MetaLab

We're an interface design agency that builds simple, hyper-usable interfaces.

[metalabdesign]

Last week, we launched a new case study showcasing our work with Slack.

Slack wants to change the way that modern teams communicate by bringing everything together in one place. It’s a product that makes working life simpler and happier, and we’re proud users over here at MetaLab. 

[metalabdesign]

Peak

Now available to everyone! Sign up your team today.

[metalabdesign]

This is our creative director, Brandon. He has some choice words for the Dribbble community.

So what does it mean to be a UI designer? It means you understand the system and boundaries you’re working in, and you understand the context of a project and the user base it’s reaching. It means you understand when it’s ok to break convention. It means knowing that delighting people takes more than a pretty picture: it takes a story, it takes personality, and it takes empathy. Disregarding any or all of these things under the guise of “staying true to your style” isn’t courageous—it’s cheap. You’re not solving a problem, you’re doing production work.

[willw]

[metalabdesign]

MetaLab TMZ captured this shot of Chris Sparling (MetaLab CFO) as he "spread Christmas cheer" around Victoria.

[willw]

[metalabdesign]

Live video feed of our office view.

[metalabdesign]

MetaLab

We're excited to introduce our brand new website!

[pixelunion-staff]

We’re looking for senior or junior web developers to join our team in Victoria B.C. We’re a small team, dedicated to refining the experience of prefabricated design on the web. We’re as frustrated with the state of theming as you are, and we’re working our asses off to make it better for...

[metalabdesign]

Big opportunity at Pixel Union. 

[pixelunion-staff]

Tumblin’: Tag Savage, Writer of Sexpigeon

Sexpigeon's voice is painfully, jealousy-inducingly unique. It's something William S. Burroughs might have written if he'd been given the reigns to Vice's “Dos and Donts” and an unlimited supply of that spice from Dune. Or maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe paeans like this just play into the larger joke on writing that Tag Savage—its author—is constructing throughout the pages of Sexpigeon.

Either way, Sexpigeon is a work of actual, bullshitless genius. It’s simultaneously an ode to New York’s infinite beauty and irony, a semi-autobiographical toilet filled by an invisible, unknown narrator, and a weirdly beautiful experiment in what idiots like me might wrongly call “ekphrastic poetry.” As far as words on Tumblr go, it’s the best damn pile of ‘em around, and if you don’t love it then I’m not sure there’s any hope for you. Behold: the curtain parts, and Oz speaks.

Read More

[metalabdesign]

This interview Pixel Union did last year with the incredible Sexpigeon, so good. You should follow their blog, they are really great at finding talent on Tumblr. Always proud of our sister.

[metalabdesign]

Introducing Peak

One thing I've noticed since we moved into our office is that I'm less productive than I used to be when I worked from home. It took me a while to put my finger on why, but I finally figured it out: Shoulder taps. When I worked from home, I'd choose when to check my email or take a call. At the office, I have no choice but be interrupted when someone walks up to my desk to ask me a question or get my opinion on something. Studies confirm that it takes people up to 25 minutes to refocus after being interrupted. This means that if the average employee gets interrupted a couple times a day, they're losing hours of productive time. We know we can't eliminate the dreaded shoulder tap altogether, but lately we've been on a mission to minimize them as much as possible and I think we’re onto something. After talking to the team about how we could cut down on interruptions, it became clear that while we use tools like Flow to discuss most of our work passively online, there are some conversations that almost always seem to be had in person. With most team members, it was their manager checking in to see what they were up to. We tried getting everyone to do this via email or daily huddles, but it always broke down after a couple weeks. We also tried using time tracking, but not only did people hate having to manually enter their time (and often forgot), but a time log didn't give us a realistic picture of someone's actual output for the day. As a result, we ended up building something ourselves. Today, we're excited to announce Peak. It's pretty simple: It connects with all of the cloud services that you already use (Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Flow, Basecamp, Gmail, Harvest, Ballpark, and more) and shares what everyone is up to. There's nothing to input, upload, or type in. Your teammates don't ever need to log in ever again once it's setup, it’s totally automated. As you use Peak more, it will also start sharing neat insights based on your team's activity. For example: "Marshall has started working nights lately" "Tim is drowning in email" "John has been less active than usual" "Brandon has been working longer days lately" "Your team is most active on Monday afternoons" "Most team members work around 6 hours per day” You can also set custom alerts to ensure nothing slips through the cracks: “Notify me when anyone uploads a PSD to Dropbox” “Notify me when anyone is inactive for more than 24 hours” “Notify me when Jason is active more than 40 hours per week" “Notify me when my team is less active than usual" While we’re super excited to share Peak with the world, we’re taking things slow this time. Inspired by what 37signals is doing with Know Your Company—another app we love that solves a huge problem in the workplace—we're trying something new when it comes to sign up. Instead of opening up the flood gates and letting everyone in on day one, we're going to be hand picking companies to join the service and taking a more hands on approach to sales. We'll likely move to a self-serve model in the near future, but we really want to walk customers through the product, ensure a fit, and learn about their needs as we go. We're just getting started, and we want to take this time to learn as much as we can from our early customers. If you think your company could be a good fit, we'd love to have you on board. Sign up today at www.usepeak.com. -Andrew

[metalabdesign]

Coming in to find this in the morning is (sadly) a pretty good indication that our new site is almost ready. 

