Articles

When I joined the team here at Planet Argon, LESS was being used to code and compile the current CSS files. When a new client project came along, we started the transition to using Sass. The decision was made to use Sass when it was included in Rails 3.1. Being a Rails shop, we wanted follow the conventions that were being advocated by leaders of the Rails community. The differences between the syntax of Sass and LESS are minor, but the process of transitioning our largest project to SASS has had its issues.

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We carved pumpkins yesterday, and Gary took photos!

Can you guess who made each of these?

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The newest addition to the studio: lockers!

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With more than 200 itineraries in over 40 countries, finding the perfect trip with Contiki can be daunting if you’re not given the right tools. In collaboration with Contiki, our latest deployment of Contiki’s Trip Finder adds more functionality, improves the design, and has some added perks.

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Leupold & Stevens has been designing, machining, and assembling precision optical instruments for a century. They recently expanded their hunting lineup with the addition of an RCX Trail Camera System to track animals for hunting.

The RCX Trail System comes with a remote camera that you can place anywhere and a controller/viewer that allows you to see what that remote camera sees. This system allows the user to find targets they wouldn’t normally be able to see from their position.

Leupold came to us to make a microsite for the launch of the RCX Trail Camera System. Leupold is a local company, and it’s always a pleasure collaborating with clients in person for a project. We went with a sales sheet model for how to present the product on the website. We felt Leupold’s potential RCX customers would want a simple explanation of the products, large photos to view, and full technical specifications for evaluating their purchase.

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Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s and operates in over 40 countries around the world. For more than fifty years, Contiki has primarily relied on print brochures to allure and entice young adults to explore the globe. The printed brochures provide detailed and photographic overviews of the many available tours and benefits of going Contiki, however they do not provide the same flexibility and accessibility of an always up-to-date website.

Regardless, Contiki still has a large customer base that prefers to flip through a physical brochure just like many of us do with our annual Ikea catalog. While we cannot share the correlation between print brochures and purchasing decisions, there is still a significant percentage of customers that use the printed brochure to decide which product to purchase. So it was critical that we improve the user interaction to increase leads here.

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Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s and operates in over 40 countries around the world. For more than fifty years, Contiki has primarily relied on print brochures to allure and entice young adults to explore the globe. The printed tour brochures provide detailed and photographic overviews of the many available tours and benefits of going Contiki, however they do not provide the same flexibility and accessibility of an always up-to-date website.

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Contiki asked Planet Argon to help introduce their new South America tours. This release was a big moment for Contiki, and they promoted it with a mysterious site countdown on their front page. Our team of designers worked closely with Contiki to deliver fresh and inspiring interaction to match up to the global anticipation for this new continent to tour.

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I signed back into Visual Website Optimizer today so that I can experiment with it. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the warning message.

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Allison, Brian, and I attended WebVisions in Portland, OR on May 26-27. It was a great event, and I appreciated that time limits for speakers were mostly set at 15-30 minutes. This made for a more energetic conference than most, and speakers needed to get to the point quickly or risk not getting time to make one at all.

I attended as many design related presentations as I could, and this year the talk in web design has shifted from visual design to emotional and interaction design. What makes a user return? What excites them? How can you guide them through your site? Having a pleasing visual design isn’t a big deal anymore, because now that’s just expected.

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