A year ago, I wrote about a video I made for our Nosh 404 page. Shortly after the success of that video, we set out to film a sequel. The idea behind the followup centered around the same fictional Special Forces team we used to handle that very dangerous and exciting 404 mission. This new video is sort of like a highlight reel of all the skills and tactics they can offer in the “web services” realm.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a process post here, so I figured this would be a good project to start back up again with. It’s pretty far afield from some of the typical design writing I’ve done, but it was a really fun project and an interesting case-study in non-traditional marketing for startups.
Final video above as well as a quick breakdown showing the original footage and the eventual effected final output. Follow me on Twitter here.
It’s been such a long time since I posted! This is largely due to the fact that I’ve been head-down on my company’s most recent product, UberConference, for the last few months. UberConference is basically a visual interface for audio conference calling. You can see who’s talking, who’s on the call, and control it completely via the desktop (and soon mobile) UI. We recently won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition — you can see our pitch and presentation here.
I haven’t written a process post in a very long time so I wanted to talk a little bit about the UberConference process here. I’ll talk about the UI development as well as the video work. Keep reading to see the rest of the process. You can follow me on Twitter here for more frequent updates. Oh also, for a good time, call (424)-226-3111.
There’s always been an arms race of sorts, between startups, surrounding their 404 pages. Often times sites do something unusual on this (hopefully) seldom viewed page. When we first started working on Nosh, we had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for our 404 page. We wanted it to be crazy and I think it ended up being just that.
Above you will find the video that became our 404 page. It’s loud, crazy and weird. Definitely the most fun I’ve had on a Sunday in a long time. I’ve written up some production notes here — if I miss anything feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll be sure to answer. Follow me on Twitter here.
While it’s fresh I thought I’d write up the process behind the Firespotter Labs logo I designed. This was an incredibly fun logo to design and probably one of the quickest, at least when contrast to some of the luxurious multiple month (!) design explorations I’ve done in the past for school or other companies. That said, it was exceptionally challenging; it’s hard to take a step back and think objectively about the company you’re a part of.
Before this, I had already designed a couple logos for some of the products we’re working on now. I had to break out of the “consumer application” design mindset I had been entrenched in for a few months. For the mothership, we needed something that conveyed that we were a lab full of crazy people brewing up cool things, while simultaneously appearing to be trustworthy gentlefolk worthy of venture support.
