So, we’ve been busy working on lots of things, but I’m spending the day getting caught up on a few paperwork and administrative to do items. One “to do” was to share with you some recent mail, both electronic and postal:
Traces of Hope
We received an email from one of the organizers of an interactive project called “Traces of Hope” by the British Red Cross. The experience is designed to help bring awareness to conflict zones around the world, in this case Uganda.
I wrote back with some suggestions and feedback based on things we discovered when working on campaigns focused on real world issues in the past as part of CD.org.
Check out the site and we wish the team the best in taking a different approach toward bringing attention to a noble cause.
Blindness
We also received a package at the Collective Detective Compound containing promotional materials for a viral marketing campaign around the movie Blindness. The package contained a card embossed with “i am blind” in text and also in braille, two pairs of wrap around shades (like you’d get after having your eyes dilated) with “iamblind.org” printed on them, and a self-addressed stamped envelope for a PO Box in Toluca Lake, CA.
It was very awesome of the campaign organizers to track us down (we’ve moved recently) and send this to us. We started CD.org in ‘02, so it’s nice that six years later, colleagues and friends still send us stuff as part of their campaigns.
Archives
The last notable piece out of the mailbag is from a member of the original CD.org:
It’s great to see CD back online and to read about your plans. It sounds very exciting.
I was wondering if the old forums are archived somewhere. So much wonderful brain power and hard work was reflected on it, and it serves as a history of that genre’s gaming community. It would be a shame if it was lost. If you have a chance, could you please drop me a link to it, that is if it still exists.
We archived that version of the site in ‘05 and it was available until late ‘06 I believe. We recently changed servers and did some massive updates and the site is archived, but no longer publicly available.
It’s amazing the longevity and interest in the community and what we all participated in, accomplished, and the experiences we took away. It’s a great feeling to have been a part of something like that. We appreciate it and thank everyone who ever stopped by.
At least once a year we get an email asking about buying the archives or an inquiry into putting it back online. Due to the privacy of the detectives, selling the archives is highly unlikely to happen. Putting up the old site up for even nostalgic reasons would involve massive upgrades to the application to get current with dependent software packages and to secure it against security vulnerabilities. Besides, the Internet is full of tools that are generations ahead of the 2002 custom-built ones on CD.org:
- Our Trail system, could now be set-up with free wiki software like pbwiki
- Our IRC network could be done over Twitter or any IM chat software
- There are plenty of feature-rich forums and comment systems out there — you can even set-up a WordPress meta-blog and use distributed comment systems like Disqus
Of course, having a web application which unified all of these tools was a great reason for the success of CD, but in today’s internet, distributed tools, information, and multiple communities are a better way to go. Get the info “up in the cloud” as it were.
What These Things Have in Common
The thing that loops all of the above together is that we wanted to thank everyone in Collective Detective’s past, from our most awesome supporters, to our critics, friends, lurkers, and customers. However, our future is in a much different direction than our past; we’re a different organization on a new mission. We’ll occasionally have something to say about past projects and we’re happy to dispense advice to anyone who wants to learn or hear about the things we’ve learned and experiences but we’re not focusing on the types of viral marketing promotions we’ve promoted, created, or consulted on in the past.
For the nostalgic, if you look closely you will be able find a lot of CD influences in Collectivus, our next project. We’ve also taken and applied a lot of the lessons learned from CD.org and beyond. We look forward to writing more chapters about our the projects ahead, now that we’ve closed the chapter on what came before.
Collective Detective will be in attendance at BarCampDC2 on October 18th. We’re also happy to be one of the many great organizations sponsoring the event. If you are not familiar with BarCamps and how they work, check out the BarCamp Wikipedia page.
We’re big on communities at CD; always have been. BarCamps provide a great opportunity to talk about the issues, challenges, opportunities and interests facing developers, start-ups, and fans of social and tech media from the DC, VA, MD, and PA area.
If you’ll be there, we’re looking forward to meeting you. If you’re not, look for a BarCamp event near you.
I’m chronicling the development of Collectivus because I appreciate it when others share their stories and I wanted to contribute as well. With now ten years in the ‘Net biz, I have benefited from the advice and learned from the successes, failures, and online adventures of others. As developers, we search for how-tos when we get stuck; as entrepreneurs, we look for advice, tips, and lessons to apply to our own ventures; as designers, we look for new techniques, inspirations, and trends (both on their way in and out) to be aware of. And so on. The world moves at Internet speed because we can share and process information so quickly. Many times an article or helpful post or comment on sites both large and small have helped or inspired me. These influences are baking themselves into Collectivus and all projects I have a hand in — oh, and sometimes people are just curious how a project came to be.
