Since I became aware of this technique of developing the right attitude and believing in the right things (the right way), it is something crucial for me.

The mind is something incredibly powerful and when you learn how to put it to work, amazing things happen. What do I mean by this? Believing in what you are and what you can do.

Treat it as your own. When working for a client, you need to believe you are part of the team, you work with them not for them. It is always in your best interest that the outcome of a project is something of value so you have to push for that.

Security. You need to believe you are awesomely good at what you do (don’t get me wrong, there is always room to improve our skills). Basically you portray what you believe and your client will see that. Either you do portray it or not.

Structure. You are treated how you’d like to be treated. When working with a client, you need to set your parameters of how you work. Everybody has their own method. The structure or set of methods you build are the ones that work best for you and that is why you have chosen them.

No intimidation by titles. What do I mean by this? In corporations you will usually find titles such as ‘Art Director’, ‘Senior Designer’, ‘Junior Designer’, ‘Intern’, ‘Head of Technology’, ‘Information Architect’ (which by the way never understood what that means?). Titles are used only to intimidate people. YOU ARE PART OF A TEAM. I have a meeting with the Head of Technology, The Marketing VP, Production, and my Art Director… whooooaaa those are a lot of titles or important people right there. Wouldn’t it be easier just to say: I have a meeting with Jason, Alice, Nate, or whoever, they are humans! Anyhow, when you have one of those meetings, talk like you usually do, speak your mind, disagree when you have to, give your opinion, ask questions. Treat them like your team mates (which is what they are!). Everybody has something to learn.

We had the pleasure of hosting Corey Haines for a week last month. It really was a eye opening experience into the practices of a Software Craftsmanship (more on that later). This time is for a video we did about starting up a company, dealing with clients and the whole designers/developers worlds.

Conversation with Ivan Acosta-Rubio and Bellatrix Martinez from Corey Haines on Vimeo.

We’ve been observing patterns on client behavior that cast some light on how a project is going to develop. By recognizing this patterns, you can avoid clients that will drown your energy, work with clients that get the big picture, advance your career and obviously make more money.

Have you observe any pattern of client behavior?

A successful web development project is the one that carefully listens to their visitors, customers and clients. There are projects where feedback starts even before any design or web development; moreover, it is not a coincidence that those are the projects that live longer or even become profitable. Even if you have not collected user data yet, you must set up a well design feedback loop if you are aiming for success.

I love how hashrocket asked, listened and crafted RMM (rails maturity model). Obie introduced it in the Rails Business list with this message (Feb, 12). Surely after, there was a rave about certifications vs whatever. All this controversy generated tons of blog posts like this, this, this and a huge twitter stream.

The feedback gathered around the information stream was priceless. It is truly an example of how we can validate our market and get feedback from users even before investing in development. It took Obie just one email. Today, they launched the app unofficially and all the drama around the certification argument was put to rest by their tagline “Rails Maturity Model It?s not about certification. It?s about success”. Be sure to notice that their tagline was gathered from early feedback.

To immature people I left the discussion on how much of a good thing is the RMM for the rails community. However, we can learn how to ask for early feedback from this example. We see a lot of value on professional development and give two thumbs up for this project. We are proud to be part of the RMM and we are honored to be among giant firms. Surely, we’ll learn many more things from all of them.

“Sorry ice cream I am dreaming of a different dessert”, and these are the lyrics of the Pinkberry song. What is Pinkberry? To be honest I just found this brand and have fallen in love with the work they have done. It is incredible the detail and fun they have had with their brand. Let’s review it!

Simplicity: Pinkberry brand only sells pinkberry products, they do not even sell water in their store, why? why would you go there to buy a bottle of water? you can buy that anywhere else. In this store they sell swirls and smoothies. The swirls have three flavors, why? Because this is the refreshing palette they believe in. They have their original flavor, green tea, and one seasonal flavor, which now is pomegranade. The smoothies have two flavors, so basically their menu is based on 5 items, not bad uh?

Having fun with swirls: They have a variety of toppings, with which they ‘dress up’ their swirls.

Store: Their store is very well designed, this was done with the product in mind and with the goal of activating the customer senses. They have even taken an extra step and designed their bathroom signs and adapted them to the Pinkberry look and feel, being the woman’s bathroom the actual logo with the leaves as a clip in the hair.

Concept: They work with real yogurt and real ingredients. Their yogurt is certified with the Yogurt Association, which in order to obtain such a certification one has to prove the yogurt has more nutrients than what their standards are, and Pinkberry actually exceeds this requirement. Pinkberry is real fat free yogurt, that is actually good for your health.

