Zeitguys and Unitron Hearing launch iPhone app on iTunes

By overclocked | Published: May 6, 2009

Today, Apple has released uHear, a slick application in the Medical category conceived by Unitron Hearing. The application, for which we designed the user interface, is a scientifically-accurate hearing evaluation and testing tool, with three different tests based on standard tests used by audiologists.

This was one of the coolest projects we’ve worked on recently as developing for the iPhone / iPod touch hardware is a very engaging process. For one thing, the specific restrictions around UI standards, screen size, resolution and performance issues all provided parameters that informed the final design. That, and the tactile experience of using the iPhone / iPod touch made us really want to focus on larger, button-driven interactions.

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Creating a successful horizontal scrolling website

By overclocked | Published: April 17, 2009

Ever since stumbling across The Horizontal Way, we’ve always been really keen to try to create a horizontally-scrolling website. There’s something about the look of such a site that really turns web design on its head (well, on its side, I guess), and it can lend itself particularly well to a comfortable way to consume the information because of the landscape orientation of most computer screens (especially the widescreen 16:9 laptop screens that are so ubiquitous these days).

When Romeo Salon & Spa approached us to do a high-impact “brochure” site, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to wrestle with some of the challenges that are inherent when you shift navigational paradigms:

  1. ensuring that the user realizes that off-screen content can be accessed by scrolling horizontally rather than vertically?
  2. rewiring the middle mousewheel to horizontal rather than vertical scrolling
  3. finding a way to provide the conventional, ubiquitous nav bar (even though all “pages” are actually all on a single page) that is still search-engine friendly and is not dependent on JavaScript in order to function correctly (ie: degrades nicely)
  4. providing horizontal flexibility in terms of page “length”, based on amount of content
  5. use semantic and standards-compliant markup as much as possible.

Well, we succeeded in 4 out of 5 of these points. On the last one we had to make a few compromises for the sake of project timing (and our own sanity).

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Unitron Hearing myStyle

By overclocked | Published: April 10, 2009

The Unitron Hearing “myStyle” is an interactive style guide which allows you to select a hearing device model, its colour and see what it looks like on an ear. The program was developed with a mix of both flash and 3D design and developed with as much user interactivity as possible, which is a quality that allows this program to differ from many other hearing aid product guides currently available.

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Romeo Salon & Spa gets a “Fresh” look

By overtracked | Published: March 29, 2009

Romeo Salon Spa is a full service Aveda Concept Salon that is soon to move into a new location in the trendy Bauer Buildings located in downtown Waterloo. To accompany all these great changes, Romeo Salon & Spa decided the timing was right for a full redesign of their website. With Zeitguys already involved in all the Bauer Buildings and Bauer Lofts marketing, our 411 found its way into the hand of the Romeo team and the new site design was soon underway.

At the top of the list for the new site objectives was to be fresh and innovative. A cool approach that struck a cord with everyone was to build the site around horizontal scrolling in lieu of page-by-page navigation. The navigation cues work the same as a traditional site, but the mechanic for viewing new pages is refreshingly unusual. This approach was not without its technical and usability challenges, but careful planning, a simple, linear site architecture and some technical wizardry won the day.

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Toronto Environmental Alliance – P.L.A.N.E.T Logo

By overtracked | Published: March 12, 2009

Hello everyone, with Earth Day around the corner I thought it would be appropriate to share with you one of our recent projects just completed that we feel is our little way of helping make the world a better and cleaner place for future generations. For this project we were approached by the “Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA)” and asked to develop a logo to help visually display their most current project to the public. Though TEA has worked on various local environmental issues in the greater Toronto area such as education and action on Smog and Climate Change, Public Transit, Toxics and Urban Pesticides, Waste Reduction and Greenbelting Toronto, this particular project has taken more of a direct approach and is aimed at reducing energy consumption in privately-owned low income multi-residential buildings in Ontario.

Appropriately titled “Low Income Tenant Energy Savers”, (aka LITES), kicks off its campaign mid-April and starts with two particular apartment buildings in Ontario, one in Lawrence Avenue in Toronto and another in Ottawa. With partners ACORN, Ministry of Environment’s Community Green Fund and sponsorship from Enbridge Gas, TEA plans on educating tenants and landlords alike on the costs of energy and potential bills they may face in the future.

