The Wishingline site and our Notebook may be inaccessible for a short period of time this weekend beginning around 12:00 midnight EST on Friday as we move everything over to our new slice at Slicehost, something we’ve been quietly coodinating for a few weeks now.

Just about everything should already be in place, so we’re hoping that the transition will be more or less seamless and hiccup-free. The big unknown is always “how long will the DNS take to propagate” once we flip the switch…

Join the Wishingline crew (Scott, Anna and Dale) for Toronto’s second Lunch 2.0 event which will be happening on Friday, May 30th, from noon until 1:30 at the still kinda-sort new Wishingline studio in Toronto.

Come out and meet like-minded people from Toronto’s design and tech communities and help us inaugurate our new studio space, rock out on the finger drums, and check out the comings and goings of our strange neighbours across the street all while enjoying yummy pizza and fizzy or otherwise bubby beverages.

The event is totally free, but space is extremely limited and once the tickets are gone, they’re gone. Full details including location, time, tickets and anything else you might need to know are available at Eventbrite.

For the scoop on what Lunch 2.0 is all about and who’s behind it in Canada, check the official Lunch 2.0 website. Hope to see you on the 30th!

Because starting the year off by moving into a exciting new office space and bringing on one new person wasn’t enough, I decided to shake things up a bit more and have already bumped the Wishingline team from three to four.

What’s that — madness, you say?

Not in the least. Just the start of something great and now that the cat’s out of the bag, I can say a little more about these new peeps.

So Who’s Are These People?

First — Anna McLuhan. Anna, an unbelievable score for Wishingline will be instrumental in helping manage projects along with playing a key role in developing the company beyond my original vision. Aside from being amazing at what she does, Anna brings a fresh perspective, a brilliant mind and great ideas, infectious enthusiasm, and a well-rounded set of skills that will help improve internal processes and enable us to take bigger strides (not just because she’s 6ft 3 either).

I’d continue to extole her virtues but I don’t want to give her too big an ego :)

Next up — Dale Harrison, with whom I’m still finalizing a few details, but who will be coming on board in April as a design intern. Currently finishing up his final year in Durham College’s multimedia design program, Dale has the right level of technical and design skills and a great thirst for knowledge that will let him flourish especially in a small team environment where everyone can really have an impact on the larger whole.

Internships can be hit or miss, particularly depending on the size of the company and the amount of attention given to interns. For students, it’s a great chance to experience the real world; the often challenging reality of creative work. Hopefully it allows them to use skills they’ve been learning and pick up new ones which let them to evolve as designers — not scare them away. An internship is a great way to experiment, learn what you’re good at, what you like to and don’t like to do; to find the things that will make you happy in your working life.

For Wishingline, internships are an opporunity to learn more about what’s being taught to design students in Canadian post-secondary schools such as Durham College, Humber College or OCAD and hopefully have a positive impact on the career of a young, bright designer.

To both Anna and Dale — welcome aboard!

One More Thing

I’ll be in Vancouver next week for Web Directions North between Jan 29 to Feb 1. While I’m not speaking at the conference exactly, I will be introducing my friend Jon Snook who’ll be giving a short talk on Ajax frameworks along with Andre Charland and Walter Smith who will be talking about Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight respectively. Expect awful jokes and good-natured ribbing.

I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and will hopefully arrive home having made some new ones. If you’re going to be there, please do say “hello”.

2008 is already looking to be a big year for Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. Projects scheduled throughout the year are piling up at a feverish pace, plans are being made and there’s a lot of behind the scenes activity going on.

The first item being that, yesterday, I picked up the keys to a new studio space on Queen Street East at Vancouver Street. There’s a bit of minor renovation work, painting, packing and unpacking to do, but the plan is to be in the new space full-time beginning in March. Just in time to disappear briefly for SXSW in Austin, Texas.

And if that weren’t enough, earlier this week I hired a fantastic new account manager who’ll be coming on board sometime in mid-to-late March. A more official announcement with actual details will come later.

