★ Weeknote 77
As Week 77 closes, we are hosting the one and only Matt Haughey in our offices. He is sitting behind me right now moderating spam users on Metafilter. I challenge you to find another person as experienced as Matt who still does the dirty work of running a community every day.
We were up to our eyeballs in design this week. We started the week evaluating the first round of MediaBugs designs that CourtneyP created, and we're ending the week with the very exciting second round of design that Rumors did for Helsinki Design Lab. Both of the sites are coming to life quickly, and it looks like we're on schedule for February and March launches.
Jesse Keyes, our frequent partner in crime, has been kicking out revision after revision to an all new, all awesome homepage for SMITH Mag's Six-word Memoirs. Larry Smith sent us his last little chunk of feedback today, so the new design will hopefully go into production some time next week.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Katie and I put together a report on our session with Bryan Boyer last week. It was an intense few days featuring lots of whiteboarding and pages and pages of notes and drawings. We pulled it all together so Bryan has a clear record of the things we looked at, the decisions we made, and the next steps we all have to take towards finishing the HDL site and moving onto the next phase. I love creating these kind of documents - thoughts and processes made concrete! Here's a zoomed out version of the document we sent to Bryan on Wednesday:
One of my early 2010 goals is to spend some time redoing all of our XOXCO document templates. Some beautiful PDF files have crossed my desk recently, and it makes me jealous. This is just another item we need to add to the agenda of our upcoming (and as yet unscheduled) XOXCO retreat. I love reading about BERG's internal processes and the efforts they are making to define the culture of their studio to themselves and to the outside world, and THAT also makes me jealous. We are so busy being externally focused, we haven't spent enough time focusing internally, defining our own goals.
We can't wait much longer to tackle these internal issues. My goal is to set aside a day or two during January to sort ourselves out, and to give ourselves the full XOXCO experience that we normally reserve for our clients. I want to draw some stuff for myself!
Another thing I want to spend more time on is doing pure research. It occurred to me the other day that I very rarely get lost in a chain of Wikipedia articles anymore, or find myself having spent hours reading about a new technology or API. This week I had cause to learn all about (and implement) an oauth consumer, and it was really refreshing to learn something new. If only I had a clone.
- Ben Brown, Jan 15, 2010