Saturday, December 31, 2005

Finding a Designer

Our next challenge was the design and interface. We starting meeting with designers and thought we found one in August 2005. When we got his contract we started reading, we realized two things: one, this was going to be too expensive, and two, it said he was going to retain all the rights to the design. Retaining rights to the design seemed like a really bad idea, come on, are you going to charge us again down the road for them, madness.

The rights issue kind of freaked me out, so I started learning Illustrator, so designers wouldn’t shackle us again. We still knew that we needed a really good logo and layout and that was when we found Tyler Walseth, in mid-September. This posting could be renamed Mark's hero worship for Tyler's talent. Tyler has been written up in the Wall Street Journal for design work and he is excellent you can see his work on his site at www.212215.com. Tyler came up with a great logo, color scheme, and layout and was willing to give the rights us. We liked his work so much we bought him a video ipod to show our thanks. By the end of October we had a great look, and just needed to get it built. By December we even had our own custom font, the Scantron-ish bubble text font that you see in our logo and elsewhere on the site.