The search for designer(s) is still on and I haven’t forgotten about those who have sent in their resumés and portfolio links. The call-back list has been whittled down from the 100+ submissions I’ve received so far and I expect to begin to respond to those selected in the next few days. Thanks for your patience!

In the off-chance this wasn’t clear in yesterday’s announcement that Wishingline is hiring (which clearly it was not), you must live in Toronto and be able to work from our office in order to be considered. Unfortunately this position is not open for telecommuting.

There wasn’t an option to indicate a locality for the job on Authentic Jobs which is why it says “Anywhere” and which is why, if you read the description all the way to the end it says:

Candidates are expected to work from our office in Toronto, Canada.

I appreciate everyone who’s sent in their CV from around the world, but the position is only open for local residents. I’ll be contacting those who’ve make the first cut by the end of next week and periodically from then on if anyone else happens to pass muster. A final decision, if there is one will be made in early February.

I hinted at this earlier (ok, I came right out and said it), but it’s now official and Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. is looking for a designer to come on board in our Toronto office. Although this position is initially on a contract basis, the right person will have the opportunity to move to full-time.

Good talent is hard to find as Greg so eloquently pointed out which is why our ideal candidate is perhaps a bit younger and looking to gain real, practical experience in both design and across a number of interesting technologies. In finding the right person, my hope is to do a little bit to help pick up the slack where our educational institutions may be going wrong in instructing students, particularly in how to design for the web. And for that design to be inclusive of all people.

You can read the condensed version of the job description and perks at Authentic Jobs.

While perhaps a few weeks late in making an official announcement, as of June 18th, 2007 Wishingline Design Studios (also commonly referred to as Wishingline DS) is no longer a going concern, at least in the eyes of the Canadian government.

This doesn’t mean we’re going anywhere though — oh no!, quite the opposite. In its place is the newly formed Wishingline Design Studio, Incorporated — now with all new super-seriousness, renewed vigor and more paperwork than you can shake a stick at.

For our clients, this doesn’t mean much aside from us having to make a few minor wording changes to our general business terms and conditions, and updating our stationery, estimates and invoices to reflect the name change. Everything else is business as usual. Same design insight and problem solving. Same creative drive. Same bad jokes. More paperwork.

Taking the leap to go from a sole proprietorship to incorporating the company (still operating as a private enterprise) was a big step and one which will be bringing other changes later this year including bringing on employee no. 2, a clearer, more focused direction and tuning the design services we offer to better differentiate Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. among the highly competitive design marketplace.

Incorporating is perhaps just the preface to chapter two of our story.

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. will be representin’ (but not presenting) in Chicago at the end of August for the third An Event Apart conference of 2007 which will be featuring talks from such web luminaries as Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman, Derek Featherstone, Jeremy Keith, Lou Rosenfeld, Jim Coudal, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria and more. We’re looking forward to seeing a few old friends and hopefully making some new ones, so please do say hello if you see him milling about between sessions.

At the moment, there’s still a few tickets left, so if you’re looking to attend what will surely be a great two day conference, you had better hurry as they undoubtedly won’t last long.

Everyone loves go carts right? Well, they should.

And anyone who’s headed out for the @media conference in San Francisco, CA should take some time out on Friday night, May 25th to take part in the inaugural Avalonstar Grand Prix, a sure-fire fun event that we just happen to be sponsoring and have donated the grand prize for — namely a full license of Adobe Fireworks CS3 (for the Mac, though Adobe will let you easily switch platforms if necessary).

So, go out. Have fun. Race your asses off and make sure to take lots of pictures since we can’t be there for the event ourselves!

Everyone likes schwag. We know it. You know it. And now we’ve made it even easier to get your hands on official Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. schwag such as our world-famous coffee mugs and infamous 1” hand-crafted buttons. There’s no limit to how many mugs you can order aside from the fact that we only have a handful left and once they’re gone… that’s it. No more will be produced. Ever.

