April 10, 2008
The New Jive Site
Jive Software’s new homepage
[Editors note: While this is portfolio-related in nature, I thought this project deserves a blog post all of it’s own.]
For the entire month of March, as well as a little bit of February and April i’ve been helping the folks at Jive with their new website. This was the single largest project i’ve ever been a part of, and it’s brought a lot of challenges my way, but in the end it’s turned out quite well.
A screenshot layout I worked on for Jive’s products page
Don’t get me wrong here, I cannot take credit for even half of the work on the Jive site. It’s been a great collaboration between in-house designers Mike Sigler, and Chris Kalani, contract designer David Carroll, and I.
We went through about 6 different global/header styles while I was working on the project, and with each iteration we made it even better.
Clearspace really shines with the help of these screenshot graphics
External communities powered by Clearspace Community displayed in a screenshot layout
The areas I worked on the most were things like icons, promotional graphics (such as the examples above), icon-ified screenshots of the product, inline screenshots, and all sorts of other things.
Iconified screenshots of Clearspace interface help present the features
Inline screenshots help point out specific features mentioned in the paragraphs above.
Some of the challenges we faced were:
- Navigation: Finding the best way to organize a website with a lot of content
- Creating an interesting style so the pages without fancy content (About, Support, etc) would look almost as good as those with fancy content (products pages, etc…).
- Making screenshots readable (i’ll be writing a separate post for this soon) and not jaggy-edged
- Getting the whole website done in a little over a month
- Balancing the feel of corporate vs. human/fun
- Dealing with moving workspaces several times during the process of creating the site
- Merging each designer’s style into one unified style
Several icons I designed for the new Jive site
It’s been a unique chance to dive into the heart of a quickly expanding company and i’ve enjoyed my time contracting with them so far. I will be continuing to contract with them on a much smaller scale for a little while longer.
Nice write up. Again thanks for all your hard work. I was a bit of a slave driver at times but I hope it was worth it. Looking forward to your post on the angled screenshot thing. That’s one thing I’m particularly proud of us figuring out.
Also, lovely icons as always. :)
Great writeup, and amazing work on the site. I’m especially interested to read your post about ”Making screenshots readable”!
great work, the new site is amazing!
I’ve always enjoyed your portfolio, Josh. Great work on the Jive site! I can imagine it being quite rewarding to have one of your largest projects go live :)
Definitely looking forward to reading more about making legible screenshots—great job on the site all around!
Nice post. Its interesting to hear about the challenged faced with a large site like that, especially because I’m not a developer. Now I see more of why you’ve been so busy lately!
I’m looking forward to photographing all the execs and everyone else there at Jive.
Dude nice. I haven’t made any posts about the site because I am embarrassed of the homepage / homepage video, haha. But it was fun working with you and I am glad everything turned out nice. I feel like I’m signing a yearbook.
I just went through all *ALL* of Jive’s website and it looks fantastic. The software they’ve put together looks really impressive too, I’m going to have to give it a deeper look.
Great icons, too!