I had seen something similar a few years ago. Ryan Carson and team at Carsonified ran a blog called “Bare Naked App.” It detailed the building of an app called “Amigo” in 2006. I remember reading through it at the time and thinking how refreshing it was to see what a team was going through in detail, while building and launching an app like that. That’s something the Carsonified crew continues to do today and I see a few other projects sharing their stories as they build new businesses. That’s awesome.
Interesting side note: I met Ryan in person at FoWA in Miami this year, but embarrassingly I didn’t connect the “Bare Naked App” project to him until I started thinking about writing this post. D’oh!
So why not spell out the entirety of the Collectivus game plan right now? Hopefully, there’s an air of mystery, anticipation and interest that will develop over time. Publishing all the wireframes, mocks, user stories, descriptions, and other information all at once isn’t a good strategy for building awareness and interest. Besides, I’m not sure exactly what will happen next either. Details change, sometimes daily. Not in a “directionless” kind of way, in an iterative and adaptive kind of way. The plan is to continue to share information as we can as it happens.
Whether you’re reading it hot off the “post” button or part of an archive in the future after Collectivus launched and you’ve became curious where it came from, we hope you find these posts interesting and maybe useful.
Thanks for reading!
The nice thing about designing Collectivus is being able to start from scratch with the brand identity and site aesthetics. It’s also the bad part — filling a blank page. I’m fortunate to have worked in the past with a lot of talented designers on projects big and small to help work this stuff out, but this is a personal project, with a small team iterating toward the first release, so I’ve got the designer and UED hat on this time, along with many others. I’ve talked about the evolution of the Collectivus Logo in a previous post. Today I’ll recap how I spent Labor Day weekend developing and applying a color palette to the template and page elements.
I wanted the look have organic colors, but bright colors as well. I started thinking about paintings and other images which used colorful earth-tones. I’d throw images into a folder, then sample colors from them into some random blocks in Fireworks. I wasn’t finding anything I liked. Then while brainstorming some other sources of inspiration, Traci provided a great suggestion: “What about ‘Pushing Daisies‘?”
Brilliant!
If you haven’t seen the show, it’s not only great in its characters and stories, but its visual eye-candy is fantastic as well. The use of color in the sets and wardrobe is just amazing too. I tried using photos of the set interiors for the “Pie Hole,” but it’s in the show’s branding I found a starting point for the Collectivus color palette.
So the next step was pulling colors out and building a palette to use in Collectivus. Here’s where I blew the dust of some bookmarks and tried using some online tools, looking for the best way to do this.
My solution came in an old post by UK designer Andy Clarke (aka Malarkey) called “Creating Colour Palettes.” I liked it because it was simple, made sense, and used Fireworks, my primary graphics tool.
The premise is that you take a white and a black strip, then on top of it, pick a base color at various opacities in blocks on top of the strips to give you a selection of color tones to pick from.
So here’s what I did:
- Picked four major colors from the Pushing Daisies image using the eyedropper tool
- Converted each of the color samples to their closest web-safe colors using this Color Scheme Generator
- Applied each color to Malarkey’s color palette technique
- Saved the color palette file
- Began applying the colors and adding additional design style to the previously grayscale page template
We’ll talk more about the page elements on the receiving end of this color palette in future posts.
Not everyone consumes information the same way. Some people like to surf web pages, some people still read these foldable devices made from trees called “newspapers,” some people have a chatty Aunt that seems to be in on everyone’s business, etc. For those on the more online side of information, we’ve got a few new ways to keep up with CD updates and news.
There’s always this site, which if you’re reading this, you’ve managed to find it at least once.
The Need for Feeds
We also have the Collective Detective RSS feed. Feel free to plug this link into your favorite feed reader (like Google Reader); you’ll know every time we make an update.
Follow Us on Twitter
Gearing up to share more news about Collectivus, we recently added Collectivus on Twitter. Twitter is a highly-addictive site for telling everyone what nonsensical thing you’re currently doing. It’ll be more interactive in the future; right now it too will let everyone know when there’s an update to this blog.
FriendFeed
We’ve also added both Collectivus and Collective Detective to FriendFeed, a great new social aggregation site. These too will alert you to updates on this blog and share information in other ways in the future.
Portable Comments
Lastly, we use a commenting system from a great start-up called Disqus. Disqus allows you to use a single login to comment across blog and track discussion updates across the ‘Net.
Information Sharing Made-to-Order
We’ll continue to add additional resources to keep tabs on all CD activity, even though things are pretty quiet now. We want you to be able to find, friend and follow us your way. In the future, when someone asks about “Collective Detective,” you’ll be able to say: “I’ve been following them for years!”
