HiiDef Inc.

Less than two weeks ago, we resolved to re-build the Flavors...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:28:00 -0400

Less than two weeks ago, we resolved to re-build the Flavors Directory from scratch. It turned out like a modern, web-based version of the White or Yellow Pages.

Dashboard.me: Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a holistic,...

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:54:00 -0400

Dashboard.me: Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a holistic, real-time view of your Company’s key business metrics that looks just as stunning on an iPad as it does on a 60’ plasma?

Flavors.me Drops Flash for Web Fonts Using @font-face in HTML5

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:49:00 -0400

Flavors.me announced today support for web fonts using @font-face in HTML5.

Users can now access 50+ of the highest-quality fonts from FontSite, Mostar Design, CanadaType and many other top foundries. The transition from Flash to HTML5 also extends the Flavors experience to the iPad, iPod and other mobile platforms. Fonts are delivered in TrueType, WOFF, EOT and SVG for the best overall rendering quality and browser compatibility.

“Typography is a core element of the Flavors.me design process. Broad access to commercial fonts is an important step forward for the entire look and feel of the Internet. The advances in performance and personalization are profound. With well more than 100,000 users, this is among the largest implementations of web fonts using the @font-face standard,” said Flavors designer Jack Zerby. Flavors will continue to expand its library as more of the best professional fonts become available.

Additionally, Flavors.me is officially releasing a groundbreaking new grid-style layout system built to showcase the entire digital life stream at a glance. The grid uses a hierarchy structure that allows users to define the relative importance of each service within the page layout. “In the grid, user content defines the entire presentation. For the first time, information and design truly become one,” said Flavors designer Rob Morris.

Other notable features in this release include powerful meta data options for search engine and Facebook Open Graph optimization, as well as custom ‘favicons’ for even more brand control.

About Flavors.me / HiiDef:

Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant and dynamic website using personal content from around the Internet. It automatically organizes all kinds of information – Posterous blog posts, Twitter status updates, YouTube videos, Last.fm music listening habits, Flickr photos, LinkedIn resume details, Etsy store listings and more – into a constantly growing, interactive montage that is ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, digital business cards, brand marketing – and everything in between.

HiiDef is an Internet incubator that was founded in mid-2008. It owns and operates Flavors.me, Goodsie, Dashboard.me and Superkix. HiiDef’s team has a strong track record in the consumer Internet sector with experience from Vimeo, Digg, Mahalo, Zend, Wordpress, IAC, Pentagram and Digitalmash. The Company is distributed around the east coast of the United States, Canada and Australia.

"Underdesign: This week Flavors.me is finally rolling out its latest feature, the ‘Grid’ layout,..."

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:51:00 -0400

“

Underdesign: This week Flavors.me is finally rolling out its latest feature, the ‘Grid’ layout, which I had a hand in designing, but is due largely the ongoing work of Jack Zerby. Jack is one of the most underrated designers I know. He’s also one of the few designers I’ve worked with who really understands the value in underdesigning things.

This philosophy is certainly reflected in Flavors.me. After all, its whole purpose is to put its users center-stage. Still, that doesn’t mean there’s not an underlying system at work behind the scenes looking after everything from spacing to line-heights, font-sizes and floats. Hours and hours have been spent developing a system, in which, hopefully it’s kind of hard to make something ugly. The design is there. But while they’re creating their own page, most people will hopefully never notice it.

”

- Designisnowhere • Digitalmash

Music by Emancipator

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:29:27 -0500

Music by Emancipator

HiiDef Inc. Identity

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:06:00 -0500

Any designer will tell you the hardest job you’ll ever do is to design for yourself.

Even though I’ve been a part of HiiDef Inc. for a while now, there’s only recently been a need to put a ‘face’ to the name.

Challenge

There were a few things that made this job tricky.

It’s got to be broad

HiiDef is a web product incubator that’s really hard to put into a single box. Because it’s a parent brand, not only does it need to reflect the company, but it needs to compliment the products we put out.

