This week began on a positive note as FTS was happy to assist Infante Sano, a Waltham-based non-profit client focused on improving the health and wellbeing of women and children in under-resourced communities, in re-branding their site to connect to a larger audience. Infante Sano is now World Connect offering two giving channels to help vulnerable women and children – Mothers to Mothers, which supports changemakers in health, education and income generation projects, and Kids to Kids, which funds innovative youth arts, sports, education and environmental projects.

Fresh Tilled Soil team member David Romero was primarily responsible for migrating the existing Donation and Account programming logic from the existing site to World Connect, ensuring full continuity during the transfer. He also worked closely with Jacquelyn Caglia, Director of Development and Communications, to craft a custom content management system powering both World Connect and Kids to Kids featuring an intuitive Project system which powers the unique initiatives that Kids to Kids lists on their Projects section.

We wish World Connect continued success as they increase their reach eastward anticipating new programs in Africa in the coming months.

I was on the phone to a client yesterday talking about the way the mobile application development industry is changing. Traditionally the applications are cobbled together in a horizontal way by “gluing” the various code stakes together with custom middle ware. This approach avoids having to build the entire vertical stack but creates downstream issues when code from different sources conflicts with each other. Some cutting edge designers and developers are taking a vertical development approach, which essentially builds the entire stack from top to bottom avoiding any middleware and potential problems. Read more

Today we launched The Morality of Profit website. Alex, our creative head, did an amazing job with this clean crisp layout. The book by the same name will be launched with a cover reflecting Alex’s design.

The Morality of Profit is a global project sponsored by The S.E.VEN Fund inviting discourse on the morality of profit. The competition seeks pieces that explore a range of positions through the lens of diverse cultural, religious, philosophical, and academic traditions.

See full gallery of examples here:

A new FTS client, RetireLife, has been working with our UI team to launch a website for their start-up company.  FTS’ user interface web designers are now in the final stages of creating a comprehensive website, designed to fully support Retire Life’s business model to get the company up and running.  The young entrepreneurs behind RetireLife are a group of Babson students whose entrepreneurial objective grew out of their own personal experiences with friends and family members; they recognized the struggle their parents’ generation was experiencing as their grandparents aged.  There were very few resources available to their parents, (the Baby-Boomer Generation,) who have become the caretakers of their aging parents.  These Babson students realized that they, Generation Y, would inherit this same problem fifteen to thirty years from now, when their parents, (from the even bigger Baby Boomer Generation,) grow older and need the same type of care.  RetireLife.com helps assuage the tension and anxiety surrounding the very difficult, sensitive issue of caring for our aging loved ones. Read more

A few weeks ago our brilliant photographer friend Brian Tetrault spent some time just shooting some candid pictures at the Fresh Tilled Soil offices. We thought you might like to see where we spend our days.

As a business that sees hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups every year we have started to develop that kind of sixth sense for what works and what doesn’t. Apart from all the prospect and client startups we see every year we have also had several of our own businesses. We currently have a significant stake in five early-stage businesses and are negotiating a sixth. A few weeks ago we discussed how our little web design business has become the ideal startup incubator and listed some of the success factors we’ve experienced. If we turn the spotlight on the people that run those successful businesses for us we see some patterns too.

Here are the key success factors that we look for in both our client’s and our own investments: Read more

This video was played at TED and followed by a standing ovation. So beautifully simple it doesn’t need any description.

Lukas Mathis has written a short but insightful piece on the idea that simple designs for icons and action related UI makes more sense. His conclusions also reminded me of some of the studies done on faces and body shape as it relates to attractiveness. The retention of juvenile characteristics or Neoteny suggests that the retaining the basic look or shape of the child or immature version has the outcome of making it more attractive to our visual brains.

A great example of this is the evolution of the Mickey Mouse character. In 1978, Stephen Jay Gould theorized that Walt Disney and his animators gradually discovered what it took evolutionary psychologists decades to prove: that baby-like features and proportions elicit an “automatic surge of disarming tenderness” in adults.

Simple UI or icons offer more inferred information as opposed to prescriptive. The simpler the icons the more likely we are to throw them into a general category instead of wondering which action or quality to ascribe to them. As Lukas Mathis points out, “People are confused by symbols if they have too many or too few details. They will recognize UI elements which are somewhere in the middle.”