MetaLab

It’s pretty rewarding to watch one of your designs evolve from a...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:56:00 -0800

It’s pretty rewarding to watch one of your designs evolve from a rough idea in the back of someone’s brain to a full-blown site or app. Like watching your kid grow up, develop a personality, and head off into the world, you can’t help but feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.

We’re lucky enough to experience that just about every day with the work we do for our clients here at MetaLab. Being proud of what we create is what keeps us going strong month after month, year after year, and it’s a big part of what makes us stand out amidst all the other noise online.

And when the project is personal, the feeling is just that much sweeter. Which is why it’s with great pride that we’d like to introduce you to the new, improved, and beautifully re-imagined Flow site! By bringing in new features like user stories and a way more in-depth tour section—not to mention a pixel-perfect redesign led by Flow’s product director Luke Seeley—we think it does a great job of communicating to people just how much Flow has to offer, both in terms of function and form.

Go check it out, have a look around, and feel free to give us your feedback anytime. We’d love to hear what you think.

- The MetaLab Team

MetaLab Welcomes Jesse Lupini & Martin Rechsteiner

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0800

We’re excited to welcome two fantastic new people to the MetaLab team: Martin Rechsteiner and Jesse Lupini.

Martin has come to us straight from the wilds of Norway (Trondheim) and will be joining the Flow Team to help Luke out with all things design. When not making things look so good you want to burst into tears and then submerge yourself in a bath of ice water, he can be found darning his trademark scarf or wandering the streets trying not to look lost. His impressions of life at MetaLab so far? “Superawesome.”

Jesse will also be focusing on Flow, but on the development side of things as our new Front-end Developer. He hasn’t travelled as far to be here (he’s from Vancouver) and he doesn’t speak with an exotic accent, but that doesn’t mean we like him any less. Jesse’s coming from an extensive background in UX design, so we’re excited to get him working on everything we’ve got planned for Flow this year. And he’s also an international salsa dancer, which should come in handy around the office.

Welcome to MetaLab!

Andrew Wilkinson on Founders Talk

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:58:00 -0800

If you’re looking for a little weekend listening, head on over to Founders Talk and check out Andrew’s recent interview with Adam Stacoviak. Andrew shares his thoughts on happiness, fatherly wisdom, Steve Jobs, building a multi-million dollar interface design company, leading a growing team to success and there’s even a teaser to something super-secret on the way…

When I emailed Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab’s founder, for...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:00 -0800

When I emailed Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab’s founder, for the first time two years ago, it was on a whim: I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was impressed with the beautiful work MetaLab was producing, but I didn’t know much about the company, and they were 3,000 miles away from where I lived in Washington, DC. I didn’t even expect a reply, but as it turned out, a reply was the first of a few surprises: not long after, I joined the company.

Looking back, I’m amazed by how much we’ve done in that short time. I’m singing our own praises, sure, but it’s true: we built a collaboration tool that has changed the way we and a lot of other people work, we created a new digital goods business, and we continued to grow our consulting business. And we did it all with a small team. More than once recently I’ve found myself wondering: what (besides the great people) makes MetaLab such a productive company?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we’re not perfect. But I think that’s actually been key to our success: we don’t spend our time trying to be the perfect company. We focus on products instead: we want to make great things that our clients (and the world) can use and enjoy. That might sound facile or even obvious, but I think it’s the reason we’re so productive. It’s why we enjoy sane work hours and autonomy, and it’s what sets us apart.

As you might imagine, we’re constantly examining and improving both what we make and how we make it. As part of that process, we’ve decided to share some of our behind-the-scenes thinking here at MetaLab in a series we’re calling “How We Work.” Over the course of the next few months, we’ll talk about topics like some of the challenges we face as a quickly growing company, the philosophies that guide what we do, and how we manage everything from coding practices to design decisions. With several people contributing from different parts of the company, there should be a pretty diverse range of perspectives and insights, so make sure to stay tuned!

Happy Holidays from MetaLab Taken by Antonio at our wonderful...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:32:44 -0800

Happy Holidays from MetaLab

Taken by Antonio at our wonderful office party last weekend. This isn’t even everyone: we’re missing Chris, Geordie, Jake, Jason, Jeff, and Oliver. We’ve posted the rest of the photos on our Facebook page.

Our friend Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, has been diagnosed...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:11:00 -0700

Our friend Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, has been diagnosed with leukemia and needs to find a bone marrow donor ASAP. He’s of South Asian descent, so finding marrow is particularly difficult (1 in 20,000 people are a match). We’ll be matching Seth Godin’s offer to donate $10,000 to charity on behalf of the successful donor, alongside Jake Lodwick and others. Let’s get swabbing, people!

superamit:

Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.

If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.

If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.

*UPDATE 1* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.

*UPDATE 2* Want to get a free test, but not in the US. Here’s a list of international donor registries that are globally searchable.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.

