Blog Home » Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

All this blogging at once, I don’t know! Well, to be honest I’ve been putting this off for ages and figure that in this 5 minute restbite I’d remind my nearest and dearest that we are actually busy beavering away here at Caffeinehit HQ.

MyPhysioRehab.com was a very different project for us. Firstly, it was just development, not really any design. The site itself allows administrators to create injury profiles and gym routines for clients. With a simple CMS administrators can create detailed injury profiles and routines and then email it directly to the client as a PDF.

A really exciting site that we feel has some serious potential. We’re already looking forward to getting stuck into v2

Well, we thought we’d help out our lovely new neighbours (Underground Rebel Bingo Club) with a cheeky little revamp of their website. Keeping in theme of the ‘operating from our bedroom’ we put together a quick and dirty redesign for them.

If you like bingo, drawing all over yourself and having a damn good time then, my friends, Rebel Bingo will take over your life!

Caffeinehit’s latest client project is launched today (Tuesday 9th June 2009). The new website design and UI design for G3 Global.

Having sat in the duldrums for some time and been the victim of stinted additions to the site over a long period of time the G3 site design had been left disjointed, clumsy looking and overloaded with text. Working with the G3 team we stripped down the content and created a more unified site with slick UI and obvious service / product highlights.

The site now has a much simpler site structure and the introduction of photographic and visual elements gives the site a fresher and cleaner and feel.

We’re looking forward to hearing what sort of feedback comes through.

Take a look at the live site at http://g3it.com and some screengrabs here.

I purchased my Apple “boys-toys-make-me-look-cool” TV kind of way back in August and I hate to say this, but I haven’t actually watched any ‘normal’ TV since. Not only does this mean my index finger is slowly slipping off the pulse of popular culture but it’s also putting me at risk of having my flat reposessed (I know I rent but it’s more for effect!).

So why is this so revolutionary? Well, to be honest it’s not for most of you. It is for me, I missed out on TiVo and the like so here I am, rambling…

Apple TV is quite possibly one of the best (and worst) purchases I’ve made, this year at least. The pure volume of content that they’re starting to get on there is awesome. I know it costs less to buy the DVD’s and have them in ‘real life’ from Amazon or Play but the problem (for me at least) is that I want it NOW!

Saying that Apple TV is great and wonderful and everything is all well and good but there are definitely some improvements that could be made to help suck more cash out of our pockets.

Make the box more eco friendly.
It’s very difficult to switch the box off, on the first software release you used to be able to switch the box off in any menu or even watching movie/tv by simply holding down the menu button. So, rather than faff around and find the top menu I just leave it on, thus increasing my already large carbon footprint.

Suggest content with friends
Now I know this probably isn’t Apple’s cup of tea, having a social network within the Apple TV box BUT it would be great if you could suggest a movie / tv programme to a friend. Having suggested stuff to friends in the past it would be a nice little touch if you could do it from the TV itself.

Apple TV Suggestions
By making more of tracking the content that I am rating (and how I rate it), the content within my favourites and what I’ve purchased it should be able to start to see what sort of stuff I might like. At the moment there’s no use of the suggestion system that they’ve just started to use on iTunes. It could be so much more powerful if you have more than the “people who purchased this also purchased…”, that only goes so far and really doesn’t make the most of what Apple TV knows about me.

Review content via Apple TV
Now this wouldn’t have to be a full on review, a simple star rating system for you to review what you’ve just watched.

Marking purchases
One thing that annoys me is that if I’m buying programmes from a series I have to check back with My TV programmes to check what I have or haven’t got yet. I know it comes up with an alert if you are re-buying something but that could be quite time consuming. If there was a simple icon next to an episode you’ve bought.

Alerts
For example I’m watching Season 5 of Entourage and Season 6 is out in December on Apple TV. It would be great if I could either pre-order a season pass or simply get a little alert when I next turn the box on letting me know that it’s now available for download.

Another nice touch would be to have the ability to flag movies you’d like to watch or download using Apple TV when they’re realeased. I know that there could be a horrific amount of time inbetween when you watch a movie trailer to when it’s actually released but you never know it could be quite useful. Maybe just having the ability to ’save a trailer’ into a favourites folder would be enough.

Season Passes
Now these are all well and good but generally I use Apple TV to discover new programmes that have either been suggested to me by a friend, I’ve wondered what it was like or I actually know I want to watch it. The problem with a season pass or buying an entire series is that you don’t want to fork all that cash out on something you’re not sure you’d like.