It’s got to be relevant

Well, I say relevant, but the name ‘HiiDef’ is inherited from one of Jonathan and David’s (founders) earlier businesses. So beyond the idea of something being ‘high definition’ there wasn’t too much of a connection.The new identity had to stay married to this name but also fit with the current company, which meant being simple, bold and flexible.

It’s just the beginning

Let’s get one thing straight: the brand doesn’t make the company. It’s the other way around. Still, whatever meaning we place on the branding, we wanted to be as excited about it as we are about our future.

Solution

So to start, I came up with some rough directional concepts that were intentionally pretty different. The hope was this would allow us to narrow a path from which I could start to refine things.

Some of the broad directional concepts for Round 1

While the guys were excited with where we were going in round one, we all agreed that maybe we should have a look at a second round of ideas. Most of the concepts followed the most obvious ‘high definition’ angle. I also liked the idea of keeping the two ‘i’s lower case, as they reminded me of the two founders (and brothers) Jonathan and David.

Some concepts from Round 2

One concept, however that turned out to be most popular from the second round batch was an abstract ‘H’ and ‘D’ formed through circles in a square. We were actually very close to deciding on this one, but I wasn’t happy. As a web company, I wanted something that could be shrunk to a 16×16 favicon and survive.

Even though this logo itself was quite generic, this sort of treatment was worth exploring.

One, but many

Another direction that I liked from the second round of ideas used a very basic rounded rectangle shape and used changing backgrounds to give it more than one look. I know AOL (oh sorry, Aol.) had recently done something similar, and we were all conscious of not going down that path. What I liked about this approach was that it ticked two of the boxes straight away — what’s broader than a logo that’s always changing? Similarly, it gave us a lot of room for changing direction and keeping things fresh.

Some applications with the final logo. I’ve continued with the many-but-one treatment for the HiiDef Inc. website.

And we’re done.

So the solution (it must seem obvious at this point) lay in combining these two ideas — a shape using the ‘H’ and ‘D’ in a form with enough symmetry and simplicity to be styled in many different ways. And unlike every other concept that I’d sent through for feedback, this seemed to get everyone mutually excited.

Flavors.me Launch & Premium Accounts Release

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:47:00 -0500

Aventura, FL February 23, 2010: HiiDef Inc. announced today the public launch of http://flavors.me, and the introduction of premium accounts.

Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the Internet. It automatically organizes all kinds of information – Posterous blog posts, Twitter status updates, YouTube videos, Last.fm music listening habits, Flickr photos, LinkedIn resume details and more – into a constantly growing, interactive visual montage that is ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, digital business cards, splash and microsites, celebrity fan pages, brand marketing – and everything in between.

With the launch of premium accounts, Flavors.me is officially open for business. For $20 per year, users will have access to: custom URLs using A Records (easiest configuration, fewest DNS lookups and support for permalinks); real-time traffic statistics and support for Clicky and Google Analytics; and a lightbox-style contact form. In the coming weeks, Flavors.me will be releasing a more advanced layout framework, an updated members directory and powerful search and browsing tools.

During the past three months of private beta testing, more than 50,000 Flavors.me accounts have been created. In February alone, the site generated more than 275,000 unique visitors. Dana Oshiro from Read Write Web covered the beta with a post titled “10 Code-Free Minutes to a Sexier Web Presence”, Daniel Raffel from Yahoo included us in his TechCrunch guest blog post “From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009” and Mark Krynsky from the Lifestreamblog wrote a “Build a Beautiful Lifestream Quickly with Flavors.me”.

All beta features are now publicly available and will remain free indefinitely. Flavors.me currently aggregates API-data from 15 of the most popular social media sites, in addition to most RSS/Atom feeds. Both free and premium accounts will have access to new content as Flavors.me continue to integrate more services such as Soundcloud, Picassa, Yelp and Gowalla. Flavors.me will soon be switching to exclusively licensed @font-face web embeddable fonts, which use HTML5 instead of Flash on compatible browsers.

The Flavors.me team will be presenting at SXSW Interactive’s Meet the Press Event on Saturday, March 13th at 11:15 AM. For the Flavors.me user Gallery visit: http://flavors.me/directory and for user feedback visit: http://flavors.me/feedback.

