All this adds up to us needing to add some new people to help us navigate and build out the series of tubes that make up the Internet.  As we all know, the internet is NOT a big truck.  This is not a joking matter!  We need top notch web plumbers to join our team in making nothing but the finest of HTML/CSS magic.

Sound like you?  Hmm, prove it to us.  You got these skillz? If the answer is yes, drop us a line at jobs@reli.sh.

• Develop standards-compliant webpages using: HTML4/5, CSS
• Strong knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX
• Great working knowledge of PHP and MySQL
• OOP methodologies
• High level of customization experience on WordPress platform
• Mobile development, including application creation and deployment
• Familiarity with a range of creative design tools including: OmniGraffle Professional, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator
• Strong communication skills including the ability to clearly present and defend ideas
• Collaborative personality with the desire to iterate a solution through various inputs and feedback
• Able to effectively manage timelines and comfortably communicate with clients through the project lifecycle
• Desire to contribute to our culture and help shape our practices
• Must live in or be willing to commute to Toronto

How’d we celebrate? Cupcakes (thanks to @theforrestry) and Tequila, of course!

And now that we’re all grown up, we’ve gone ahead and gotten ourselves a little present. It’ll be a couple of months until we can play with it but you can check out the progress here. Anyone interested in a playdate this spring can send a note to picked@reli.sh.

Global Premium Brands

Last fall we helped Spain’s Global Premium Brands, a distributor and marketer of upscale liqueurs and bottled waters, completely redesign their site from scratch.  The end result is a dark and luxurious experience that aims to capture the depth and quality of GPB’s selection of products. Do you dare to enter…

Global Premium Brands' Spanish site

TravelPod Blog Redesign

Back in November TravelPod debuted a long overdue redesign of their blogger page. As you might have guessed, Relish worked with the fine folks at TravelPod to come up with a new look and feel from the ground up — from wireframes to finished designs. If you’re a Relish enthusiast, you might remember that we helped TravelPod with a logo redesign in 2008.

Before: This is how the blogs used to look... 2001-alicious!

After: A much-needed facelift

The Seven Sins of Greenwashing

In partnership with Standard Media Services, Relish was asked to help TerraChoice Marketing to develop an online presence for their “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” report.  If you’re not as West coast as this Vancouverite to know what Greenwashing is, you can learn about it here.  It’s a practice that’s becoming all too common in the age of marketing everything as “green” this and “enviro” that, so we were especially pleased to be involved in a project that shed some light on this important issue.

I think all of us at Relish would agree that important issues are important… but so are games. To help inject some fun into learning how to spot Greenwashing sins in the wild, we developed the Name That Sin! game to test your ability to spot phony and false green claims.  Test your Greenwashing IQ to see how enviro-savvy you are as a consumer.

Name That Sin! Game

Late last year we were approached by the fine folks at Xenophile to build an online presence for a new kids’ show called RollBots that was going to be airing on YTV in early 2009.  Naturally we were thrilled at the opportunity to work on a big site chocked full of games and geared totally at kids.  None of us had worked on anything quite like this, so we eagerly accepted the challenge.

Meet Spin, our hero

A bit of background: RollBots are robots that can roll (hence the name) by coiling into a ball.  They live in the clouds in Flip City and roll around on tracks to get from place to place.  There are 11 different tribes a bot can belong to and each tribe has a different role in helping to run the city.  The show centres around a special (and speedy) bot named Spin who mysteriously doesn’t belong to any of the tribes.

Our goal early on was to capture the high energy level of the show and create an online extension of what kids would experience in the episodes — a world where they could explore, learn and uncover new secrets with Spin’s help.

Duking it out with Manx in the "RollBot Rumble" game

How was it accomplished?  Working with Xenophile, we developed a plan to launch with an initial site when the first episode aired in February and then build on that by adding new content on a weekly basis for the entire first season of the show.  Basically we timed it so that the site gets updated late on Friday night so that when the episode airs on Saturday morning kids can immediately go check out what’s been added that week.  All in all, that included 12 standalone games built from scratch, a video mashup tool to make your own RollBots video, a tool to build your own RollBot, a Danuga (the RollBots written language) translator and countless other features to help you rise through the ranks as a cadet at FCPD (Flip City Police Department — where Spin works).

"My RollBot" tool to customize and build your very own bot

We’re nearing the end of season one and it’s been a total blast to be involved in such a visually rich and technically complex project. We’re all looking forward to seeing how the rest of the season plays out — specifically finding out how Spin came to be and what the heck that nasty Vertex is up to… he’s such a meanie!