72 were made. We know at least 2 have been damaged during shipping over the last year or so, leaving 70 or less in existence, so if you want one, you’ll need to act fast. Visit the store now!

We’re planning a few new surprises to be added on a later date. Once we have some time to actually do something about those things, that is…

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. will once again be attending RailsConf, this year in Portland, Oregon with our friends, clients and colleagues from FiveRuns, who, incidentally, are one of the big sponsors of the event.

TheFiveRuns crew have a few special announcements for theRails community planned for the event and they’re going to be giving away another new MacBook Pro at the conference too. So if you wouldn’t mind walking away with an awesome new computer, be sure to stop by their booth at the conference or pre-register for the draw at their website.

We’re looking forward to seeing what’s coming next for Rails and catching up with a few friends we haven’t seen in a while. If you’ll be in attendance, be sure to say hello!

On Friday, March 9th Wishingline is headed south to Austin, Texas for the annual web, film and music geekfest known as South By Southwest. As such, the office will be closed for between the 9th and the 16th when we return.

All systems will return to normal on March 19th. While we will make every effort to respond to any inquiries promptly please take note that it’s unclear the exact level of connectivity that will be available at the Austin Convention Center throughout the day and throughout the city during the evenings.

If you’ll be attending the conference, please stop and say hello. Ask nicely and we’ll happily hand over a shiny button (may not be exactly as shown). Ask really nice and you could get yourself a fancy mug.

The Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. office will be closed during the week of January 23rd through January 28th while we’re away in Reston, Virginia at The Rails Edge where we’ll be learning more about what’s new in Rails 1.2 and other interesting, related Rails topics from Rails luminaries such as Dave Thomas, Mike Clark, Marcel Molina Jr., Chad Fowler, Justin Gehtland, Stuart Halloway and more.

If you’ll be attending the conference, please stop by the FiveRuns (primary sponsor of the conference and one of our clients) table and say hello.

‘Tis the season and Wishingline has been working with new and existing clients to help remodel their sites, applications and visual identities. Some of these have gone live, others are coming soon.

Over the last few months we’ve worked again with Toronto Life, this time to help with the redesign of some secondary screens of the venerable lifestyle and entertainment site. The changes required reworking some of the template code developed earlier this year.

We’ve also been working with Sabre Airline Solutions developing a modern design framework to help unify their various applications and provide cohesive branding across the board. During this time we also completed identity projects for programmer/designer and writer Dan Benjamin, and user-experience designer Theresa Neil whom we’ve been working with since March on the FiveRuns project and whom we’re continuing to work with on other upcoming projects.

During September and October we collaboratively redesigned and produced HTML/CSS template code for Toronto-based e-retailer Glarkware and during November, we rebuilt Epireon Capital Investment’s website with clean, valid XHTML and CSS and with a touch of Microformats thrown in for good measure.

During all this we’ve also continued working with our friends in Austin, TX, FiveRuns, iterating through new screen designs, new functionality and other general improvements for their premier hosted application. I’d say we need a vacation, but we’re just getting warmed up.

Today is an official national holiday here in Canada as we celebrate Thanksgiving a bit earlier than the US. As you might expect, the Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. office is closed. We’ll be back online tomorrow morning.

Happy turkey day to all our clients and friends in Canada.

We recently undertook a major renovation of our office space here in Toronto and are now finally finished and ready to show it off.

The major goals for the office were simple: increase the general workspace area, make better use of the space available, and incorporate some of the Wishingline visual identity via colours and furniture choices. Through this we ended up rewiring the entire office, put in new lighting, new windows, flooring and space-saving pocket doors. Nearly everything is new.

More photos coming soon.

FiveRuns was a big hit last week at LinuxWorld, as it has been everywhere it’s been shown (JBoss World, RailsConf, Interop and the MySQL UC) and has been garnering praise from all corners of the tech industry including members of the cross-platform UI team from Apple. Coming from Apple, that’s high-praise indeed.