About HiiDef Inc.:

HiiDef is a web services incubator that was founded in mid-2008. It owns and operates Superkix, Flavors.me and Goodsie. HiiDef Inc.’s team has a strong track record in the consumer Internet sector with experience from Vimeo, Digg, Meetup, Zend, IAC, Pentagram and Digitalmash. HiiDef Inc.’s core group is a distributed team based around the East Coast of the US.

John Wehr Joins HiiDef as CTO

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:57:00 -0500

In September of 2008, after Jack and I had spent months working with different full-time and contract developers, ‘Glue’ (aka Flavors.me) had made zero progress.

To be kind, we had ‘explored’ a handful of proprietary and open-source frameworks. It was time to call in the heavy artillery. After failing to persuade him to accept a whacky deferred compensation offer to build Superkix earlier in the year, I asked John Wehr to step in and save the project. The idea behind Flavors.me is that simple systems can produce complex patterns (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram). After a couple weeks of blunt conversation, it was clear that only John could build the type of system we were still envisioning.

I have found that adhering to the operational frameworks provided by Jim Collins and Sun Tzu removes a good deal of confusion that arises during the company building process. And I have encountered few others as capable as John of filling the archetypal technical leadership role that Collins or Sun Tzu would surely require were they pursuing an Internet-related endeavor. So it is with great excitement that I announce HiiDef Inc. has hired John Wehr as its Chief Technology Officer!

John will be manning a booth at PyCon Atlanta in a couple weeks. We are actively looking for Python/Django experts to join the HiiDef team. So if you fit the bill, please find a way to introduce yourself either at PyCon in Atlanta, or digitally via the Internet.

Eli White Joins HiiDef to Lead Goodsie Development

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:50:00 -0500

Sometime in 2002 after 7’6 Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets, a couple of friends and I silk-screened about 1,000 t-shirts with funny riffs on Yao’s identity like Who’s Yao Mama?, Deez Nutz in Yao Mouth! and Who’s Yao Daddy?

I used a hosted e-commerce platform from Network Solutions to hack together a “Yaowear” site with only .jpg images; it was one of the more frustrating, semi-technical experiences of my life, and I swore to never do business with Network Solutions again.

Fast forward to 2008. Shortly after launching Superkix, we needed a very simple storefront to sell our wonderfully comfortable American Apparel 50/50 blend Superkix t-shirts. I had read about Shopify a couple years prior and was very eager to try out their service. My standards were exceptionally low; we needed only to sell one product with a couple different t-shirt colors. Sadly, I couldn’t even create a site that I was comfortable associating with the Superkix brand. So, I asked Jack the designer via IM if he would be interested in joining me on another HiiDef adventure, and Goodsie was born!

In February 2009, Kevin Sheurs from Vimeo agreed to sacrifice his nights and weekends to help bring our little retail project to life. Our plan was to launch before Jack’s wife Marissa was due to give birth to J3 aka: “BabyJ” in June; evidently we underestimated the project scope a touch. Based on our experience with the Flavors.me beta, we realized that in order to cross the goal line, we needed to add a full-time development heavy with some real horsepower, pronto.

Enter Eli White, who joined us on Monday to lead the development of Goodsie! Eli was among the first few developers at Digg, spent time at Hubble Space Telescope and TripAdvisor, and was most recently the Community Relations Manager for Zend. He wrote the book on PHP 5 and is a tour de force in the open source community. It’s only been about 72 hours, but Eli is already wearing full body armor around his house, and Goodsie is that much closer to becoming a reality.

So what is Goodsie? Goodsie allows anyone to create a unique web presence to sell physical or digital goods. Retailers of all kinds, from eBay power sellers to artisans in handmade marketplaces, or even musicians on MySpace, can have their own branded online store, without any of the traditional hassles of setting up shop online. We are building Goodsie to modernize selling online. Built on Amazon’s cloud, Goodsie integrates the Paypal, Google Checkout and Amazon gateways. It incorporates structured attributes in product categories such as Apparel, Media, Art, Pets, Furniture and Jewelry, leading to a consistent search and shopping experience. With native support for digital file preview and delivery, downloading purchased audio, video, stock photography and e-books is seamless.

