either discuss it and alter it or tear it apart and start from scratch. Fortunately we had the time to do so.

I long ago lost count of the number of mockups we did. Some of that could probably be attributed to the fact that Jive as a company was swiftly growing during this time period. It’s worth mentioning that we were also working on a new logo, a new community, a new version of Clearspace, aquiring Jotlet, creating a new booth and completely rethinking some of our strategies. We were challenged with the fact that at times we still didn’t know how we were positioning our product or building our messaging. We definitely ran into some chicken or the egg problems with the design and content. We designers wanted to know exactly what sort of content we should expect in order to best build a design around that specific message. Meanwhile everyone else wanted to know what things would look like and how they would lay out so they had an idea of what to write. That’s something I hope to fix with my process in the future.

Overall it worked out well. While we probably spun our wheels a few times, we definitely came up with some really solid designs. While I love what we finally decided on, I think there are a lot of really great designs in our mockup pool. You can check them out for yourself on Flickr.

In the end I think we came up with an incredibly stellar site. We have a modular, flexible site than is easy to navigate yet looks killer. We incorporated Clearspace seamlessly into our site, driving our blogs and news and running our communities. All in all I feel that our site accurately reflect who we are as a company and what we’re trying to accomplish.

I should of course shout out a huge thanks to all who worked on the site. Designers: Chris Kalani, David Carroll and Josh Pyles. Backend Codeninjas: Benjamin Sherman, Chris Bohnert and Tim Neuwerth. Project manager and wall of defense: David Greenberg. Our SEO and Lead Gen master, Paul Biggs. And last but not least, our steadfast leader who let us do our own thing and do it well, Sam Lawrence. We survived a new logo, a new product, explosive growth and being relegated to the Manstable to put out an incredible site.

Oh and lest I forget, a huge thanks to all our wives and lady friends for putting up with us throughout this process.

The conversations Sam and I have are usually via IM. He’s usually off traipsing about the globe while the rest of us salt miners hack away at a design or code. Sometimes this can be incredibly frustrating as we are both very poor at instant messaging. Our brains move faster than IM allows. Three or four conversation threads start to happen at once. I’m also quite handicapped at conversing when I can’t gesticulate wildly with my hands. Occasionally though a true gem sprouts forth. Something like today’s amusing banter.

Michael Sigler: how’s the foot? is it rotting yet?
Sam Lawrence: it really sucks. it’s broken in three places and i’m in a stupid wheelchair
Michael Sigler: Do you have osteoporosis?
Sam Lawrence: blow me

Ahh Sam, what would we do without you? Hope your ankle heals soon!

I must admit. When I first heard the name Startupalooza I dismissed it as a silly name that I wouldn’t be interested in. Then I started reading about who would be there and what they would be talking about. Josh Williams & Mark Frohnmayer of GarageGames. Kurt Deutscher to demo ExpressionEngine. Jason Glaspey & Matt King to demo Unthirsty. Heck, even my friends and co-founders of Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker would be talking. By the morning of Startupalooza I was driving my lady nuts with concerns about arriving on time. Despite the rain, sun and hail, we made it just fine, despite the general lack of parking in the area.

Todd and the Legion of Tech did an great job of putting the show together with the folks from Cubespace. to borrow Scott’s format, the highlights for me were:

• Listening to the Garage Games story and seeing the demo of Instant Action. It’s nice to see someone besides EA and the other giants doing something in the market. I’m amazed at what they’re doing with a web browser. The sheer possibilities are astounding. I’m also intensely curious to see how GarageGames and their developers put their player and gameplay data to use to make more engaging and fun games.


• Getting to pester Kurt about the future of Expression Engine. In particular the Forums Module. Its been in maintenance mode for a long time and I’m looking forward to seeing what they decide to do with it this year, if anything. He seemed to understand my pain and it was obvious he feels passionately about the product.


• Listening to Matt and Bill tell the Jive story to a large group. So glad to see they were using Keynote. I trained them well, though they forgot to use our new templates.


• Meeting Matt King, Scott Kveton, Rick Turoczy, Michael Richardson and more. I tend to shy away from events, getting sucked into my own projects or work at Jive. It was really great to put faces and voices to names. Its inspired me to attend Beer and Blog and other functions more often.


