pass the relish » Thoughts

Relish’s Best of 2010

ella — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:24:15 +0000

We here at Relish spend our days toiling in the vast world of the interwebs so I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that we also spend much of our downtime trolling the web as well. Being immersed in all things digital, we like to give props to those who have successfully executed cool sites or apps. Here’s a list of our favourites from 2010 (in no particular order):

Online

Ride the City – This site lets you plan your biking route and allows you to choose from the most direct to the safest route. It also lists bike lanes, protected lanes, and greenways and can help you find the closest bike shop, bike rental, or bike share.
Hipmunk – Anyone who has searched for a flight knows how awful travel websites can be. Sometimes the user experience is so offensive, we leave without even looking at the deals. However, Hipmunk shows the competition how it’s done with its clean design, intuitive user experience, comparison of different airline prices in a pretty graph, and ability to sort by price, stops, and “agony.” The cheapest price is always highlighted in blue; a nice touch.
Tourfilter - A Craiglist-ish site that shows listings for 79 major cities automatically compiled by some kind of bot and administered by (as far as we know) just one guy. Super useful.
OpenIDEO – “solving problems together, for the collective social good” - How are you making the world a better place? Not everyone can rely on their good looks being enough of a gift to the world like we can. For those of you that need another outlet, OpenIDEO provides a forum for anyone to submit questions (or challenges) for the community as a whole to contribute inspiration, ideas, creativity and solutions to “solve problems for the collective social good.” Impressive.
OpeAppMkt - An alternate app store for iPhone/iPad/Android of browser-based apps that sometimes works better than their native counterparts…exhibit A: YouTube for the iPhone.
Saturdays - Clean and simple, no-nonsense design gives us what we want up front. The brand is represented perfectly and those of us who in to are fashion want to buy everything.
Net-a-Porter - For women who appreciate fashion, the best online window shopping is done here. Based out of NYC, Net-a-Porter has grown beyond just a website, into a full-fledged multinational corporation operating across two continents. Beautifully curated, the merchandise options are updated multiple times a week.
Grooveshark -Similar to Jango and Last.fm, Grooveshark lets you create your custom radio ‘stations’ and stream songs from different bands based on your taste. What’s great about Grooveshark is that you can search and select your own songs and then manage them via a very user-friendly playlist.
Airbnb - A site that allows users to list or search rentals listed by nightly rate. It has a beautifully clean user interface and displays price, photos, maps, street view, availability, user reviews, amenities, and similar properties. This is an ideal site for travellers or those looking to gain a bit of extra $ by renting out their space for short periods of time.
20 Things I Learned – Basic web 101 articulated in a way that won’t make you feel like an idiot. The internet is a complex thing sometimes; it can be confusing and scary for some. What we do sometimes eludes our friends, family, clients, and occasionally even us- so we happily welcome sites like this that break down the basics in a swift, 20 page, interactive storybook. Using snappy metaphors, clear language, and cute cartoons, this site finds a way to make even the most daunting topics easy to understand. We have printed it and given it to our moms.

Mobile Apps & Games

Trainyard – made by our good friend Matt Rix, a delicious puzzle
Osmosis – fun and beautiful
TO Parking – handy
Instagram – extremely handy (especially if you take photos of asian girls and cats)
Astronut – fun and beautiful
Wallet – handy
Ride the city – handy, see website above
Mint – handy
Infinity Blade – incredible graphics and unique gameplay

Time for Lunch

Paul — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:20:15 +0000

Some exciting developments have been brewing at the Relish HQ. The New Ketchup™ is no longer just for breakfast… we now are officially open for Lunch dates.

We’re now being represented by Executive Producer Amy Miranda of lunch inc. Amy has worked extensively in the digital space. She’s worked as an editor, designer, technology manager, technical services director, project manager and interactive consultant. She’s been at companies including iXL, CNN, U8TV/Alliance Atlantis, Activate, Henderson Bas and TAXI.

Not only are we working with Amy now, but we’re a part of the Lunch family. The roster is made up of incredibly talented group designers, production and post production companies, developers and artists. These folks have mad skill sets ranging from web to motion design to technical services to illustration and sound design.

The digital media's version of the Brady Bunch

You should definitely check out the work of our lunch mates:

Alchemy – http://www.helloalchemy.com
Alex McLeod – http://www.alxclub.com
Bijou – http://www.bijoueditorial.com
Broader Than Broadway – http://www.broader.com
Element – http://www.el-e-ment.ca
Fatbox – http://www.fatbox.ca
Mark Gervais – http://www.markgervais.com
Nick Goso – http://www.planetgoso.com
Imported Artists – http://www.importedartists.com
Indusblue – http://www.indusblue.com
Magic Pony – http://www.magic-pony.com
Narwhal – http://www.narwhalartprojects.com
PixelPusher – http://www.pixelpusher.ca
The Radke Film Group – http://www.radke.tv
Six Degrees – http://www.sixdegrees.ca
sociMedia – http://www.socimedia.com
STEM – http://stemlimited.com
Studio Dialog – http://www.studiodialog.com
Tool of North America – http://www.toolofna.com

That should keep you busy for a while… you should definitely eat Lunch at your desk today…

Where the Tweet is Santa?

Paul — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:33:58 +0000

The holidays are a busy time. Presents to buy, friends and family to visit, meals to prepare. It’s hard to keep track of everything. If only there was a way to keep tabs on it all…

What if you could see what your friends were up to? or even people in different cities? countries? What if you could even keep tabs on the man of the hour himself, Santa Claus?