The long awaited alpha testing should finally start in a month or two, perhaps during SXSW in March, which a handful of HiiDef team members will be attending.

In the meantime, Eli will be speaking at both ConFoo and tek-X. For those in attendance at either conference, please seek him out to say hello, buy him a beer and challenge him to a medieval-style joust!

"My favorite part about this site? The large type, the excellent use of colors and the tiled..."

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:54:57 -0500

“My favorite part about this site? The large type, the excellent use of colors and the tiled background, combined with an intuitive interface, of course.”

- Styleboost

A New Page (+Year)

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:07:00 -0500

I’ve closed up shop and become what the Japanese like to call a ‘salary man’.

Well, not exactly. In early 2008 I started working with Jonathan and David Marcus on a ‘little shoe project’ which eventually turned into Superkix.com. Since then we’d been throwing round the idea of working together exclusively, and late last year we decided to go for it. After all, they were my favourite clients by a mile.

This is a big change. Even though the actual work is much the same, the situation of dealing with a dozen or so clients (essentially bosses) on a handful of simultaneous projects is very different from working on a single large project. As a product designer, I’m working alongside former Design Director at Vimeo, the one and only Jack Zerby. Jack’s an OCD designer with mad skills. He’s also the mastermind behind the interface on HiiDef’s other recently launched product, Flavors.me.

Themes vs. Uniqueness

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:26:00 -0500

Jack Zerby gives some insight into customization on Flavors.me:

When Jonathan and I first discussed the design customization on Flavors, our first instinct was to offer various themes.

After giving it some thought, I realized that I didnt think themes were the best way to allow the user to create something unique.

The whole goal with Flavors is to give people a tool to create something personal, something special, something different.

That can’t be accomplished when you give people options like “Duckhunt”, “Steampunk”, or “OMG Jonas Brothers Theme”.

The argument for themes comes from the fact that most people aren’t designers, so if you give them the final product and allow them to slap their name on it, it becomes theirs.

My argument is that people may not be designers, but they are creative.

Using Layers instead of Themes

I came to a solution when I broke down elements of my own design process.

Wireframes
Fonts
Colors
Images

I obviously dont do any of this in any particular order, but every time I sit down to design I have to manipulate these elements to achieve my desired result.

Using this guide I created 4 sections of design options in Flavors.

Layouts
Fonts
Colors
Backgrounds

This allows the user to arrange these various elements in millions of different combinations, yet still staying within specific design contraints.

Design Controllers

There are many different approaches to design controllers.

1. Top drawer (via Tumblr)

2. Bottom drawer (via Squarespace)

3. Sidebar (via Soup.io)

4. Draggable (via Flavors.me)

I tried a ton of different approaches and finally settled on a draggable design controller.

The reason why I chose this approach

If you’re designing and you want to move the controller away from where you are focusing.
If you’re done designing and you want to hide it to see what the final presentation will look like.
Doesnt bump your screen up/down or shrink the actual workspace.

Some things Id like to improve:

Colors: A better way to show a user which color affects which area of the page. I tried highlighting the area affected when mousing over the color swatch, but that was really distracting.

Behind the Brand

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:22:00 -0500

The Flavors brand started as a tree.

That’s because at the time, I didn’t really care about the brand, I just wanted to start working on the product.

What does a tree have to do with the word Flavors? Nothing…but it looked cool.

Jonathan and I work well together because he knows when I’m half-assing it. So after he called me on it, I ditched the tree and started at square one. (no pun intended)

Baskin Robbins has a lot to do with flavors. All 31 of them.

Everyone knows the colorfully delicious grid of ice cream behind the counter of a Baskin Robbins.

I started with circles.

That looked way to girly, as my wife Marisa told me from the other couch.

I tried squares, starting with a single square at 150px x 150px.

