Sidebar Creative: The Next Steps
It’s been over a year now since Sidebar Creative was announced. During that year the four of us have accomplished plenty, and dreamed far more. So we thought it was high-time to portray that matured concept with a redesign and enhancement of our site.
An Updated Design
The first thing you’ll notice is a new, updated design. Keeping a very similar feel to the previous version, we made a few graphical refinements sprinkled with better usability and better use of imagery. We also added a lot of new content. We’ve taken the opportunity to showcase some of our publications, and our consulting and workshop opportunities (I’ll touch more on this later) in addition to our portfolio.
Building Applications
Over the year the four of us have collaborated on a number of applications, some which haven’t launched yet, but many that have. MyMileMarker was one of the first that saw the light of day, and has proven to be a useful tool for nearly 10,000 users. Next up was Snitter, a Twitter client written by Jonathan Snook using Adobe AIR. Sidebar contributed some theme goodness, too. Snook and Dan Rubin followed that up with Overheard.it, an application that pulls in select tweets from Twitter for your amusement. And Bryan Veloso has just released Django Pluggables, a simple, helpful resource for all you Django folks out there.
It’s been really fun to build these sites together. Even if not all of us ‘touch’ a particular product, we’ve all been in contact, sharing ideas, concerns, and code to help make them what they are. I’ve been really excited and impressed with how well this remote collaboration has worked, and we’re only just now getting into the groove.
To help promote these sites, we’re putting a small network bar across the top. As we add more sites, you’ll see them added there, so you can easily get from one network site to another.
Workshops and Consulting
The four of us have been wanting to expand beyond project and application work for some time. In the past year we’ve all had the opportunity to speak, teach, and share our knowledge, and we think this is a big future of Sidebar Creative. So in addition to offering corporate training and education, we’re starting Sidebar Workshops, a one-day two-session workshop for designers and developers.
We plan to keep things small and intimate, limiting registration sizes and traveling to locations that aren’t normally hit by the larger conferences and workshops. So no flights, no hotel, just come spend the day with us, and learn some tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way. We’re looking for ideas on where to start, so if you’d be interested in attending, be sure to let us know your closest major city so we can add it to the list. We’re really excited about this, and can’t wait to get them started, hopefully this fall.
Check It Out
So go visit the site and poke around a little. We hope it helps show a little more of ourselves and our goals for the collective. Here’s to another great year!