Peapod Architecture and Design Process

Posted on April 25, 2010 by Alistair Morton
Filed Under Design, Interface, Marketing, Nerd Alert, Open Source, The Web, User Experience | 3 Comments

When Peapod Studios begins creating a website, we’re not just simply collecting a few key pieces of information and moving directly into the build process.

There is a great deal of discovery and strategy that goes into creating the final products we deliver. We start with several sessions of discovery, where we set the basic goals and criteria we’d like the clients site to meet.

Then we develop several individualized personas of who the key users and stakeholders of the site will be. Personalizing a users experience dealing with a website is a key part of ensuring success. We develop several pathways throughout the site, for them to easily obtain the information they desire or have come for while navigating the site.

Architecture and Strategy Documentation

Architecture Document

We take all of this information and use it to develop our Architecture and Strategy document. This will serve as a resource for both our developers and the client to refer to as we move forward to the point where we can begin the preliminary site mapping and wire-framing of the eventual site build.

WireFrames

wireframe

Once we have established the web sites core functionality and layout only then can we move into creating the initial rounds of designs, a process we call skinning. Initially we like to provide the client with three distinct rounds of creative, allowing the client to have several choices in the future direction of the design.

Design Begins

first mocks

Taking the clients feedback from the intial three mockups we can begin to build out more honed designs based on their feedback. This is not a perfect science, sometimes a client will go through more than one round of creative, although sometimes we nail it from the get go.

Design Sign Off

Final Design

WIth all the elements in place, we finally have the basis for build.

The documentation we have from the preliminary steps allows the developers to work knowing the ins and outs of the final structure, and gives them an extensive library to refer to. Art direction is minimized as most of the design lives within the styles created in the skinning stage.

Asigra.com

Thirteen years of Apple Online.

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Alistair Morton
Filed Under Design | 1 Comment

As the web and web-technologies march forward, it’s sometimes nice to take the time to look back at the evolution of the web and its design through a companies eyes.

One of the first companies to go online was Apple, here is a snapshot of their journey, design and products through the last thirteen years.

Apple Website 1997

apple 1997

Apple Website 1998

apple 1998

Apple Website 1999

apple 1999

Apple Website 2000

apple 2000

Apple Website 2001

apple 2001

Apple Website 2002

apple 2002

Apple Website 2003

apple 2003

Apple Website 2004

apple 2004

Apple Website 2005

apple 2005

Apple Website 2006

apple 2006

Apple Website 2007

apple 2007

Apple Website 2008

apple 2008

Apple Website 2009

apple 2009

this post was made possible by Innocente–Hayart’s Apple Gallery

Open Source Fonts.

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Alistair Morton
Filed Under Community, Design, Open Source | 1 Comment

Free fonts have always been shunned by the design community, and many of the free fonts on the internet are simply poorly crafted ripoffs of actual quality typefaces. They lack differentials in weights, have improper or incomplete unicode, poor hinting and so on.

However some in the typography community are now moving towards the creation of high quality, open source free fonts. This is a sea change in the philosophy we’re used to dealing with from the old school foundries, representing a new age in how we can consume great typefaces.

Today we’ll focus on an open source foundry we just love…

The League of Movable Type

Philosophy: No more bullshit. Join the revolution.

“We’re done with the tired old fontstacks of yesteryear. Enough with the limitations of the web, we won’t have it. It’s time to raise our standards. Here, you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.”

Quite a statement, and they deliver on that promise. Here’s some of our favourites typefaces from The League of Movable Type.

League Gothic

league gothic

League Gothic is a revival of an old classic, and one of our favorite typefaces, Alternate Gothic No.1. It was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company (ATF) in 1903. The company went bankrupt in 1993. And since the original typeface was created before 1923, the typeface is in the public domain.

You can grab League Gothic here

Junction

Inspired by my favorite humanist sans serif typefaces, such as Meta, Myriad, and Scala, Junction is where the best qualities of serif and sans serif typefaces come together. It has the hand drawn and human qualities of a serif, and still retains the clarity and efficiencies of a sans serif typeface. It combines the best of both worlds.

You can grab Junction here

Chunk

Chunk is an ultra-bold slab serif typeface that is reminiscent of old American Western woodcuts, broadsides, and newspaper headlines. Used mainly for display, the fat block lettering is unreserved yet refined for contemporary use.

You can grab Chunk here

One of our core philosophies at Peapod Studios is to always strive to work with open source software whenever and wherever we can. Seeing this open ideology move to the realm of typefaces is indeed very exciting.

The League of Movable Type Logo

With our highest recommendation, please check them out.

The League of Moveable Type

Kidney Stories of Hope.

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Alistair Morton
Filed Under Design, Marketing, The Web | 2 Comments

We were thrilled when Argyle Communications asked us to help out with The Kidney Foundation of Canada’s Kidney Story of Hope campaign that aligns with March, which is Kidney Health Month across Canada.

What’s Your Kidney Story of Hope?

March is Kidney Health Month across Canada. Kidney Health Month offers a special opportunity to educate all Canadians about potential risk factors for kidney disease and important steps for prevention. It’s also the time of year to encourage financial support to help improve quality of life for current and future patients.

Based on your positive feedback on last year’s Kidney Stories of Hope campaign, the Kidney Foundation and campaign partner Shire Canada are pleased to once again offer you an opportunity to help raise funds and have a chance to receive a cash prize in return!

Here’s what we came up with.

kidney logo

first kidney image

third kidney image

fourth kidney image

Freshbooks Makes Us Look Professional Every Day, So We Decided to Return the Favour.

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Alistair Morton
Filed Under Branding & Identity, Community, Design, Interface, Social Media, The Web | Leave a Comment

Freshbooks makes us look professional every day. We’ve been customers since early 2007, and have no reason or inkling to ever move away from their awesome time-tracking and billing services. They save us several hours a week, and days a month. If you want to know how valuable your time is, try doing your invoicing for one month with FreshBooks, we promise you wont ever want to go back to your crusty old system.

So when Michael McDerment called and asked us to add a little spit and polish to his presentation at the Future of Web Apps Conference, we absolutely jumped at the chance.

Mike giving his talk
Photocredit: Alex Designs

Presentation Slide

FreshBooks Believes…

Running a business is hard enough. We believe financial record keeping should be easy, fast, (and perhaps even fun), but still detailed enough to satisfy your accountant.

Billing should be simple. You can send an invoice a few seconds after creating your account no matter what level of experience you have.

Your data deserves to be safe, secure, and accessible to you. We also believe you own your data, we do not. Your data will be easy to export any time you want it.

Every customer should look like a Fortune 500 company, based on the image sent by invoices, bills, or other accounting communications, no matter what size the company is.

Thank You.

So a giant “Thank You” to the FreshBooks Management Team for putting your external face to the world in our hands, if only for a brief moment.

We were happy to return the favour.

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