A leader in Applied Health Sciences education—with an emphasis on hands-on learning—the Michener Institute quickly saw the benefits of what’s turning out to be a natural marriage between the medical applications in use by the industry today and some of the more tactile and er, “hands-on”  interfaces of tomorrow, like touchscreens.

Relish was asked to help build a prototype that showcased a hypothetical Electronic Patient Record that featured new ways of presenting and manipulating existing data as well as new interaction models for integrating some of their existing vendor applications. Using Adobe AIR, (and some fancy DLL modding from the Michener team) we were able to tie everything together into one visually-rich, fullscreen, multitouch experience.

Check out some footage of the demo here:

http://www.relishinteractive.com/snacks/michener/

::

In addition to the award, we were also amazed—and a little overwhelmed—by the positive response we got to the new FITC website we designed and built and also to Relish in general! So thanks to everyone who came to the Get-A-Job event and those who stopped us just to say “hi” over the last 4 days. It really made us remember why we relish what we do.

Through the Eyes of LOVE is a site that we launched yesterday morning as a project of Motorola’s Raise Your Voice.  We worked with Hill & Knowlton on this one and what makes it special is how beautifully simple the concept is: the site contains a slide show of 50 photos taken by youth who have been affected by violence.  Every photo you view contributes 10 cents towards a $10,000 donation that Motorola will make to LOVE (Leave Out Violence).

So you set aside 5 minutes to look at 50 photos and you just donated $5. Bam. Then you share it with all your friends and they each donate $5. Then they send it to their friends, and their friends… you know, it’s like the warm and fuzzy version of a pyramid scheme.

After being online for less than a day there’s already been almost $1300 contributed.  That’s 13,000 photos viewed.  Wow. Doesn’t look like we’ll have to wait long to hit that $10K mark after all.

Below are some before and after shots to compare the difference or you can check out the real thing online.  What do you think?

Before:

After:

…and last night I got the chance to live it in person at the 2008 Digital Marketing Awards.  The Tell Your Story site that we designed and built for Dentsu Canada was part of an integrated campaign that won a DMA Gold award for Integrated Campaign and Best in Show.  The campaign encouraged users to tell their own story by uploading a series of 12 photos to the site.  Visitors to the site can view and search the stories, vote for the ones they like and even save their favourites so that they can find them easily again later.

On a geekier note, not only is the site slick, but it’s also run by an easy-to-use custom CMS.  The CMS allows Canon to review and approve submissions as well as get a top level view of the entries that includes the most viewed, highest rated, etc.

This was a fun project to do as the whole team was involved and we were able to get our hands dirty on the design, Flash and PHP development.  Tip of the hat to our lead designer on the project John Thai.

Congrats to Michael Gramlow and Dentsu Canada on a campaign well conceived, thought out and executed.

In addition to the kudos for the Canon site, the Test Your Breath site we worked on received an honourable mention.  Not a bad night for Relish’s first appearance at the DMAs.  Looking forward to next year!

Do I get out of bed today?  Shreddies or Cinnamon Toast Crunch?  Do I shave or pretend that I’m going for the rugged look?  Ok, you get the idea… maybe these decisions aren’t too hard, but some can be.  Many choices we make require us to consider a multitude of factors – each with many options.  To top that all off, maybe some of these factors are more important to me then others – some are deal breakers, while a few probably are just ‘nice to have’.  Head starting to spin yet?

This is the problem that MyChoiceBot has set out to solve.  The folks at ChoiceBot have a nifty little algorithm that helps sort out these nasty little problems and unlike a lot of the current web tools out there, it doesn’t filter out options — it just helps me rank and see what sets each one apart.

Ok, you’ve probably guessed… I’m talking about this because we worked on it, but I really do think it’s a cool tool.  I know I will definitely use it the next time I have a hard decision to make.  This was a fun project because we touched a number of different pieces on it — not only did we design and build the Flash widget in conjunction with the talented ChoiceBot backend developers, but we also redid the logo, designed the site and threw in a bit of HTML/CSS for good measure.

Hmm, so what should I make my first ChoiceBot of…

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  How about a moving picture?  What about one where you can control the action?  That’s gotta be worth a gajillion words.

Recently, Relish was asked by AMD to help them announce a new chip  — dubbed “Cinema 2.0″ — that plans to blur the line between movies and video games.  Imagine combining the immersive and emotional (albeit passive) cinematic experience with the interactivity of video games. What if you were able to peek around the corner to see if the villain’s about to attack our hero?  Or if you don’t like how sunny it is just click a button and it’s now a nighttime scene.

For the announcement of this revolutionary chip, Relish created a visually rich multimedia presentation to complement the speakers’ words and provide a bit of subtle eye candy to remind people that this chip’s graphical capabilities are what’s making “Cinema 2.0″ possible.