Posts tagged ‘brightbox’

The “branding” of Brightbox 16 Aug 07

As you might have noticed, we’ve started to roll out a new logo. Up until a week or so ago, Brightbox was just a name we were using - there was no “branding” or logo as such, so I thought it was about time I put my designer hat on and came up with something! After days of playing about into Fireworks with different shapes and styles it was all looking either too clinical or “corporat-ey” or too “web2.0-ey” - just couldn’t find something that worked.

So, resorting to the good old pen and paper, I tried just sketching out a couple of ideas.

Three minutes and two pages later, there it was :)

From rough sketch to finished “box” took 4 steps (and another 4 minutes):

  1. “Scanned” in the sketch by taking a photo on my mobile (Sony Ericsson K800i)
  2. Sent the photo to my Mac via Bluetooth
  3. Increased the brightness/contrast in Photoshop to make the lines clearer (flickr)
  4. Imported the image into Illustrator and used the “Trace” command to simplify the edges and convert to vector (flickr)

Done. Not bad for 10 minutes work or so?

Posted 16 August 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

The story so far 31 Jul 07

The beta programme is well underway now with around 50 beta users trying out Brightbox. We’ve already got some really useful feedback and are working on some tweaks to improve performance *and* make Brightbox even easier to use. We’ve also done extensive testing of our own involving thousands of Brightbox machines.

Of course, the question I hear all the time is “when?”. “When will you be going live?”. We’ve not got an exact date and we won’t be publishing a date until we’re ready to go and we’ve got a way to take payments :) Right now, David is working on the ordering/admin system that will be built into the main Brightbox website so customers will be able to order machines and have them automatically provisioned (we already have Ruby scripts to do this). We also want beta users to have at least a month to have a play around and do their own testing.

So, right now, we’re currently looking at a full launch early September.

Posted 31 July 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

Hey, what’s the hold up? 28 Jun 07

If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed the countdown timer recently disappeared from the holding page. Don’t panic, nothing sinister is happening :) It’s just that our testing has taken a little longer than planned (plus a delay in the delivery of some new shiny hardware set us back another week).

Jason Fried (37signals) was right and I should have listened:

..we don’t have release dates. It’s a great way to make sure things are never late.

Also, in response to some good early feedback, John’s been working on a deployment gem that will make it super simple to deploy your Ruby on Rails apps to Brightbox.

Posted 28 June 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: 1 comment