Going up in the office to keep us in check.

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:08:18 -0700

Going up in the office to keep us in check.

Dragging, Dropping, and Sorting with Flow

Thu, 26 May 2011 14:40:00 -0700

We’ve just released a whole series of new features for our task management app, Flow. Until today, drag and drop features within the app were quite limited— among other things, you couldn’t mass delegate, or mass re-assign deadlines. Not only can you now do both, but just about everything within the app is draggable. We’ve also allowed you to share list orders with your collaborators so that everyone on your team is clear about what the top priorities are. For a full write-up on what’s new over at Flow, check out the Flow blog.

Introducing Leica & Stockholm: Two new premium themes

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:00:00 -0700

We’re tremendously proud to release two new premium Tumblr themes, Leica and Stockholm. With these two new additions to our line-up, we’ve tried to stress the beauty of simple typography, using subtle patterns to set off a washed out colour palette. Sister themes, both Leica and Stockholm share a similar style but differ drastically in functionality: Leica is designed as a photographer’s portfolio and Stockholm is meant as a personal theme. Photographer’s will be delighted by Leica’s lightboxing and high-resolution images while more eclectic bloggers will find Stockholm’s versatility a refreshing alternative to its somewhat simplified counterpart.

We’re tremendously happy with these two, so head on over to Pixel Union to pick up one of our tumblr themes.

Introducing Pixel Union 2.0 About a year ago, we teamed up with...

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:52:00 -0700

Introducing Pixel Union 2.0

About a year ago, we teamed up with 45royale to create Pixel Union, a premium Tumblr theme marketplace showcasing designs by some of the world’s best designers. It’s been immensely successful. What began as four themes dedicated to better showcasing photographs and videos has rapidly turned into a library of nearly twenty, multipurpose themes.

It’s with a whole lot of pride that we announce today the launch of Pixel Union 2.0. We’ve redesigned the site, we’ve packed it full of new themes and, over the next two months, we’re going to be releasing one new theme each week. Check out the new site and stay tuned by following Pixel Union on Twitter.

Introducing Flow, a new way to work. You need your assistant to...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:30:08 -0700

Introducing Flow, a new way to work.

You need your assistant to book you a flight, so you email him about it. You forget to follow-up and it ends up getting lost in your inbox.

You need to post a mockup for your team, so you share it in Basecamp. You discuss it, create a to-do there, then make another on your personal list so you don’t forget.

You need to buy groceries, so you scribble out a list on a piece of paper. You stuff it into your pocket, forget about it, and you’re in the dog house.

Flow is the place where everything you need to get done comes together. Launch your new website with your team at work, coordinate your home renovation with your wife, and keep a personal grocery list, all in one place. No more jumping between apps, losing email threads, or forgetting what needs to get done.

From anywhere.

Whether you’re at the office or the airport, Flow comes with you. It’s a web app, so you can access it from any browser, as well as a powerful iPhone app. You can even delegate a task to a team member via email. Just send an email with a subject line like “@Jim Drop latest accounting figures on my desk” to tasks@getflow.com and Flow will handle the rest.

With anyone.

Flow is built for teams of 1 to 100 (and beyond). Whether you’re a one-man-band looking for a way to keep track of your freelance jobs, or running an advertising agency with 40 employees, it’ll play nice with your workflow. And it’s not just limited to your team at work, you can collaborate with friends, family, and anyone else in your life.

Try it now. We think you’re going to love it.

The Rockstar Myth

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:28:00 -0800

We have to accept that we aren’t super-human. Too many designers pride themselves on hand-crafting everything they produce. They write their own code and insist on designing every screen of a project themselves. Designers like this burn themselves out within a matter of years. When your business grows, your time invariably gets split between doing the work you love and keeping up with email, sending invoices and estimates, banking, updating the books, and all the other minutiae that goes along with running a business.

When I started MetaLab in 2006, the idea of handing anything off seemed insane. Hiring somebody terrified me. It seemed like a risky expense to take on. Since then, the company has grown to 20 people. Hiring them has been the best business decision I’ve ever made. It’s freed me up to build incredible products, let me focus on the stuff that I love, and given me the opportunity to work on projects that would have been impossible without the help of a great team. Being a one-man-band is great at first, but it’s unsustainable. Perfection is impossible. If you focus on design, your coding will slip. If you focus on coding, you’ll get behind on email. You can’t wear ten hats, and you can’t be everything to every client - you need to focus on what you love most and let others pick up the slack.

When you’re a one-man-band, your income is tied to your daily output. In concept, this is great - you reap what you sow. In reality, you get burnt out and hit speed bumps. You break up with your girlfriend. You go on vacation. Shit happens, and when it does, your financial stability invariably takes a hit. When you have a team, you share the load. When you get overwhelmed or need to refocus, you can have someone else take the reigns for a while instead of having a nervous breakdown.