Whether or not tenants currently pay directly for their energy, they definitely pay the price either way. “When landlords pay expensive utility bills, they pass on those costs to tenants through rent increases. It also means there is less money in the capital budget to make improvements to the building, or make much needed repairs.” (TEA)

To help educate these tenants TEA has chosen to put together free energy kits and distribute them to the residents of the buildings. These kits will be a reusable bag filled with compact fluorescent bulbs, a timed power bar, window film for draft proofing, tip sheets and more, thus putting necessary saving tips right into their hands. Tagging all these items will be a specific logo developed for each of the two locations.

This is where Zeitguys came into the mix.

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Descartes Systems Group Inc. Website

By the Editor | Published: February 9, 2009

Zeitguys Inc. has been working closely with Descartes System Group Inc. for the past several years to bring visitors a robust and extremely up-to-date website that presents Descartes’ Logistics Solutions to the marketplace.  Zeitguys also works closely with the Descartes marketing team providing additional design services for many of Descartes’ print marketing initiatives.

Descartes Website Home Page

About Descartes: Descartes’ logistics management solutions include a multi-modal network, the Descartes Global Logistics Network, with value- added applications to provide messaging services between logistics trading partners, shipment management services for contract carriers and private fleet management services. These solutions and services help Descartes’ customers reduce administrative costs, billing cycles, fleet size, contract carrier costs, and distance travelled and improve pick up and delivery reliability. Our hosted, transactional and packaged solutions deliver repeatable, measurable results and fast time-to-value.

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Summerlee Office Solutions Website

By overclocked | Published: February 6, 2009

Unfortunately, Summerlee Office Solutions, Ltd. closed its doors near the end of 2010. You can still visit an archive of their website.

Summerlee Office Solutions, Ltd. is somewhat of a deceiving name for this Canadian provider of office interior solutions. Far more than merely a distributor for some of the industry’s top brands, Summerlee stands out from the crowd as a true resource, providing strategic design solutions that range from furniture to architectural walls to specific technical solutions such as mission-critical furniture, noise damping or stealth cabling solutions. They know about stuff you wouldn’t even think of thinking about when it comes to populating your office with everything a modern office needs to be visually attractive, ergonomic and functional.

Summerlee website homepage snapshot

Summerlee’s website is not an online store. In fact, very early on as we were facilitating a website vision and design workshop (a standard component to many of our larger web projects) with the Summerlee team, it became very clear that this would be one of the defining differentiators about this site. Visitors to the site shouldn’t feel like they were here to browse a product catalogue and make a few budget purchases. This is completely anathema to the entire Summerlee value proposition.

Summerlee helps clients make great decisions about their corporate office interiors. It says so right on their home page.

So how do you craft a website that infuses every page with that ethos?

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Unitron Hearing Offers Something for the Little Guys

By the Editor | Published: February 1, 2009

Unitron Hearing is committed to bettering the lives of people with hearing loss by developing and manufacturing high-quality hearing instruments. In 2009, Unitron approached Zeitguys to help refresh the “Kids Club” section of its website, an area devoted to children and the parents of children with hearing loss.

Kids Club is a fun, support site just for kids with hearing loss. While using the site kids can play cool games with Moki and Pip (two cute animated characters that are mascots for the site) and to learn more about how there ears work, and how and why hearing loss happens.

The first portion of this revamp started with the logo. Unitron was looking for something fun and current. After spending numerous hours watching cartoons (for research of course) we developed a theme and overall look brand update. We decided to go with a funky bold font, and a colour colour palette that borrowed from the company brand, but with a younger, bolder feel.

With Moki (the squirrel monkey) and Pip (the parakeet) sitting comfortably in their new logo, the next steps were design new scenes to animate them in. The interactive Flash website follows Moki and Pip on adventures through the rain forest, keeping the kids engages with the help of fun activities that inform, engage and entertain.

Posted in Flash, Web Design & Development | Comments closed

Localization and Configuration in Flash Sites using XML

By overclocked | Published: October 31, 2008

Wow. That’s a long-winded title, but hey – it’s one for the web crawlers.

So yeah, welcome to the Zeitguys blog. I’ll be periodically posting (what I hope will be) helpful tips, war stories from the development trenches, and case studies whenever we have some technical achievement to boast about.

In this post I’d like to share a vision that we’re starting to implement whenever we do Flash sites or mini-apps for customers, namely: adding the ability for our customers to easily configure / customize the application, or add content, using an editable XML file.

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