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.