The Vanity of an Ancient King

After many moons, and gnashing of teeth, including a 100% staff turnover (on the development side), we finally launched Fashion Week Daily. It's not exactly as it was originally created (due to the dev turnover), but it's *far* better than what it was. Interesting to me that they're using Discus for their discussion threads, and Share This for the social reblogging features, but I think that was a compromise to get it launched. It's a bit of a shame, as we designed *much* better custom interfaces for these functions.

Oh, and the kitsch isn't our fault. Srsly. Their brand is verymuch People Magazine or Us Weekly of the fashion industry. Contrast this with Women's Wear Daily, which is much more industry/work focused. I tried using the Wayback machine to provide a "before" screenshot, but modern web pages have made the Wayback machine almost entirely useless.

Check it out!

Our new T-shirts came in the other day.

They're black AA Ts, with PMS1795 (the vermillion) PMS425 (the grey). On the back, they've got a small knockout BHVR logo (in PMS1795) just below the neckline.

As I've mentioned in the last post, I've been busy. Today one of the projects I've been working on went live:

HBO's Alzheimer's Project.

http://www.hbo.com/alzheimers/

I knew I had a lot of work to do this week-end, but I knew I could probably get the bulk of it done on Monday. Of course, I *totally* forgot about *yet another* thing I was supposed to do for Tuesday. This completely threw off my rhythm. I have to complete 4 projects by the start of the day tomorrow. Three down, the biggest, yet to go. Luckily, this one isn't a hard deadline, and I can whip up a few non-annotated wireframes by the early after-noon, as I am totally burned out right now.

In other news, I hit the gym Saturday and Sunday, and did triceps and biceps respectively. The humidity got me on Saturday, and it grossly affected my workout. So much so that I finished my lifting, but didn't do any cardio. I returned on Sunday to do biceps, abs, and cardio. A much better day.

I need a massage. I need to ride off into the mountains. I almost forget what it's like.

Yarrg!

So my office has a little racket going with the local Starbucks. If you get a regular coffee, iced or hot, or an iced tea, you can get refills for 50¢. If you have a Starbucks card, and at least $5 on that card, you can get free refills. This is normal, although many people don't know about it. However, we've found a way around this. In general, we keep our cups, and usually buy a new cup weekly (yes, we wash them during the week). This means, aside from Monday morning, we're not charged for our refills for the rest of the week. This doles out *a lot* of free product. Great for us, not so good for them.

So this morning, we were informed that we'd have to show our receipt from the morning (for a full-priced beverage) if we wanted to get a refill (which would still be free w/ the Starbucks card). This new rule will go into effect tomorrow.

But we've already found a way around this. Each morning, one of us will buy a full priced drink. From then on, everyone will take that receipt with them when they go to get their morning beverage. Status Quo, as everyone is still buying one drink a week. Yes, ethically this is totally over-the-top, but I am really curious how this arms race will turn out. Personally, I'll probably buy more tea, as it didn't really occur to me that I wasn't giving them *any* money aside from my Monday purchase.

My co-worker/friend Lacy received 50 red balloons from his new boyfriend. In retaliation, Lacy is sending over a guy in a pink gorilla costume who will sing 99 Red Balloons (hopefully the german version).

The arms race has begun.



(that's Lacy (with headphones) with his back to the camera. You should remember him from a prior T-shirt of the day)

I started this project —gods— probably nearly two years ago. If finally launched several months ago, although we're still constantly refining things, and fixing some bugs. It's now been named Communication Arts' "Pick of the Week".

I'm really proud to be part of the team who worked on this —sooo many late nights, many trips to DC, phone calls that lasted whole workdays, even a few firings. The effort was worth it, and continues to be so.


http://www.commarts.com/web-sites/national-geographic.html

After 2+ years of stopping and starting, starting over from scratch, pulling out our hair, and lighting everything on fire, I am *proud* to announce Behavior's new website (version 3):


http://behaviordesign.com

Check it out!





*it may be a bit broken, but we'll be fixing things as we find them.

W00t!

After more than a year in development, we finally launched National Geographic Channel's new website. Wow, what a ride. Originally, I wasn't even on the team. I came on about a month later as "The Cleaner", when the original Information Architect catastrophically failed.

The site is graphically intense, so people with slow connections will have a very difficult time. For those interested in some of the technology, most of it is done with CSS and Javascript so as to be SEO (search engine optimisation) "friendly". The one major exception to this is the Flash-based TV schedule, which was designed specifically to *not* be picked up by search engines. It also operates similarly to the iPhone in that you can drag the schedule directly without using the little (clunky, IMHO) arrows. You can also filter the schedule, and it'll highlight the relevant shows. The back-end integration was some seriously heavy lifting. So many special cases made it almost impossible to code, made even more difficult due to problems with IE and Safari 2 (which was the spec when the project initiated). There is a reason the W3C made standards. We code to them, but then we also have to code around the poor implementations on some browsers.

Going over the site, I can still see some areas of wonkiness like the "on tonight belt" on the homepage truncating the names of the shows, making it totally useless. Also, the graphic for a "show that has no custom graphic" is not obviously generic. These will be fixed in the next several days.

The homepage itself is an interesting story. National Geographic Channel (NGC) is actually semi-independent of National Geographic, and a partner with Fox (and if you see the programming, it's obvious). However, online, National Geographic is the "umbrella" brand, forcing the NGC homepage to live inside the shell of NationalGeographic.com¹. This makes it non-obvious as to which navigation will take you inside the NGC site, and which will take you back to a NG site. Once you're in NGC however, the shell goes away, and is replaced by the global NG "hat", which is much less intrusive.

If anyone has any specific questions, I can answer them, now that we've launched.

Check it out here: National Geographic Channel

1. In fact, http://nationalgeographicchannel.com redirects you several times, and finally to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/

SXSW is still going on in Texas, and a few of my work colleagues went down for the interactive portion. During one of the panels, Anthony, my friend and co-worker, decided to get up and ask a question: