The week started with a big effort to pull the Puno write up together. Alice, Tom and I tackled different bits and we had something we were happy to share with the client team on Tuesday. The report itself will see more work as other strands of testing are completed but we’re also moving ahead and working out a roadmap for the production phase that will commence here shortly.
Suprema saw another week of concept development, as well as the usual budget and schedule conversations that come with kicking off a new project. I have been working on that with Adam and Steve, but hope to spend more time on the product itself next week. We were also ready to react to any launch requirements on Cucuta, but it has not been necessary so far.
I continued to work with Brad and Thomas on the Mint site, checking in more code this week than I have in a good couple of years. Annoyingly, we were unable to push anything live due to a few snags, but largely because we tried to tackle too many things in a single iteration. That said, this next update is a complete style overhaul, so a two week turnaround is not terrible. We should have that live early next week.
In a few weeks, we will start to roll out Projecteo to our Kickstarter backers. We’ll be treating this phase as a beta to test and iterate on the trickier aspects, such as fulfilment. The site is generally feature complete for this launch, with next week set aside toward bug fixing along with final design and copy reviews. We do still need to nail packaging and test fulfilment internally though. Nothing like a deadline…
Although it’s not for a little longer, we’re also working on the public launch for Projecteo. I see this as play space and an opportunity to push what we can do on the web. To that effect, I outlined a new design brief to Steve and Tom this week and we agreed to do just that. I’m already excited.
On the rest of the roster, Sandeep completed the final shoots for the Valentine’s Day promos, which will launch late next week. There’s one shot in particular that should produce a good chuckle. Nikki worked on mapping the service flow for Summer Chimney and it looks like she has some good findings. Foldable.me is also seeing work for a fun collaboration, which involves celebrity Foldables. I’m looking forward to seeing that in action.
The product teams on StickyGram and Foldable.me had away days to discuss strategy for this year. I’ll need to catch up with them properly but even from skimming the notes, it’s clear there are a lot of ideas for what we can do. One of our ideas for this year actually involves a new venture, using some of our existing infrastructure. There’s already been some work on that in the last few weeks on building a prototype and coming up with a name. Our aim to get it to market fast and go from there.
On new business, a proposal we had submitted did not come our way. This was a shame but not surprising, given we had proposed a different idea to what was briefed, one we genuinely believed to be a better solution. A few other conversations have moved forward though, so no sign of things slowing down there.
Tom and I are getting into the habit of sitting down once a week to discuss the studio. For the last couple of weeks, we have mostly been looking at how designers manage projects and what our involvement should be. We’ve come a long way in the last six months on this but it’s a tough problem and we’re looking to see how we can improve on process. This week, we’ve also agreed to kick things up a small notch on hiring. That’s always exciting.
