Omnigraph - Grow Version 3

A Little Preamble

As with most collective ideas, the need for version 3 came from a meeting in a country pub.. or several meetings to be accurate. Charlie, Paul and I were drinking coffee, tea and coffee respectively at the meeting in question - I think it has something to do with age, and the realisation that a pint at 3pm means living in slow motion for the rest of the day.

That was the seed meeting where we decided how we would integrate the hosting and ISP services of the Collective in one site

Another crucial meeting was between Paul and myself: On a sunny afternoon in June we sat outside Browns (to the left in the pic on the site) preparing for a meeting and Paul said, 'I've had an idea - what about a pound project?'. GrowSearch was the natural tool we already had to share and it was exciting to think of sharing it with our fellow accessible minded designers and developers. We wanted to rush home and get started there and then.

Conception to Birth

So we had a need to document our hosting services, include AMOS applications and publish our thoughts and tools: Version three was concieved.

It’s a long road from conception to birth though. Especially when its our own site and client work naturally comes first. I'll skip the endless hours on Skype, the multiple iterations of the design, and the hours spent checking usability and functionality of our back-end tools that power the site like GrowBlog. Let's just say it was educational and fun (when it all went to plan).

Our aim was five-fold:

1. Publish our thoughts and share our personality with our clients and audience in a library.
2. Give ourselves a means to develop and document our AMOS applications including GrowSearch, GrowBlog, GrowStore and Growmail.
3. Bring together our hosting services more coherently and deploy another in-house developed tool, an accessible domain name availability checker
4. Start offering tools we'd developed that we thought others might find useful like a site search and site map plug-in using no javascript, GrowSearch
5. Wrap all this information in an interface that was accessible, applied web standards based design, used no javascript and we all liked

An Omnigraph

Many of our clients have said they love the simplicity and clarity of our design work. That was what I wanted to continue. Version 3 is an expression of content over packaging. I focussed on typography rather than graphical composition. Omnigraph was chosen as the name because we were scaling many different ideas, tools and thoughts for the web and other agents to see and use. Touches like the zoom version (achieved using only PHP), and arranging the menu to be at the top of the page visually, and at the bottom structurally were particularly satisfying to achieve.

The composition is deliberately clean, spacious and discrete. We imagined the presentation to be a placeholder for our design work and ideas and hopefully we've come close.

The logo and the headers are set in the immortal Georgia by Matthew Carter of Carter and Cone who also designed Tahoma which is was used for paragraph text (it’s now Verdana) . All of these fonts were originally created for the Typography Group at Microsoft and were made freely available to all on August 12, 2002. Matthew Carter also designed the indispensable Verdana.

Amos and Paul go PHP-tastic

Paul worked tirelessly developing the back-end for the site. No javascript was used in any crucial function of the web site. In fact, there are only 2 instances: Firstly, in the GrowBlog editor that visitors will never see, and even there it is only used for the text editor and degrades gracefully. Secondly, in the domain name search where it is used to change the text on the submit button to notify users that the search is in progress. Again, it degrades gracefully and is not critical for the functionality to work.

Paul's work on GrowBlog was a labour of love. He rose early and worked late just to get everything I asked for and he wanted working precisely. In many cases the code was re-written time and again to optimise it, streamline it and generally make it all the tiny, powerful and delicious application it now is.

GrowSearch was also applied to the site which was also a labour of love. Out of the simple integration came new features like being able to pick what tag is used for the display text in the site map and search results (we have it set to the page title). Everything we thought would be useful to us might also be useful to other designers and developers, so while we were integrating it in the site, Paul also kept making changes to the final GrowSearch product you see today.

Afterword

Like all projects that are a long time in the making we deployed the Eskimo theory of travel: Start slow and get faster towards the end. Launch day was a joyful and long-awaited moment. Even though the site is finished in its current form, there is still work we will do. The AMOS applications will be demo'd in full. We will also be releasing more javascript-free accessible tools for designers shortly. The hosting services will be integrated with GrowStore for online purchases. Our ethos is always to work on a personal basis with our clients and know all of them by their first name so that will be a convenience rather than an interface for sales.

Time for a pint?

So that was the short version. In between there was heart-ache and frustration, laughter and joy but in the end we arrived, hopefully intact, hopefully with something of a flourish and with a whole heap of useful hard-work done. We hope you like it.

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