• Chatting with Martin about Treasurelicious. Its a killer app for a collector like myself. Hopefully I didn’t offend him when I asked if he was ready to give the site some more design love.

It’s obvious I moved to the right town. The collaborative spirit here is awesome. There is so much to take part in and everyone is eager for feedback and participation. Though it was still mostly a sausage-fest, it was good to see a number of women in the audience. I was also pleasantly surprised by the range of ages represented.

The event was quite inspiring and I’m glad we attended. I came home on fire, ready to get back to some pet projects so I can share them with others. I’m also eager to spread my design knowledge to those in need. As Rick (or perhaps Kistner) said on the Technopreneur panel, “Don’t take your knowledge for granted. Someone out there is in need of it.”

Oh and Todd, I still think the names silly. Silly, memorable and tied to a great event.

The New Jive Stickers from Jive Software on Vimeo.

Ryan and Kalani were afraid that the new Jive logo stickers might be too confusing for some (like our IT department). They decided to use our CEO’s car as an example.

There is a lot of speculation, doubt and excitement over the news trickling out about Expression Engine 2.0. I’m a bit cautiously optimistic, as usual. Some screenshots are up on Derek Allard’s blog. It looks interesting but Veerle’s design is really divergent from the look that Jesse cam up with. Not sure how I feel about it yet. Everything feels a bit too large. Reserving judgement until I see more.

I’m intrigued by the ideas of jQuery but am unsure about how deep it goes. I really wish there was OpenID support out of the box. I also haven’t seen any news about the Forums module. I love that its integrated with the Expression Engine platform and it made development of Dragon Avenue much easier. At the same time it seems like Forums may be Ellis Labs’ bastard stepchild that just doesn’t get the love it needs.

I’m really excited about Startupalooza. Looking forward to Kurt Deutscher’s demo the most.

Now if I could just get someone to nab me an Ellis Labs tshirt from SXSW.

Sam posted about the new Jive logo a couple of weeks ago. I promised myself I’d post something more in depth but let myself forget about it. Then I saw this post over at 37signals and it reminded me how much I love how-they-did-its.

Sam’s already done a great job of explaining why we went with a new logo:

The “Bullhorn” didn’t represent collaboration as much as it did an individual voice. And it certainly didn’t match the new product logos and corporate identity. We hired a designer to help us back then but it didn’t result in anything we loved. It was just a painful experience and we decided to table it and concentrate on Clearspace. That behind us now, we embarced on re-addressing Jive’s logo a few months ago.

I’d like to add that the timing was great. We were already consdiering a new website, new marketing materials and even possibly a new booth. If we were going to change the logo it was sort of now or never.

We immediately went to Raja. He was a complete rockstar on several of our current product and website logos, including Clearspace and Ignite Realtime. Raja brought along Mike Erickson to help us out. At the beginning the one thing that was clear was that we really wanted to focus on a text-only treatment. We wanted to let the products retain the more icon-like marks and to make Jive more of an all encompassing emblem. We also suggested that it might be good to remove Software from the logo. Everyone refers to us as Jive. We call ourselves Jive. Why bang it over everyone’s heads that we create software?

Raja and Mike immediately began taking stabs at it. Our first direction was more of a take on “infinite unity” with a few simpler take on a stylized Jive inside a container.

This one we really liked at first but but never could get past the sporty, Nike-ness of it.

There were a few that were interesting but perhaps a bit too bizarre and others that just didn’t make the cut:

We saw a ton of options:

Eventually we saw something with some potential. It was a bit too whimsical at first, but Raja and Mike had stumbled upon something we really liked. We loved the flow of the inner line, how it created the dots for the J and I. We also liked the dimension created because the line didn’t cut completely through the V. Almost like whatever was cutting the logo apart was going behind it.

We went through several variations, until after a late night I stumbled into this idea. It had the feel that we wanted. Large, bold, concrete, energetic, and with the right balance of enterprise-class business and hip technology company.

Of course just because I was close didn’t mean we were there yet. Raja and Mike spent plenty of time correcting the kerning and letter weight. We explored a multitude of different typefaces until we had altered things so much it was pretty much our own. We bounced ideas around internally, sometimes quite heatedly. John (dude, get a blog already!) pointed out that the swoop was a bit too much of a “comet” crashing down to the ground. To emphasize growth he flipped that frown upside down, which made a subtle but quite impactful difference.

