Chapter 6: Geeking Out About Design

This was one of my favorite weeks working at customer support platform Assistly because it was huge in both progress and creativity.

First of all, I’ve pretty much wrapped up a several-weeks-long project to create Assistly’s entire product video offering — that’s storyboarding, scripting, audio recording, audio editing, video recording, video editing, and making title scenes and final cuts — for 6 videos.  Software-wise, this involved a combination of GarageBand, Camtasia for both PC and Mac, and a bit of dark magic.  Sustenance-wise, this involved a combination of Nonni’s biscottis and a 72-pack of hot chocolate the Assistly team generously supplied me on one of their Costco runs.

Formula for making product videos.

My new project has me hopping out of bed in the morning because I can’t wait to go to work.  I’m working with CEO Alex Bard on redesigning the Assistly website in preparation for the product’s upcoming public launch.  This means that Alex and I spend a lot of time geeking out about colors, textures, gorgeous typography, and clean design in general — and then go and build sketches and mockups based on this aesthetic.

This week, I thought I’d give you a taste of what this daily immersion is like by sharing some of the designs that have been inspiring our work:

GOOD Magazine:

Frank Chimero:

Squared Eye:

(Speaking of typography, I can’t say enough about TypeKit.  I talked about CEO Jeff Veen in last week’s post on iterative design, but did I mention that TypeKit enables you to put designer fonts on your website — not as an image or as Flash, but as honest-to-goodness text?  It’s highlightable, but more importantly, it’s indexable and searchable, which means that TypeKit is literally improving the content of the web.)

I’m very excited about the direction Assistly is taking.  Everything’s under wraps right now, but here’s hoping that by next week’s post, I’ll be able to share some screenshots and footage of my projects with you.