The Groupies: Pinberry instead of having a ‘fan club’ they have ‘groupies’ yes! because pinkberry is really considered a rock star. It even has its own song, which you can listen to when you enter their site, and I have to admit it’s quite good, you end up actually singing it.

Love this product, love this branding execution. Love to see strong concepts out there.

I invite everybody to visit one of the Pinkberry stores is they are in your are, and if they don’t you can visit them in www.pinkberry.com

Like having the bags next to the garbage can. Not like having the bags in a separate drawer.

Joomla Dashboard

Joomla is a popular open source content management system (CMS) with hundreds of extensions created by 3rd party developers and widely use in the PHP realm. By the amount of extension one has to put together to create a complete site, this can become a maintenance nightmare and turns out to be much more expensive than implementing the same site in Business Feather.
I?ll explain just some of the things that can go wrong if you create your site on Joomla and how Business Feather solves those problems.

Picture the scenario of using Joomla and 3 extensions. The first is for e-commerce, the second is for handling an image gallery and the third is a forum. Updating the system can become a nightmare and expensive since extensions only work with specific versions of Joomla. This means that you won?t be able to update your site until all extensions you are using are compatible with the version of Joomla you are about to update.

While some businesses can relay on the creators of the extensions (3rd party developers), it proves to be dangerous for smart business owners like you for the following reasons:

• You don’t know who is developing the extension.
• Second, you don’t know if he/she will keep updating the extension or at least update it to work with future versions of Joomla.

On the other hand the vast majority of the websites require some form of customization over the extension. If you customize it, the code of the extension will change and it guarantees that you won’t be able to update it anymore because the code will be different. You will have to hire another developer to custom hack the upgrade and make it work if it is possible at all.

We created an experiment where we installed 40 Joomla extensions on a site without doing custom work on them. We expected them to work, but by the extension number 12 the system was throwing errors left and right. When we installed all of them, we could not access the Public site at all. Consequently, we started looking for a reliable solution we could offer our clients.

Business Feather Dashboard

This research lead us to Business Feather. it is developed by a team of Engineers and all the extensions are developed by the same people and integrated to the system from day one. This ensures that the system will run smoothly even when using all the extensions.

Since Business Feather is a hosted solution, it is constantly being updated so that you always have the latest version. The team of engineers makes sure all modules work perfectly before updates are push to production; therefore, you can rest assure that your Online Business will work.

Business Feather is created in such a way that all the modules are customizable 100% so that we can extend the functionality without breaking the system.

Our past experiences with Joomla have proven that it is unmaintainable for projects where a business depend on their online presence. We only recommend using Joomla for personal sites that have little action going on. This experiences made us look for a system we can rely on and we found Business Feather. So far the experience is top notch and we recommend it to everybody. The system is updated twice a week, they have an API for sophisticated customizations, the customer support is top notch and the quality of the extensions is super. Go ahead and give it a try.

We just found this great article about how to think strategically when designing online business. Let’s face it, Web Design is not Art. The strategy ought to be designed to fulfill your business goals witch generally involve filling out a web-form - you better make them short a pretty!.

Playing is a big part of any living organism life. To let go of yourself, of your mind and just interact how your body wants to. We see animals all the time playing, and it does not matter how old they are they love to play.

Human beings are the ‘most intelligent’ creatures on earth, yet we are the ones that have forgotten about playing. We were all once kids, remember that feeling? of just not wanting to do anything else but play. This is a very healthy feeling, it is a feeling of happiness, freedom.

So, the question now is, do you play with your process? You being a designer or developer, should be able to have fun with what you do. For the creative minds the process is a bit harder, why? because you need to let go, most professions do not let you or want you to let go, but hey! we have the advantage, the great advantage that ours encourages us to let go!

Tips to play with your process:

? Start your project by brainstorming, but do not do a formal aligned to the parallel? brainstorm. Get yourself a big piece of paper, board anything big! some markers and start to scramble thoughts, the messier the better!

? Mess around with your project. Once you are prepared for doing something in the computer, do it your way, present innovative ideas, ideas of your own. Now, off course there are always sticky clients with big ego trips, that want things done their way, hey! save different versions or use a great tool called github. That way you can have both versions, the one your client will approve just because it is done the way he/she wanted. And the other version which let you play.

? Have projects of your own. This is the best way to really play. You are your own decision maker and you have total freedom of what to do and what direction to take.

Conclusion: Get yourself out of any type of routine, and play!