Rob from Sugar CRM had this to say about FiveRuns — “Built on Rails and Web 2.0 buzz, their next-gen system management interface was definitely best of breed visually. Concerns over scalability of a Rails based application, especially with a Software as a Service model definitely popup immediately, but on interface alone they have a real winner product. Neatest feature: Updated links from Google for frequently occurring error messages displayed contextually with a service problem. Super rad.”

Tuesday, August 15th marked the official announcement that FiveRuns’ self-titled systems management application has been declared GA.

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. been working extensively with Austin, Tx-based FiveRuns since March of 2006 on the front-end design of the application along with the underlying XHTML/CSS structure.

On top of the application design, Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. has also been involved in creating the company’s public-facing website, a number of marketing-focused HTML e-mails, and their booth at LinuxWorld.

Although the application has been declared GA, we still have work to do to tie up some loose ends and will be travelling back down to Austin next week to work closely with the team there to deal with these minor outstanding bugs and UI tweaks.

FiveRuns is currently showing off the application this week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, California.

Since March, Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. has been working with Austin, Tx based FiveRuns and UI/interaction designer Theresa Neil to design the front-end interface for their premier hosted web application along with other components such as their public-facing website and marketing e-mails.

After countless hours of design, coding, squashing bugs and making general improvements we’re proud to announce that the FiveRuns application has been rolled out for the first round of beta testing, primarily focused on overall UI interaction and general usage.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement and feedback from users to ensure we release a solid application that stays true to the pragmatic approach while also pushing the boundaries of the systems management application market space.

A big tip of the JBM mug to the FiveRuns team and all who had a part in getting us this far!

It was 365 days ago that I officially launched Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. as a true business entity and on from just being a side-project. The last year has brought great change, new challenges and new opportunities, nearly all of which were a bit expected but very welcome!

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some great clients, such as Five Runs, HSBC Private Bank, St. Joseph Media, BeamEcho, Group Kae, Sahara Dance, Big Image, Cocoa Stuff, Masterfile, Digital Cement, IndexCore (IC), Floral Fetish Design, Michael McLuhan and more.

It’s thanks to them that I can say the last year has been a tremendous success and has left me looking towards and even better 2006!

Cheers!

These days it’s difficult to avoid “shiny stuff”. It’s everywhere — in product packaging (just take a look at recent cereal packaging design), advertising and on the web. It’s here now, but has been for a while; it’s popularity growing substantially over the last year.

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. was there very early on and was recently recognized as part of this movement by our inclusion in a chapter at Design Melt Down.

Thanks, Patrick!

Lately we’ve had the opportunity to take a break from strictly web-focused projects to work on a couple identity/logo and icon design projects. These breaks are a nice way to let the part of the brain focused on resolving Internet Explorer-related bugs to take a breather while other parts of the brain get to flex their other design and problem-solving muscles.

Both projects presented different problems to be solved based on their unique situations — one, an independent Macintosh software developer while the other, a startup technology and systems integration consultancy.

The goals and potential audiences of and for each were very different and as a result, so were the final results of our work with them. Additional information on each project and samples from the projects can be found in our Portfolio.

The office will be closed for the Christmas holiday between Friday, December 23, 2005 and January 5th, 2006. Emily, Newton, Lionel, Pippin and I will be taking some well-earned time off away from the wonderful world of web design and instead relaxing with our friends, family and hopefully catching up on some reading. Nick Hornby’s new book is calling my name along with a few other more geeky titles.

We may also take this time to play catch-up on delayed correspondence and sending RFP responses.

Thank you to all our clients and friends for a great year! Best wishes from us to you this holiday season. See you in 2006!

Marko at mcville.net interviewed me today as part of his web designer interview series. Point your news readers and browsers in that direction to see what I had to say.

