SXSW countdown: two weeks, one day

We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.

As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.

Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:

This was our first attempt in Photoshop. Each person gets a panel that shows their avatar and latest tweet. We’ve colour-coded the boxes to show recency, with the freshest content (hot colours) at the top, and the stale content (cold colours) at the bottom.

However, we wanted the page to update in real time, which would mean people and their panels moving around the screen. We figured that was going to get far too busy and complicated… Onwards!

Here’s the next stop on the journey:

Here we’ve brought in a bit of alpha-order to give everyone a spot on the page and keep them there. This solved the busy problem, but when the coloured panels are shown in a non-spectrum order, it looks confusing. We trimmed the colour back to what you see here but found that they meant less.

Standing back a bit, we worried that this design was actually a bit boring and unemotional… just not MxM enough. Next!

Finding the right conversational note:

Here we’ve started to play around with something that’s a bit more conversational and has more personality. There’s still more work to go, but we think this could be fun. Now we’re moving in the right direction.

We agreed this design and we’re taking it forward even as we speak.We’ll preview this project again next week, but in the meanwhile, feel free to tell us what you think.