Pabst, Pizza Hut, Wing Street, if you're interested in a cross-promotion we're ready to go.

[metalabdesign]

Stage Blood Is Not Enough

Your consultancy’s salesforce cannot be comprised of people who got a crash course in why your company is great and successful: it needs to be people who understand this intuitively.

Mark Nichols just released a new post on Medium about our experiences with building a business development team. Go on and enjoy the whole thing.

[metalabdesign]

Meet Your Meta: Ali Bosworth, UI Developer & Photographer

—

Most people know you as a photographer. Were you just completely self-taught?

People have asked me about the whole self-taught thing. I feel like to me that evokes something where someone went home every night and cracked open their book about how to do something, and I didn’t do that. I definitely have a complete grasp on the technical stuff that I’ve dealt with, but I don’t feel that’s totally necessary. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who take great photos who don’t feel like they have a technical comprehension. I feel more like that’s just experience.

[...]

There is something to be said for the feedback cycle of taking pictures, and then getting some sort of a response. Or even just the ability to put them out there online, and not just them existing by themselves. So, I think that helped me. It’s not like I was in school, and then decided to pick up a camera, and then had a bunch of people being like ‘Oh, you’re good at this’ or ‘We like this’ or whatever -  I didn’t have any of that. So, perhaps in the absence of that - just having a place or places online to reach people and have people see the photos, that’s pretty influential.

It does give you the opportunity to share something in a way that’s almost completely non-judgemental, and if you can get positive reinforcement from that, that’s great.

It’s quite weird though that things can just exist online. It’s funny. When I explain, talking to my aunt, and she’s like ‘Oh, what does your company do?’. It’s kind of funny.

I’ve thought about that. If we went off the grid, what evidence would any of us have…

Yeah, an electromagnetic blast. They say that’s gonna happen, that the sun will blast out soon.

Soon?

Well, just a conspiracy theory type thing. That every electronic device will be rendered blank.

Is this part of why you shoot on film?

No - although that sounds good. But no. I mean, I think digital's great. But first off, I scan everything, so I’m not opposed to digital or avoiding digital because I scan everything with a film scanner. But my parents have all these shoeboxes of negatives that they never made any effort to maintain, they just didn’t throw them out. They’re a little faded, but they’re perfectly fine. You look at parents now, that are just taking tons of pictures of their kids.Those are gonna be gone. They don’t exist. It’s not even people have them on CDs, it’s just on a memory card, on a computer, and whatever happens to that computer...

I don’t believe the electromagnetic pulse necessarily, but if I didn’t use film, I’d have to be extremely paranoid about doing something to ensure that they’re not as fragile as that.

(Interview by Mark, Photo by William)

[metalabdesign]

Introducing the New Flow

Reengineered from the ground up, it sports a whole new look and feel, the ability to organize your projects into workspaces, and brand new iPhone and iPad apps. We've added hundreds of new features, and best of all it's insanely fast. Try a 30 day free trial today.

Oh and we're giving away a Macbook Air if you're into that kind of thing.

[metalabdesign]

How Bernie Mac Taught Me to Stop Living In Fear of Our Clients

Mark Nichols (Head of Consulting here at MetaLab) wrote on Medium about the importance of standing up to your clients and wowing them with your expert processes.

The post was inspired by a Bernie Mac set at Def Comedy Jam in '93. The outfit he's wearing there should be at the MoMA, or at least the Hard Rock Café, or something.

[metalabdesign]

Take a peep at our new demo reel, featuring some of our recent iOS work.

[metalabdesign]

I need a bigger desk to fit all my award-winning talent.

[metalabdesign]

Meet Your Meta: Shara Zimmerman, Project Manager

—

What was your first real job?

I was 13, and I lied and said I was 16 so I could work as a telemarketer doing surveys to ask people about their Toyota Tacomas. It wasn't because I had a thing for Toyota Tacomas or anything, but I got to wear one of those headsets and work in an air conditioned office in the middle of summertime, while all of my friends were working outside. And I got paid $12 or $15 per hour, which was way more than anyone else was making, and all I had to do was call people and read the script and ask people to interview them about their Toyota Tacoma. 

Jobs like that always seem to have applications in what you do now.

Oh, I can talk to anyone. I have no fear of talking to strangers, or going up to someone and asking them anything. I did do sales (after college), and I think some of that comes from there. I had to do some cold calling, and I never really had a fear of that because I did it when I was 13. 

Have you always had the gift of gab?

I've always had the lack of fear. I love asking questions. Being in an interview like this and being asked all the questions, this is so strange to me. I'm so used to sitting on the other side of it.  I think I could probably trace it back to that first job. 

And now, it's evolved. I find the psychology of it so interesting. It's not just the questions you ask, it's the way people answer them, and what that says about them, and how you can use that information to help manage them better or motivate them. 

You're from Chicago. What's it like being an American in Canada?

It's so true that Canadians are nicer. I don't mean to damn my countrymen, but it's something that I notice when people come to visit me. People just say hello when they pass you in the street - and not just once or twice, but every single day, multiple times. 

Weird. I feel like I've had the opposite experience in the US. 

And people say words weird here. 'Pro-cess'? It's 'process'. And the misplaced u's, like in 'neighbourhood' and 'colour'. All my functions and technologies are set to English-US, so I'll look at something and think, 'Why are there so many spelling errors'?

(Interview by Mark, Photo by William)