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.
Posted 5 days ago by
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