This holiday, we at Relish have done just that with the help of Twitter and our friends at Tractor. Together we made a site that pulls all of the holiday-themed “tweets” and plots them on a map so that you can see what people are up to and talking about.

Check it out here: http://www.relishinteractive.com/holiday/

How it works

We search all the latest Twitter posts for a list of holiday keywords like: santa, holiday, christmas, new year, gifts, chimney, egg nog, etc. Using the word ‘santa’ in your tweet qualifies as a “Santa-sighting” will cause Santa Claus (the red dot on the map) to fly to your current location.

So there you go, hours of fun for you this Holiday Season. All the best from Relish Interactive.

Work Requisition Form

Steve Palmer — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:42:38 +0000

You can thank Airbag Industries for the overly-bureaucratic sounding post title.

The talented folks at Airbag have recently launched this little web application (see a video demo) as a way for them to gather the brief but necessary details from a prospective client who’s considering hiring Airbag to work on a project. I think the execution is pretty flawless — design and layout are top shelf. No surprise there.

But I wonder about the usefulness or practicality of a tool like this. It kind of reminds me of those “We are now accepting projects in January 2009″ messages you occasionally see on agency sites. 51% of me thinks that they’re complete assclowns for actually putting that on their site and the other 49% of me thinks it’s kind of cool. Whether the message is accurate or not is anybody’s guess. But in any case it does add to the agency’s air of boutique-yness… like, they’re so busy you’d be lucky to work with them. Nothing wrong with trying to maintain that image.

But I digress… back to Airbag’s RFP tool. As a guy who works at an agency I see most clients falling into one of two categories: a) ones who you’ve worked with many times and will just call you up for a quote and b) ones you’ve never met and find you by word-of-mouth or just surfing. I can’t imagine the former being too impressed at being redirected to a web app rather than talking to you and the latter group would even think to look for a tool like this (unless you dedicated like 75% of your home page to it). And even if they did find it I suspect they wouldn’t be too jazzed at the prospect of filling out a multi-page form the way YOU want them to after they’ve most likely written an RFP or some kind of similar document themselves. They just want to send a quick email to the company’s general email box with the RFP attached.

I don’t want to be all Captain Buzzkill on this idea. I think Airbag’s heart is in the right place. They’re frustrated with the lack of education a lot of clients have when dealing with interactive shops. They’re not blaming the clients because it’s us as agency folk who need to educate them. Maybe this whole application is intentionally labourious for clients as a way to educate those that aren’t able to provide the basic info (timeline, scope, budget) and force them to either figure those details out or contact the agency directly and know that their are some “gaps” in the information they’re supplying.

I think most of the folks reading this blog are in the interactive agency business. What do you think?

IE6 Going the way of the dodo?

Steve Palmer — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:44:37 +0000

Obviously the answer is yes. We all know that.

The only thing we don’t know as fine makers of web sites is when exactly we can safely stop supporting the stellar Internet Explorer 6 in the work we do (i.e. when it will piss off an acceptably low portion of the audience). I don’t think Relish is quite there yet, but it looks like 37signals is as they’ve announced they’ll stop supporting IE6 in all their products in August.

We’re big fans of 37signals’ flagship product Basecamp. We use it for just about every project we work on and a lot of our clients end up using it to review and discuss deliverables and timelines as we go. If Basecamp starts acting funky IE6 and forces a few more people to upgrade to a browser made in the last 5 years then I’m all for it. Hopefully it’s a sign that IE6-free days are closer than we think… trust me, every one who makes web sites is counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Design coding rap

Shawn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:13:39 +0000

Yeah, its geeky. But its funny.

Poetic Prophet (aka the SEO Rapper) and his jammy jam, Design Coding…

Seed Conference Site is Typographically Delicious

Joshua — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:41:02 +0000

I’m amazed at the subtle elegance of the Seed Conference web site. As someone who has a tendency to over-design (before, hopefully, reining it back) it’s work like this that reminds me of how elegant simplicity can be. No gradients — shocking!

Cabel Sasser Talks Coda

Joshua — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:33:27 +0000

Cabel Sasser, designer at the world’s best software company, Panic, gives a great talk at the C4[1] Mac developer conference. He gives some insight into the origin and the evolution of Panic and speaks at length about the design process behind Relish’s de facto official dev environment, Coda.

Happy Birthday Relish

Paul — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:15:51 +0000

That’s right, we turn 1 year old today. Happy birthday to us. I was really hoping for Guitar Hero 3 for our Wii, but all we got instead was this blog. It could be worse. All the other 1 year olds that I know are getting Baby Einstein videos or a Jolly Jumper. What, you didn’t get us anything? That’s ok, we’ll be at FITC Toronto next month and you can buy us a drink then.

This past year was a fun ride. We started off small, working in the back of a grocery store along with all our other favourite condiments. Since then we’ve moved into some sweet digs and slowly grown into a really solid team of web geeks with a pretty diverse skill set. Don’t know all of us yet? Just rollover the heads in the top right to find out more and see our individual posts.

This blog will be the place for you to come and get your regular updates on Relish life — what we’re working on, what we’re playing with and anything else we’re thinking about. Maybe you could even throw in a comment or two so that we know what you’re up to.That’s it for me. I’m off to relish the day. Hopefully I’ll bump into you somewhere on the Information SuperHighway.