Color was a particularly hard decision for me. I really loved the green and blue. In the end I finally relented when I realized my feelings were more ego-driven than logical. Finally we decided on what we have today. A logo that looks great on pretty much any color background you throw at it. Its an equal balance of sophistication and energy with a tone that speaks to both business and technology.

I’m incredibly proud of all the work we did. Huge thanks to everyone who helped. So far it has been a huge success. I’ve been surprised at how quickly it has been adopted and its finally starting to feel like us again.

If you’re still reading then you might be interested in a little pixel-love I eeked out for the unveiling of the new logo. It’s a Jive wallpaper at 1600x1200. Enjoy!

I’m still in shock. Not only has Microsoft changed course, but they’ve done so in response to their design and development community. According to Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager of IE) on the IE Blog, IE8 will now default to “IE8 Standards Mode” for any site requesting Standards Mode.

To quote the blog:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously...Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

I’m still not sure I can believe my eyes.

I was generally pessimistic when Microsoft first announced their original plans for a new meta-tag that would be required to explicitly tell the browser what version of IE you were developing for. It felt like MS was removing the hammer from the hands of the standards movement. Companies could ignore any need to improve their sites by tossing some tag in their page and leaving it be. There would no longer be any incentive for a large amount of companies to improve.

While I was not outraged like some, I was still dubious of that decision. All the more interesting was the fervor generated when some of my heroes like Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer and Zeldman began singing along to the Microsoft choir. I could understand some of their points, most specifically around the problems Microsoft faced when releasing new version of IE. Any company has to pay attention when the people paying the bills start crying that their site was broken by something they did. It’s the same guiding principle as to why Microsoft (and any large software company) can’t revolutionize their software with every version. Backwards compatibility is a bitch.

Still, version-targeting just seemed completely wrong. I’ve really struggled with the issue. On one hand, the issues around DOCTYPE and quirks vs standards mode are very real. The standards community has had its head in clouds for quite a while and has needed a reality check. Perhaps this new meta-tag would help. Yet what about the potential for the standards movement to, in essence, have its balls removed? How long would Microsoft be able to continually build support for standards mode from previous versions of its browser?

So has the tiger changed it’s stripes?

I’m still on the fence here. While this decision changes the default behavior for any site requesting a generic standards mode, a developer can still use the version targeting meta tags to keep IE8 in IE7 mode. It seems like nothing has really changed except for the default, which appears to only really be a default if someone has a general idea of what they are doing in the first place. This really reminds me of a new way to do what the DOCTYPE already does, except perhaps in a more explicit way, rife with the potential for harm. And what about this statement from Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel?

While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

Is this really a response to the community or does this have more to do with Microsoft’s continuing legal issues in the EU?

It seems like I’m not the only one on the fence. Microsoft is trying to straddle a fence between making two groups happy and that rarely, if ever, goes well. On the surface they’ve made it seem like they’ve done the impossible and dodged the iceberg. But have they really? The PR engine certainly believes it according to this press release, Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards.

Call me paranoid but I’m hiring a dentist to look at this gift horse’s mouth. 

We had quite a great encounter in my Age of Worms campaign this weekend. The party has reached Kuluth-Mar, where Kyuss bcame a deity. There they met up with a few BBEG’s from the past and some souped-up monsters.

A few rounds into the combat and Jim’s Radiant Servant of Pelor was staring down the barrel of a charging enemy on horseback (well, Nightmare-back) with a +4 unholy greatsword. He was already under some serious mind-affecting effects and unable to defend himself.

At the last moment, his wife Rebecca was able to recover and come to the rescue. She lashed out with one of the first truly epic Disintegrates of the campaign.

112 pts of damage and a failed FORT save sent my beloved Knight of Kyuss, Loris Racknian, former champion and owner of the Greyhawk Arena, into oblivion.

This is the first time for many of my players at this power level. Its a lot of fun watching them roll 26d6 of damage for the first time.

Jim, ever grateful for having his cleric saved, had to snap up a picture. Just look at all those sixes and fives!