At the moment if I buy two episodes of a TV series and I then decide that rather than either going through and buying each episode individually I want to get a season pass or buy the entire series. The problem with this is that if you do that you are paying AGAIN for the episodes you originally bought. All good for Apple I’m sure but it’s a bit of a piss take to charge you twice!

Ordering programmes
Looking through my list of TV programmes for some reason is displays various seasons of programmes in random orders. I want it to display the most recent first (or last), I want to have the choice to do both.

I think the most interesting thing is what exactly is going to happen when the UK goes fully digital in 2012. Who would want to pay a license fee to the BBC when they can get all of this other content over the web directly into their televisions. I’d much rather fork out the equivalent for the license fee on some sort of license for my Apple TV. At least then you’re not going to have a few over-paid fuckwits like Jonathan Ross but hopefully see it spread out more evenly across the industry.

Either way I love my Apple TV, the biggest problem is the damage that it’s doing to my credit card!

The new, shiney Trusted Places went live today and we’re proud to say that Caffeinehit played a big part in the new site design and fresh UI design.

Following on from the relaunch of Qype last week I think TrustedPlaces has the upper hand, visually (obviously). Still a long way to go but with the site bringing in close to 1,000,000 uniques a month it’s just going from strength to strength.

As with all social networks it’s going to be interesting to see the reaction of the community that use it. When the latest version of Facebook was released the general feeling was that it wasn’t any better, maybe more confusing if anything else. Fingers crossed the reaction will be different in this case, with a much cleaner product it should make finding and understanding content a lot easier.

Either way, well done guys. The site’s looking great and I know that it’s just going to get better based on the plans you’ve got and the super team you’ve got working on the product.

Check out the new look TrustedPlaces here.

A slightly random post but I thought I’d highlight some of the hottest re-designs and startup launches (that I know of at least) recently and in the not too distant future…

• Gighit (Gig listings and artist promotion website // launch)
• HotPrints (Cool Facebook printing app // launch)
• Qype (Local review website // redesign)
• Aroxo (Awesome shopping website launching soon // launch)
• Gigulate (Gig listings and music news // launch)
• Songkick (Gig listings and music blogs // redesign)
• Gekko (Local review / listings website // launch)
• TrustedPlaces (Local review website // redesign)
• MTV (Imminent redesign launch, wave goodbye to the current Caffeinehit Ltd design // redesign)

Know of any other cool startups / redesigns that are about to hit the web? Add them as a comment…

Well, I felt it was about time that we refreshed the company logo a little bit, so, here it is! It ties in quite nicely with the caffeinehit labs logo we currently have.

The strapline is one of those things you come up with down the pub, unfortunately it was just me, stone-coled sober in the office. Now I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. Either way, it made me chuckle for at least 10 seconds.

We’ve been working super hard on a stack of projects the last month or so. The most recent one being the logo design for the SXSW (2009) Web Awards in Austin.

Anyway, we’re really pleased with the logo, it has a lot of potential to be used online/offline/video/print, it’s going to look super.

The main concept behind the logo was pixels. As well as standing well as a logo and having the ability to scale because it’s modular structure it can be chopped, changed and moved around to work on various media.

Check out the logos in all their glory here.

I stumbled across this really nice (and simple) concept by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Constant Setting.

It’s a website that pulls in creative commons photos from Flickr and then displays sunsets in ‘realtime’ for that specific town or city where the sun is actually setting. You can read more about it here.

Visually it’s a really nice, clean way of dealing with what is a very simple concept. It would be nice if the Google maps was embedded into the page when you clicked on the location link, if it was possible to view more sunset images for that location it would be good too.

Anyway, lovely idea!

It’s great to see coverage of MyBuilder and Kublax in the FT today (6th August 2008).

I’ve got the pleasure of working with MyBuilder at the moment and have recently pitched for doing some design work for Kublax. Having seen what Kublax can do (it’s just gone in to Alpha) I can happily say that it’s one of the first websites that I’ve seen that I actually thought “you know what, that could be really useful”. Once the design is nailed (obviously if it’s not done by Caffeinehit it won’t be quite as good!) but it will be awesome, a definite success.

MyBuilder is another one of those sites (although maybe not as relevant to me) that you will find really useful. I often hear friends and family saying “do you know anyone that could do…”. With MyBuilder it allows you to find and use builders on the site that are local to you and recommended by people that have used them through the site.

The team at MyBuilder are awesome and I honestly think that if the ‘credit crunch’ and property market behave themselves they could find themselves in an incredibly interesting position in the next year. I hope so at least.

Read about all the other success stories (and failures) from last years Seedcamp on the FT.com.

If you think you’ve got what it takes you can submit your idea to this years Seedcamp.