Marketing Infographics

Multiplex is a Mac-only application for managing your ripped DVD collection.  It downloads cover art and meta data for all your movies, and helps you organize your movies into sets.  Multiplex makes searching and browsing your digitized DVD collection fun and easy. Learn more and download a trial copy on the Multiplex Website.

Multiplex was developed by Dave Martorana and Jason Allum and designed by Johnny Billotta and myself.  It’s one of the first big projects released through IndyHall Labs.

I worked with Dave Speers to build a clean, simple wordpress theme for his blog covering the exploding entrepreneurial scene in Philly.

Check out all the other great entries at SXSW Cards.

P.S.  I’m honored to be in such company… UserVoice is awesome!  We’re using it on Multiplex and The Daily Jar.  Keep up the good work Marcus.

Randy Schmidt and Chris (of Ümlatte) and I will be there to present iSepta. I have a tiny case of stage fright, but I hope that I’ll be able to relax enough to enjoy seeing so many creative people blow my mind with their cool projects. I’m really looking forward to this.

Pre-Ignite Coworking

Also, if you’re planning to attend Ignite, you should come early to Northern Liberties and join Lauren Galantner and me for a Cream Cheese Session. This will be the second coworking session in our new bi-weekly schedule. We’ll be setting up camp just a couple blocks from Johnny Brendas at Euphoria Cafe. Should be a good time. Follow @creamcheese on Twitter for updates early in the week.

www.isepta.org

Randy Schmidt and Chris Conley from Ümlatte came up with the iSepta project as an experiment. It presented a fun technical challenge, gave us a chance to collaborate with a small, agile team and offered the opportunity to solve a really frustrating real-world problem.

As commuters, Randy and Chris have had first-hand experience with the difficulty of finding train times using the gigantic-info-blobs that pass as SEPTA’s online schedules. They needed a better solution, and instead of living with frustration, they simply decided to build one. Their idea was to take the schedules to the iPhone web application platform so they could get the information easily from anywhere.

When they showed me their prototype, there were just two drop-down menus and a button. Pick your stations and it displayed a list of upcoming trains on any regional rail line. While it wasn’t slick looking, I immediately recognized the potential in this simple interface. It solved the problem of finding train times by asking the most basic questions: where am I leaving from, and where am I going?

I immediately offered to pitch in with user interface design… the project was just too cool to pass on. The iPhone platform for web applications presents a wonderful balance of features and constraints. The small screen, narrow bandwidth (of the EDGE network) and touch-only interaction mean that an application has to be pared down to its essential elements. On the other hand, with access to all the benefits of Safari, you can use some really cool stylesheet properties still unsupported by most web browsers.

Within a month, after several iterations, we had a great looking and pretty easy-to-use interface. I was overjoyed at the easy of working with Randy and Chris — both really insightful guys and excellent developers. They gave me consistently great design and usability feedback and were receptive when my design experiments suggested changes to the programming. Honestly, it was the most fun and most efficient development process I’ve ever been involved with. Serious kudos to Ümlatte.

We’ll keep working on the app, with the goal of making public transit more and more fun and easy to use. We’ve got lots more ideas, so keep iSepta bookmarked on your iPhone and we hope you never miss a train again.

So this past weekend I took a little time to look around the interwebs and re-evaluate what I like about other designers’ sites. In the end, I realized that I just wanted something simple. Not too many colors, not too much content. Realistically, I’m not going to update the site every day, and I don’t want my homepage to become a clearinghouse for all my digital drivel (tweets, bookmarks, faves, pokes, etc, etc). So I threw out everything extra.

…and here you see the result. Overall, I like it. As I grow into it, I’m sure I’ll add some extra gewgaws and whatchamacallits. But for now, i’m keeping-it-stupid-simple. I’d love to get your feedback (in leaving everything out, I’m sure I left out something important). Thanks!

I had hoped to crank this thing out on Friday, but I’m a little to obsessive about my own code to turn something around that fast. It’s justified, since I’m using this site to develop WordPress plugins and techniques for use on other sites. Totally worth it, even though it means a few missed hours of sleep.

Anyway, here are some features of the new redesign. I’ll be posting more about these on Big Big Technical:

• Thumbnail Galleries and Post Images — I’m using my yet-unreleased Thumbail Gallery plugin to create the galleries on the Case Studies pages. For this redesign, I added a couple new features too, including support for images in multiple groups and a way to designate a “post image” that can be displayed with each posts’s excerpt on the front page and other archive pages.
• Categories as Pages — something I’ve been tossing around in my head for a while. I finally thought of a reasonably simple way to include categories in the default WordPress menu.