After that I realized I was on to something. We created this site to allow people create something unique. Every flavor at Baskin Robbins is unique, BUT it’s still ice cream. Every page on Flavors.me is unique, BUT it’s still within boundaries. (My sister Kayla just said she likes that line)

So I colored up these bad boys…

Now I had a grid to work with. Every page was born from this grid. I usually don’t use really strict grids (I forget most of the time), but this time it became such a part of the brand, I had to use one.

First the homepage…

Then finally the settings page…

Technorati Interview: About Flavors.me

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Q: Why did you start this project?

I wanted a personal homepage that was better than my friends, and figured it would be more fun to think up something that could automatically assemble sites for everyone, rather than just me. During the first Facebook application craze, when every single company in the web ecosystem put life on hold to develop clunky widgets for closed, proprietary platforms, it dawned on me that API-level integration was key. I was eager to prove that the open web was infinitely more powerful than AOL, redux.

Q: What is your design/service philosophy?

The idea behind Flavors.me is that simple systems can produce complex patterns (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram); simple in that layout (wireframe), color palette, background and typography are common variables, and yet each site can look and feel uniquely custom. We employ a very layered approach, like a designer would in Photoshop or Fireworks.

Q: Where do you see the project heading in the next six months? The next two years?

In the next 6 months we need to add support for almost every 3rd-party service such as - LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Wordpress, etc., fetch data in real-time (we are about 10 minutes delayed for beta), and solidify our infrastructure. In two years we hope to establish Flavors.me and its sister property, Goodsie.com, which is similar to Flavors but for retailers, as the ultimate resource for creating an online presence, whether for informational, vanity or commercial purposes.

Q: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Ensuring the service works like magic. Before starting the project, I said that if after 15 minutes a user couldn’t create something that felt magical, we were toast. Fortunately, I think we managed to build a system that can do it in 5 - 10 minutes. Aside from communication services like Skype or Facebook, very few services offer the immediate satisfaction and instant gratification that Flavors does. We struggled with the immediate wow factor at Vimeo (where I was VP / GM). Flavors is unique in its ability to add instant, real value to your entire online experience.

Q: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

There are simply no obstacles in our immediate 3 - 9 months plans. We are well capitalized and our development process is only getting more fine tuned as we go.

The Story Behind Superkix

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve had an affinity for sneakers ever since I can remember. When I was really little, my father owned a Stride Rite store in a strip mall.

I was always so proud of his ability to size up someone correctly. Ill never forget the time when my brother, dad and I were almost held up at gun point for trying to return a defective pair of high-tops to the hottest sneaker joint in downtown San Diego, back when there were no gas lamps and those streets werent quiet as friendly. In high school, I was amongst the first to brave the newest patent leather Jordan’s in a real basketball game. I met my roommate and one of my closest friends one summer in New York because of a shared love for the tragically squeaky Air Max ’95s. And while Corporate America had a strong preference for straight laces, spreadsheets and Ferragamo’s, I eventually settled back into a vanilla pair of Nike dunks from 8th Street.

Sometime last April, awestruck by my brother’s gaudy and garrish ode to sneakers in his closet, we decided it would be cool to try and build the world’s greatest sneaker expo. We envisioned assembling one pair of every sneaker in a MOMA-inspired web setting. After picking up the recently expired Superkix domain for $7.99, we were off to the races, building the start-up dream. Along the way, Rob Morris (my hero in so many ways) graciously agreed to bring our idea to life, and John Bresnik tirelessly built the whole kit and kaboodle.

And so, after months of hard work, we are excited to present Superkix, the only search engine for authentic sneakers. Superkix makes it easy to find sneakers currently for sale at retail and get a sneak peak into what is coming next from Nike, Reebok, Adidas and other popular brands. Users can search sneaker inventory by size, updated continuously from 35+ leading online retailers and discover new styles set to debut using a consolidated and ranked feed from the 20+ most authoritative sneaker bloggers.

If you dont like sneakers, someone you know likely does, and would certainly appreciate knowing about our fantastic new site:www.superkix.com - search & discovery for sneaker lovers.