Blog | Eric Paul Snowden

Mobile Awesomeness

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:48:39 +0000

Mobile Awesomeness is a design showcase for the best mobile formatted websites. Submissions can be voted on and the gallery can be browsed by category or searched. Mobile Awesomeness also has a great list of links to mobile resources, as well as a blog focusing on mobile innovations and announcements. A must visit site for anyone designing or building smartphone formatted versions of their websites.

Check out Mobile Awesomeness.

TestSize.com – Test Your Site at Multiple Sizes

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:00:21 +0000

Designers have a distorted view of the web. We all have huge monitors and speedy computers and it’s easy to forget that your average web user isn’t always so lucky. Testsize.com is a simple web app that allows you to easily check out how your site will display on monitors of varying size.

To use the site you only have to enter a url, a size, and hit enter. There are shortcuts that allow you to cycle through different sizes, and zoom, but the developers of the app have done a good job of keeping the options minimal and the application simple.

Check out TestSize.com here.

Notable – The Easiest Way for Teams to Provide Feedback on Websites

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:02:06 +0000

Notable

Notable is a web and iPhone based service that allows team members to easily share feedback on all aspects of a website. To start a discussion you create a new project called a capture, or a set to hold multiple captures. Captures can be created from a url, by uploading an image, from an iPhone screenshot or from a Firefox Plugin. After creating a capture your team can comment on the page’s design, code, copy or seo. Users can also output the results to a PDF, email, public or private urls.

Design

When uploading a jpg, or a capture from a url, Notable creates and stores a full page screenshot of your webpage. Multiple users can create transparent boxes with comments on top of the page giving the designer consolidated visual feedback.

Code

Code view is organized by html, css and javascript. You can isolate each source file and highlight lines of code by clicking and filling out a pop-up comment box.

Copy

The copy tab removes all graphics and markup from your page and reproduces the page as plain text. Unlike code view, you can highlight individual characters or words for comment.

SEO

The SEO tab analyzes how search engines see your page and only displays relevant content. The left column contains a list of keywords and keyword phrases appearing on your page. The right column breaks down the page by metadata, headers, first 100 words used on the page, bold/strong elements, alt tags and outbound links giving you a thorough view of how a search engine sees your site.

Pricing plans for Notable range from free to $119 a month based on the number of users and the total amount of storage needed. Notable is one of the most thorough site markup tools on the market allowing you to give feedback on site design, code, copy and seo. Pair that with the companion iPhone application and you have a tool that no production team should be without.

Check out Notable here.

Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights Website Launch

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:58:52 +0000

On Friday we lauched our newest artist website on Cisco’s EOS platform for Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights. The site was designed in house by one of our talented web designers Priyanka Batra (her last before going off to freelance full time) and was managed and built by the talented web teams at Atlantic Records and Warner Music Group.

Beyond a stylish yet clean design, and the great community features our fans have come to expect from our websites, we rolled out some exciting new features centered around concerts. For some time now we’ve wanted revamp the tour experience on our artist’s websites, and JTNL is the first site to include some of these new ideas.

The Archive

Across the music industry most artist websites do a fine job of alerting you to new tour dates, but very few have given much attention to past shows. Live shows are a huge part of the music experience and we wanted to add features to our web platform to reflect that. The ARCHIVE section of the JTNL site displays past shows and allows fans to interact with those shows in new ways.

You can now rate shows, comment on your experience or upload videos or photos you have taken at the show. Beyond allowing user generated content each show has the official setlist, and on the JTNL site, each show can be downloaded in its entirety for free via Topspin! It’s a great way to experience this amazing live band and share your experiences with other fans.

Check out the new Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights site.

QNX Connected Car case study on Adobe.com

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:04:22 +0000

There is a new article on Adobe.com talking about the success of the Connected Car project by Alcatel-Lucent and QNX software. The article focuses on the development platform QNX has created for automobiles using Flash Lite, and mentions the success Atlantic had porting our Fanbase application to the platform. There is also a short quote by yours truly. A great project to be a part of and continued success to QNX.

Check out the full article here.

New Role at Atlantic Records

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:02:25 +0000

Today the digital media department at Atlantic Records went through a reorganization, and my role at the label has changed significantly. Up until this point I was heading up our creative group, overseeing the work of our team of talented web designers, as well as our new technology initiatives. After today I will be heading up our entire web production team – overseeing all of our designers, developers, project managers as well as our relationships with external design and development teams. My primary focus will be overseeing our web platform from both the production and innovation standpoints in addition to our Fanbase application platform. We’ve rolled out some amazing sites over the last few months and I can’t wait to see how we can push this moving forward, as well as all the exciting ways we can align our application and web platforms to support our artists.

Brightcove Unveils Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 with Atlantic Records

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:18:04 +0000

Today Brightcove announced the availability of their platform on smartphones powered by Adobe’s upcoming Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices. With some help from our video and studio team we were able to update Kidrock.com and Shinedown.com to work with the new player, as well as creating a mobile version of our studio website Studio1290 using Brightcove’s new mobile video player. While the technology is still in beta, we at Atlantic are really excited about the possibilities of this new distribution method.

Read the full press release here.

Iconfinder.net – Icon Search Engine

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:05:25 +0000

Iconfinder is a search engine for (you guessed it) icons. It’s a great source for graphic designers to get inspiration or even download icons for commercial use. A search for “music” yielded 12 pages of results, the first of which is displayed below.

The site’s functionality is fairly basic but does allow you to change the color behind the icons to see how they work on multiple backgrounds, filter by the type of license, and filter by size.

Try out Iconfinder here.

Online iPhone Mock-up Tool

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:24:08 +0000

Lukas Mathis has created a really nice iPhone mockup tool in Flash. This web based tool lets you create wireframes for iPhone apps by dragging and dropping simple components onto a phone and sharing the url. You can create final pieces that look like either illustrations or sketches. A nice tool for simple mocks when a napkin just won’t do. Check it out here.

Beautiful data visualization

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:34:29 +0000

Datavisualization.ch has compiled a really beautiful list of charts and graphs from the Datavis Tumblr. While data visualization isn’t often seen as a sexy form of design, these designers and illustrators have brought some amazing style along with usability to the genre.