When you’re a one-man-band, you have to do things you hate. You became a designer because you love designing things, not reconciling bank statements. Fortunately, there are people out there who love reconciling bank statements. Hire one, even just part-time. You get to keep doing what you love, gain back a ton of the billable time that you would have spent fudging the numbers, and help someone else out in the process.

When you’re a one-man-band, you can’t handle big clients. Nike isn’t going to sit around while you personally hand-code every screen. American Airlines isn’t going to wait a week for revisions. To land serious projects, you need to focus your energy where it’s most valuable and let others pick up what you can’t handle.

Running your own company is supposed to be about doing what you love on your own time. That’s what’s so great about being an entrepreneur: you get to decide what your day looks like, what projects you take on, and when and where you work. So why do so many of us get trapped into miserable 10-hour days? I’ve watched tons of designers burn out one after another, many of them giving up on running their own business altogether and going to work for someone else.

I’ve been there, but since I learned to delegate and got over my fear of hiring, things have changed. I usually get to the office at 2pm, take weekends off, and work 4-6 hour days. It’s not that I’m lazy - I love what I do - just that I have the freedom to focus on exactly what I want to work on at any given moment. If I feel like taking on some coding, that’s what I do. If I want to write copy, I write some. I still get to put my stamp on all of our projects, it’s just that I kick off the first couple designs, then move on and let my team handle the follow through.

Of course, handing things off is hard when you’re a perfectionist. You have to hire well, and more importantly, let people put out their own fires. When I started hiring contractors to help with my workload, I made a critical mistake: If their first mockup wasn’t great, or a client got unhappy, I’d immediately step in and put out the fire. You need to let things blow up in people’s faces. Let them make mistakes. If one of your employees misses a deadline, force them to talk to the client directly. If you’re the middle-man jumping into the fray whenever anything goes amiss, you’ll be stuck micro-managing everyone. Step back and let people clean up their own messes and they’ll make the necessary course corrections on their own. Your team will respect you for it, and you’ll save yourself tons of headaches.

Hiring has been my saving grace. The company did over a million dollars in revenue this year. We’ve built two great web-apps and launched all sorts of great side projects. We all work short days, manage our own schedules, and get to work with incredible clients. None of this would have been possible if I was a one-man-band “rock star.”

This article originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of .NET Magazine

So You're Hiring

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 16:32:00 -0800

Hiring new people has always been one of our most arduous tasks. No matter how specific we try to be in our job postings, we’re always assaulted by hundreds of applications - and by the time we’ve reviewed all of them, the resumes and portfolios have congealed together into a mush that a geriatric could eat for lunch. And then we get a hundred more.

Having been through this process quite a few times, we’ve come to realize that merely sifting through someone’s work isn’t always the clearest indicator of whether they’d be a good fit in the company. When you’re dealing with a huge number of people, it can save time and plenty of effort to look at a few key traits.

Crystal Clear Communication

Beginning with well-written emails (god help you if you apply for a job with a typo-ridden, grade-school syntax email), but manifesting itself through anyone’s job in myriad ways, hiring a good communicator is an absolute must. Good communication isn’t always just about writing with poise and practice: it’s about being someone who cares about the person on the receiving end of their messages. A person conscious of this will be a rational thinker, a thorough inquisitor, and a concise and accurate delegator. A good rule of thumb is to witness (if possible) or hear about how this person talks to strangers (even if that stranger is you). Do they make small talk? Do they even make an attempt to ‘know you’?

Professionals vs. Lifers

Am I the only person who is often repelled by someone touting that “I have 12 years of experience in graphic design”? It seems like the sentiment of a grandfather who worked at the same machine in a saw mill for 45 years. It’s an admitted stretch, but to me, all that says is “I’m making a living” - so don’t necessarily be impressed by someone with 10 or 20 years of industry experience. Look at their work above all else, and even their previous positions 1, 2, 5 or 15 years earlier. Are they moving forward? Have they taken on interesting, challenging new roles or responsibilities? Is their work showing that they’ve been perfecting their craft and keeping up with the industry?

The Self-Conscious Stress Case: Annoying Friends, Invaluable Co-Workers

If you receive a designer portfolio with 10 pieces when you asked for 5, it’s probably not worth looking at for too long. If you get a portfolio with 5 pieces but they’re asking you to just focus on a couple of them in particular, give it a second look: this likely indicates that they’re concerned with how people perceive their work, and will work tirelessly to make it perfect. If their skills aren’t ‘there’ yet, they’ll be eager to learn. If you track down a designer’s Dribbble in which they’re tearing their hair out over a valid error someone has pointed out, they’re a good bet. Someone who will work late into the night to perfect a design will be good for both your company and your peptic ulcer.