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. has been working with Virginia-based newcomer web hosting provider IndexCore (IC) since August to redesign their existing public facing website and give it a fresh, cohesive and contemporary facelift. During that time we have worked with them to create what we see as an approachable and user-friendly design that will lend itself well to “Web 2.0” technologies such as Ajax.

A total of 46 different base screens were designed using an overall visual framework along with a series of custom-designed icons, buttons and an easy-to-follow, user-friendly order process which will allow the user to see exactly where they are in the order process when signing up for a hosting account.

At this time we are pleased to announce that the site design is now complete and ready to enter the code development stages, though due to previous project commitments, Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. will not be handling that aspect of the project. The final site launch is expected sometime in October.

For more information, check out our Portfolio section or visit the IndexCore (IC) website.

Thanks to Thomas Marban who found our site inspirational enough to list it on the wonderful (and even more inspiring) Screenspire site. It’s an honor to be featured amongst such good company.

There’s a major revision on the books so expect to see some changes around these parts sometime before next year’s May 1st CSS Reboot. At least that’s the plan ;)

We missed this late last month, but CSS Import, one of the new kids on the CSS showcase block included our humble site in their directory. Thanks to Stephen Saugestad and everyone else involved!

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. was a proud supporter of the second annual Southern Ontario Amazing Race event which took place over the June 3-5th weekend in Guelph, Ontario. Racers from all around the province congregated in Guelph for the weekend to make like the TV show and support a good cause, The Children’s Foundation of Guelph and Wellington.

Collectively the 20 participating teams raised over $32,000 in sponsor money which is going directly to the charity to provide local underprivileged youths with summer camp, sports and other activities. Compared to the previous years’ event, more than three times the amount collected was donated to the charity.

Over the course of the last two years we’ve donated our time and services to this great event and to the charity it supports and we will be continuing to do so in the future. This year, we were also happy to help out by aiding the video crew in capturing the event challenges, obstacles and atmosphere.

For more information on the Southern Ontario Amazing Race, visit the race website. If you would like to participate in next year’s event, applications will be available early in January of 2006.

They like us, they really, really like us! In all seriousness we were very pleased to find that we made it onto the wonderful, and highly inspirational Stylegala site today. We’ve received a small boatload of e-mails from folks all around the world (gotta love that internet) offering praise and we read and greatly appreciate them all.

The Stylegala site was one of the ones that really solidified our decision to push the envelope a little by not restricting ourselves to even a 1024 x 768 screen size and to go a little further. Although designed for 1280 width, the site still comfortably fits into a 1024 window but with a bit of the logo cut off. That said, it still fits with our own identity — just look at our business cards.

Muchas gracias to John Peele for the kind words and David Dickerson for submitting the site!

There are still a number of major outstanding issues lingering following our May 1st Reboot launch (technically May 2nd, but who’s counting…). We are actively tracking down the MovableType issues we experienced immediately following stage one of the launch plan (backing up the existing server data). Hopefully these bugs which generally affect us more than you will be resolved shortly.

On the plus side, now that we’ve had some time to sleep and recover from what was one of the longest nights we’ve had in a long time, the “…On A Long Piece Of String” blog is back up and running and should be accessible from both its old location and new home thanks to the magic of symbolic links. They really saved the day this time.

Rounding Applause

Thanks to all the cool cats (not literally, though we could tell you a story about an ice-cold cat) who wrote to us today and who stopped by to look around the site — there’s been a lot of you and that makes up very happy. Come back again soon!

Look for a big blog design update sometime in the coming weeks (hopefully sooner rather than later) along with improved site code happiness, software distractions and more.

Due to some unexpected technical problems with MovableType and our current web host, we didn’t end up making th May 1st deadline as some of you might have noticed. We’re close — it’s only May 2nd (and extremely early in the morning here we might add).

We’ve had to temporarily remove the majority of the contents of the “…On A Long Piece Of String” blog. We know you’re going to go into major withdrawal and you can rest assured that we’ll be working on it — right after we get some sleep.

You just had to know it couldn’t go that smoothly… Everything was going too well…