DG WORD

[”Zits” comic strip from April 2008]

Up until a year ago, rather, until I began my career in the Internet industry, I had successfully been able to avoid RSS feeds, social networking, social bookmarking, checking my Facebook updates every other hour, watching the YouTube widgets or playing on the Sudoku widget during class - and yes, even Twitter.

Alas, woe is me, I gave in - blame it on the day job - and am on this Trans-Internetian Highway for the long run. At least the Web 2.0 and Flash scenery is nice.

A few months ago Transat Distribution Group, which owns Marlin Travel, commissioned us to redesign their website.

We were glad to put our principles into practice and deliver answers to the questions: What are we doing wrong and how do we fix it?

Since we were only commissioned to do the design we had no hand in the actual build of the website, which is has its ups and downs.  On one hand we love having the freedom to design and not have to roll our sleeves up too high to develop it.  On the other hand it’s like working inside a vaccuum because what you might think is easy to implement may be out of the technical range of the development team.  So, there’s plenty of compromise required on everybody’s part.

We had a great time working with the e-marketing team at Transat and are happy for the launch of their new site.

Visit marlin-travel.ca

For those interested in how we work, you can get an inside glimpse of our process by viewing the wireframes and mockups.

In the whole scheme of this new internet, social networking, social media, Facebook, Digg, reddit, Stumble Upon, and the go to Google for everything-you-need-to-know-age - it’s as if we’ve created another realm in which we can subject and impose our subjectivity, trend-madness, collective-affirmation seeking ways.

The growing information-r-us platform which is the Internet today is an ongoing library, mainframe or collection of identities, products, articles, news, photographs, cultures, peoples. Indeed, internet users are becoming the collective of the next generation: those who dictate what is popular, what is not, what is cool, worthy, important and “normal.” [Read more →]

Thankfully, the spirit of Valentine’s wasn’t strong enough to bring us to the dark side of having red, pink, and cupids littered all over the office.

Instead, we got into the Valentine’s spirit and decorated in a different way - just like more and more websites are beginning to.

Chalk another one up to Google for starting up this trend. Most sites, however, are not as keen to celebrate Picasso’s birthday, President’s Day, and etc.

Holiday Website/Logo Decorations.

I checked out a bunch of my daily fave sites and found that about 80% of social networking, search engines, daily news or interest websites that had a likelihood of being viewed every day, had their logos or sites decorated.

I think TripAtlas.com looks prettier with red and pink and hearts. It’s nice to look at something different, even if it’s just a simple red/pink scheme.

One of my favourites! I love the site design and usability of the Magnolia site and I love the [Read more →]

We publish a fairly large online travel directory that, initially, was designed to be navigated mostly by just the search engines - so Google et al would pick us up better, faster and more efficiently. Search engines are robots. This causes a major disconnect in user experience when the users happen to be human.

So we needed to change it in a big way. By big I mean we needed a do-over. The most important thing about a do-over is to identify your previous mistakes and to make sure you don’t repeat them. [Read more →]

Essentially, TripOutlet.com is a place to find really, truly great travel deals.  It’s only fitting that the current slogan is “Because everybody loves travel deals”.

It’s TripOutlet’s raison d’être - TripOutlet’s reason for being.

[Read more →]

To better position themselves against their new rival, Facebook announced Wednesday that they’re now allowing public access to the 3rd party applications that were, up until then, locked away from anonymous, non-Facebook visitors.As previously mentioned, this had to be their next logical step if they wanted to be competitive with Google’s OpenSocial. [Read more →]

We are pleased to announce the launch of TripAtlas.com, the largest and most complete travel resource on the Internet. We leverage wikipedia data, flickr photos, a few hundred thousand international travel agents, travel deals and a slick flash map into one nicely integrated site. You can research any travel destination in the world while viewing photos of it. You can locate a travel agent by region and get in touch with them directly. You can book exotic trips & tours at competitive prices.  You can get up to date travel news and interesting travel articles.  This is truly a giant step forward and a great demonstration of how mashups can be successfully integrated into enterprise-level, consumer friendly websites.

Both Google and Facebook are virtually free products that are both worth billions of dollars - and both companies promote and pioneer in online social networking.While Google offers a couple premium services of the myriad of other free services they provide, Facebook remains completely free. This means all Facebook users are equal (almost) in that they all have the same profile, the same features and the same abilities within their accounts, no more and no less. This equality and free-ness is likely part of the appeal to the original college & highschool crowd that made Facebook popular. [Read more →]

I’m all for campaigns that provoke, especially when they’re for high priority global issues. The Ontario government is not afraid to commit to racy campaigns in hopes of engaging its youth on issues important to the public - issues we as residents have shown our concern for at election time. And that’s great. Truly.

Some of the most effective government sponsored campaigns I’ve ever seen have been put out by the Ontario government, which I admit makes me proud. [Read more →]