OVERSING UPDATE You know, we get our inspiration for design from various places.

OVERSING UPDATE

You know, we get our inspiration for design from various places. I think that it is starting to become obvious that I took the inspiration for Oversing from the Media business: Scriptwriting with Scrivener and Final Draft, and Video Editing from Final Cut.

Yes, we are sort of like a modernized version of Jira + Facebook + Project and Portfolio Management + Time, Expenses, Invoicing and Reporting.

But the UI inspiration is not from any of those tools. It’s from professional writing software.

Why? Because those tools are much more friendly to work with. Much quicker to think with and forgiving. Much more tolerant of EVOLVING your project.

It’s pretty awesome.

You can build everything from a quick list of notes, to an advanced multi-year project just like using an outliner (a writing tool that uses hierarchical indentation, rather than heading sizes like Chapter, heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 etc.)

But we still cannot get the interface to ‘feel’ quite right. It looks like a wireframe.

Now, I have thought a bit about taking that to an extreme – a very minimalist, white background with a few light grey lines, and touches of blue. Something that looked like it was from an architect’s office. And I would, of course, (and have investigated) using a ‘hand-drawn’ or “pencil-drawn” look for all the lines, borders and fonts. That would help us with the Creative industry no doubt, and visibly separate us from the hordes of antique (horrible) software from the prior generations. Maybe there is another solution. Maybe I am just biased since I use hand-drawn UI drafting tools, and I find that look most comforting. But I am just not a good enough designer to work with it one way or another.

Anyway. It has to sell. It has to be readable. And that means it can’t be as illustrative as I want – or as interesting. (I understand illustration, but I am still not a good designer, or photographer, and I never will be. Those are different skills.)

🙂

FYI: Josh Brantley