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. 

The Passion of the Wenckus from Michael Sigler on Vimeo.

I tricked my friends into thinking they would have to help me move. Little did they know that we had hired movers the week before. Instead of hauling heavy stuff we pretended to be rock gods.