Poach from the UN

Most companies, particularly small businesses, have their share of both hotheads and tacit shut-ins. If you can, hire the diplomat in the middle - nab someone who’s patient, honest, and eager to avoid or resolve conflict. If you work with needy and frustrating customers every day, you’ll appreciate someone who doesn’t take a client’s vitriol too personally and is willing to swallow their pride for the greater good.

Hire the Functioning Member of Our Society

It should be self evident, but usually isn’t. There are tons of painfully talented people in the world, but as with any faction, talented or otherwise, a good amount of them are either ignorant to criticism, lacking in social graces, or generally a pain to be around. If someone cracks a joke in their introductory email or points out a similar interest, it probably isn’t a ploy - it’s an attempt to make a connection and start a real conversation, which is refreshing in any setting. Co-operative talent may only make your business functional, but a team of people who can’t stand one another will make it implode.

- - - - - - - - - -

The fundamental thing that we’ve learned is the importance of first impressions in the hiring process - and, as an offshoot, the significance of instincts. All of the points above can be identified to a certain extent in your first correspondence, and much of your decision will probably be made at this point, too (particularly if you’re dealing with a deluge of applications like we do). Now, of course, there are exceptions. None of this is to say that a poor communicator will do their job poorly. But without the advantage of a two-day ‘discovery’ period with each of your applicants, these superficialities are our best resource.

Job hunters, take note.

Announcing Fluid 2

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:21:00 -0700

MetaLab and Pixel Union are proud to announce the highly anticipated sequel to our immensely popular tumblr theme, Fluid. With over 250,000 installs, Fluid has rapidly became one of Tumblr’s most popular themes. Fluid 2 incorporates the same aesthetic and functionality of Fluid, but with an inexhaustible list of custom features.

Fluid 2 is going to change the way people think about Tumblr themes. We’ve designed it to be the most innovative theme offered for the Tumblr platform. We’ve created a custom video player and we’ve unified it with the photo viewer. We’ve taken the photo viewer out of Flash and put it into javascript for iPhone and iPad compatibility. We’ve even designed a custom scroll bar. The best part is that we’ve done it all to Pixel Union standards: the code is simple, debugged to excess, and clean. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a MetaLab and 45royale production and it’s all backed by our Pixel Union support team.

Fluid 2 is jam-packed with incredible features:

Fully customizable: use any background image or color, tile the background, left or center align your content or turn off certain sections of the navigation bar.
Incredible custom video player: works seamlessly with YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, and Collegehumor and in HD where available. Video player automatically “turns down the lights” by fading out the background, focusing attention on your content.
Custom photo viewer: lightbox for high-res images, custom photo set viewer that uses javascript (no more flash) and smart optional scaling for images (images under 400px never scale up).
Make the best of social media: quickly link to your Facebook and Twitter, display recent tweets and recent Tumblr likes.

And much more:

Keyboard controls for post navigation (Next: J / Previous: K / Top of the page: H).
Pages
Ask and Submit
Content attribution
Background attribution
View the archive through a frame
iPhone and iPad Compatible
Endless scrolling that will remember your position if you go to a permalink page or any link within a post.

Unlike the original Fluid, Fluid 2 is $19. A small price to pay for the amount of time our team has put into it. Find out why we think this is the most exciting theme for the tumblr platform: http://www.tumblr.com/theme/15063

Photo

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:40:27 -0700

Photo

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:38:00 -0700

Photo day at MetaLab with Mareen Fischinger

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:48:17 -0700

Photo day at MetaLab with Mareen Fischinger

British Petroleum’s well has been pouring thousands of barrels...

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:52:00 -0700

British Petroleum’s well has been pouring thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month, killing thousands of animals and obliterating any sea life in its path. To make matters worse, there’s no end in sight.

MetaLab, Campaign Monitor, Squarespace, and WooThemes have come together to match donations to the National Wildlife Federation (up to $35,000).

These animals need our help, donate now.

The MetaLab Scoot Gang

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:42:17 -0700

The MetaLab Scoot Gang

Swipely We are excited to share a project that we’ve been...

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:19:00 -0700

Swipely

We are excited to share a project that we’ve been working on for the better part of a year. Swipely is a great new way to share your purchases, recommend places and products to you friends, and save money. To get started, you can link your account with your credit card or simply email your receipts from almost any merchant. You can choose which swipes you share, and also automate certain types of purchases. For instance, if you go to the same coffee shop every day, Swipely will automatically share it with your friends.

There’s nothing more satisfying than pulling back the red curtain on a project you’ve been working on for months, and I couldn’t be happier with how things have turned out. We’ve been working closely with Angus and his team since day one, and it feels incredible to finally share it with everyone.

Swipely is currently in invite-only beta, but if you enter your email we’ll be sending out invitations in the coming weeks. Sign Up Here

Read more on The L.A. Times, GigaOm, Reuters, TechCrunch, and Mashable.