Things have been busy and exciting here in Blue Flavor Land and with SXSW coming up next weekend, it’s only becoming more so. This week is especially special as we launch our new site and welcome a new employee to the family.
Welcome Garrett Murray!
We’re all about people, and while the new site is big news, we consider this much bigger news: we’ve added Garrett Murray, the extremely talented developer behind (among lots of other things) SimpleLog, to the Blue Flavor family.
Garrett will be joining the team as our Senior Developer and I can’t even tell you how excited we are about it. He brings with him a wealth of experience in application development with a current focus on Ruby on Rails, a terrific sense of humor and an amazing eye for good looking and usable design.
(Evidence of which can be seen at his recently redesigned blog.)
He’ll be helping us and our clients, do many, many great things.
The New Site
Today we’re also launching a redesign of our site. This is the first in a series of initiatives led by Kevin Tamura, who is responsible for the wonderful design you see here, and myself to bring together our messaging and visual identity.
Kevin will talk about this much more in the next few weeks, but our goals here were to bring a bit more personality into the site as well as create a vehicle for better communicating what we do, how we work and why we feel we’re a special and different company. We’re not quite finished with the work here on the site, but so far we’re very happy it.
We encourage you to take a look around and let us know what you think.
Woo-hoo!
Love the new site! Hey speaking of SXSW - your remake of Craig’s List last year was a classic. Did you catch Craig on Daily Show AND Frontline this week. Looking forward to seeing you all in Austin.
hawt. this is really well put together. There’s barely anything I can complain about. It’s well structured and nicely designed. kudos to the new blue.
hehe.. nice. Austin here we come… for those who are locals, keep an eye on your booze!
Wahoo!
Love the colors and architecture. Feels enough like the old site, just all “growed” up. Great job guys. :) See you in Austin! :)
Thanks everyone. We’re pretty happy with the site, and really excited about Garrett joining the team.
We’ve still got a few issues to sort out here and there, and some unfinsihed ideas yet to implement, so if you see something wonky, let us know!
Thanks again!
It sure does feel good to see it up!
Welcome, Garret. Congrats on the redesign, Blue dudes. Great work See you next week!
New site, new employee…all falling on the day of my one year anniversary with Blue Flavor! Was this planned just for me guys? C’mon, you can tell me…the jig is up! Seriously though, so happy the new site is up! Looks fantastic, with a fantastic team to boot! Y’all work really hard, and it shows! Welcome, Garrett! Here we grow!
Congratulations on the new job, Garrett - hope to see you at SXSW.
Excellent job on the redesign, Keith and Kevin - it feels a lot like Stopdesign (in a good way), very solid. One question, though: on the homepage, the focus is on the ‘recent project’ highlight, rather than the ‘what we do’ value proposition; what was the thinking behind that decision?
Matthew - Thanks! The decision there was kind of made for us. In looking at how potential clients use our materials and the thought process they go through in making a decision to hire us we realized that what they were looking for most is samples of our work, stories about our process, etc.
When we launched the business a year and a half ago we didn’t have anything to show or talk about when it comes to client work. Now we do — and our clients have very nice things to say about us.
So we wanted to focus on showing what we do in a real way and having our existing clients explain in their words the value we bring.
I’d be really interested to hear how you approached the redesign from a strategic standpoint. That would make for an excellent case study in the blog.
Perhaps how you analyzed stats, ran some a/b testing, etc. to see the gaps and opportunities. That is, if you did that stuff…
Welcome, Garrett! The Blue Flavor team is a fantastic bunch and I’m sure they will benefit from your talents. Guys, the new site looks great. If I can dig out from the snow, I’ll see you at Refresh Seattle later! :-)
Geof - We didn’t do any a/b testing. Honestly, we wouldn’t have time for that with our client work, but we did analyze stats a bit and we do talk to our clients about why they choose us, what they look for in a design partner, etc.
Those things did factor into how we approached the design strategically. We are thinking of doing so follow up posts, assuming people find them helpful. Kevin was going to talk about the design decisions, and I’d be happy to cover some of the strategy.
Keith, I’d find them very helpful from a personal standpoint. I’m sure your clients would appreciate learning about the process too. It’s always interesting when the consultant turns the magnifying glass on themselves.
Sweet!!! Grats on the new look and design clarity!
Great work, guys! Congrats!
Thanks everyone. I plan on doing a couple of articles about the redesign in the coming weeks.
Great jov on the redesign, it’s definitely very slick and the photography adds a nice touch to the overall feel of the site. I’m also loving the comments, is the Blue Flavor leaf supposed to be hanging outside of the gravatar box?
Looks smooth guys. Smart move on your part to add Garrett to the team.
He’s funny, talented and uh, makes nice stuff.
I know all of you (or most of you rather) will be at SXSWi next week, but will Garrett be joining you?
I figure I could then have the opportunity to bombard him with a slew of ferret-related questions.
Great job on the site, guys, and congrats to Garrett. I really like a lot of the subtlties to the design. Its obvious you put a lot of thought into this. Take pride in the work, its phenominal.
Looking forward to catching up with everyone in Austin next weekend.
Looking good! Just one complaint however, is that whilst the site loads (or if images are turned off) parts of the navigation disappear (as its white text on a white background). Seems like an easy fix would be to have the inactive tabs have a blue background, rather than rely on the image to provide this.
Hopefully meet some of you guys in Austin too!
@ Chris: Garrett will definitely be there at SXSW, he is Bowler X after all.
@Paul: I’ll look into that when I get a free moment.
Yep, as Kevin said, I will definitely be at SXSW. Looking forward to it!
Thanks for all the welcomes, everyone!
This new design is awesome. Great job guys. I really like the look of the comments.