Collective Detective Blog Archives

Identifying with Internet Inspiration

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!

Coloring Collectivus

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.

Find, Friend and Follow Us Your Way

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!”

• Collective Detective RSS feed
• Collective Detective on FriendFeed
• Collectivus on FriendFeed
• Collectivus on Twitter

Collectivus.com vs. Collectiv.us

So in this era of new domain extensions and mobile Internet surfing, a few of the things one looks at when launching a web property is the the domain and the URL people will see and use.

In “web 1.0,” it used to be that it was important to prefix the website with “www.” because otherwise people would be confused. (Mind you I’m articulating this from a layman’s point-of-view, the system admin-side of me knows exactly the reasons for doing these things.)

“Web 2.0,” brought with it a trend of dropping vowels out of names (flickr) and leveraging creative uses of TLDs to overcome the lack of decent, easy-to-remember dot com names.

I’d been toying with formally using “http://collectiv.us” for the official domain name. It was shorter and “in.” That was essentially the reasoning. With yesterday’s relaunch of Delicious (formally del.icio.us), the Yahoo-owned bookmarking service, I’ve realized that their logic is sound and mine was bad. When possible: Stick to the basics when it comes to your domain names!

From the Delicious Blog:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

Another good reason to keep it simple is that most browsers will attempt to tack on a “http://” and “.com” when you just type a word into the location bar like “delicious” or I dunno… maybe “collectivus” and hit enter. It’s the browser’s helpful way of saying: “Is this what you meant?” Making it easy for visitors to find your site is pretty important stuff. Why complicate it even a little if you don’t have to?

So when we go live, the official URL for Collectivus will be http://collectivus.com. We’re pretty sure it’s safe to leave the “www.” off these days; we’ll make sure all of the other variations still work though.

The Collectivus Logo

I created the original Collectivus logo in 2003. The cube in the logo was designed around the concept that individual connections could combine to make something bigger and greater.

There were two designs used on the site: one of just the block of cubes with a small cube off to the left-side, the other a circle of cubes surrounding the larger block. The latter was also used in a project called “Collective Effect,” which applied the power of collaboration to raise money and awareness for charity and a satellite effort of CollectiveDetective.org

The font for the Collectivus logo is “Murray Hill Bold BT.” I hacked together some of the letter alignment; the “v” especially was raised much more than the other letters. I’m not sure what I was thinking regarding the colors.

I knew I still wanted to use all these elements for our new web application. With a few more years of experience screwing around with graphics under my belt, I took a crack at revising the logo for 2008. Being a lean start-up, there’s still a lot of DIY; I don’t claim to be any great designer. There were a few issues I wanted to address:

• Alignment of the letters
• Moving the single cube to also represent the “dot” in Collectiv.us
• In the old version, the individual cube didn’t have anywhere to “fit in.” So I made a slot in the block of cubes.

The style guide is still not locked for Collectivus, so for now I’ve just applied the same color palette used here on Collective Detective.

Here’s the updated logo:

So that’s the short story of the Collectivus logo. I’m happy to hear your feedback or suggestions.