We have heard the stories of big brands spending millions and millions on their logo designs, signets and colors. Then again, there are the stories of very popular companies, well known and with global recognition, that have never spent a dime on their logos. There seems to be some kind of magic involved in logo design: Why does one logo work well and another, similar one does not? What makes it appeal to us? Why are some logos worth a ton of money? Are the others worthless? What kind of logo is adequate for me and my company? Can my clients relate to it? How can I create that perfect logo that’s been haunting me in my mind?

All those questions don't have a definite answer and they cannot all be addressed here. But what matters is this: a logo needs to work for the company or client and their audience on many levels, including the cognitive and emotional one. Recently I had the opportunity and pleasure to help out my friends, The Brothers Chapman, with a new logodesign. After some years of loose collaboration, the three brothers decided to combine their beautiful storytelling skills under a unified brand. Unfortunately we were right in the middle of the production of The Last Website, so time was scarce. Luckily, by that time, I knew the three well enough to grasp the notion of who they are and what made them move — a good logo is always the visual, economic or cultural representation of an individual or group. It therefore, somehow, needs to align with their values.

Frankly speaking, the brothers appear like a bunch of chaotic nerds, their heads in the clouds and their distinctive humor the color of a black hole. But they are not. Each is a master of multiple skills, well educated, polite, with a deep sense of communication and a hunger for individual expression. Everything they do is open and clear, yet with a dark edge of character that many storytellers and writers are lacking these days (by now you can tell that I'm a fan). The logo obviously needed to reflect this as a conflation of clarity, sophistication, and a drop of chaos.

Since the brothers are storytellers, their logo needed to tell a story as well. With that in mind, I started sketching random ideas, trying to find a solid hook I could hang my ideas on and have the logo evolve from there. It certainly helps when you have some fitting fonts as a reference for what might and might not work. I recognized an interesting pattern by sticking their initial letters together (Jared, Nathan & Joseph): JNJ. By twisting and bending those letter shapes, I got to the point where they started to resemble a storyline with a strange cuspid contortion at the center: a perfect match.

That storyline signet felt like a solid start. Time to add in some letters. I had picked some random fonts earlier, so I simply went with Fjord (which you can get here), because it felt classic and contemporary at the same time. As a side note: arranging the typography around a signet and thus forming a decent logo takes time and some practice. Eventually you get to a point where everything starts falling together.

Although this was a clean and solid logo already, something was still missing: the drop of chaos that made The Brothers Chapman so unique. Looking at the rough outline of the whole composition, the logo seemed to move into many different directions at the same time. By switching out some lower case letters with capitals, the whole appearance became streamlined while introducing a certain, chaotic rhythm that you might not recognize at first sight.

At that point I was pleased with the process and sent it off to the brothers for review — not just the final logo, but the whole step by step process displayed here. The feedback came rather fast: "Such a beautiful story behind a beautiful logo. We could see this hanging on a wooden sign outside a workshop."

What I would love you to take home from this logo design process is that there is no magic involved. Rather a little experience, a solid understanding of the values of the client, and a fitting story that supports a connection with the visuals on an emotional level.

Message log, Jan 2013

jaredcc:

I figured it out! 2 am I figured out Gunther's piece! God it is awesome

me

What?

jaredcc:

here, I wrote this:

"Ethin was a pianist. A composer really.
Undeniably his playing affected my work,
his rhythm my pace, his piano-key smashing my code..."

me

...damntastic!

***

Soon after that revelatory conversation, Jared pushed out the first draft of The Last Website, sucker-punching my brain and soul.

Evenings became blurry, caffeine-injected bouts of brainstorming online with my brothers: sketch/upload/discuss/rinse — repeat.
Ideas spawned like jackrabbits, no sooner born than murdered for their ineptitude.
A lot of bunnies died those first few days.

Then, eyes gluey with art-drenaline, palsied hands drawing something (I wasn't sure then, nor am I now), and too inundated within the throes of flow to halt or verge course, she came out.
Alibi was this powerful lynchpin that we kept coming back to, an obscure cusp that we never needed or wanted to define. Every medium was lured toward her, tentatively rising then arcing over, never touching.

Illustrating became a bizarre, frankenstein-esque conglomeration of what I learned drawing the last piece, and an exploration of stuff I never tried before.
By visualizing the text I was navigating the story's emotional arcs: mine, my brothers', the chaps' at Opoloo, and the audience's.
Imagery is such a vital force, and yet in storytelling, it somehow tells the least. Three great movements, trysting in violent harmony to move pen and paint.
It shows one viewpoint, generally slanted; one window into a story that, in showing, hides.

The Discussion

Users and even developers seem to be still uneasy with design guidelines when it comes to building mobile software, especially with the Android platform. The design guidelines published by Google give an amazing perspective into the thought process behind the system user experience design. However, there’s definitely some confusion around what to do with these guidelines.

Design guidelines: The Holy Grail for developers?

I hear this one frequently. It’s at the heart of many design arguments among different companies’ teams and even members of the community. Users and developers are sticking to the term “Holo” in a very passionate way. I would even argue that the term has taken on more than it actually is.

A personal example: Opoloo has an application on the Play Store called “Timer”: a very simple countdown timer that closely follows Holo design. We released a dark theme for the application after having received a significant amount of requests from our users. In this dark theme we decided we would go with an orange color instead of the blue we used in our light theme. The amount of emails we received asking for a dark theme that contains the Holo Blue were overwhelming. The main reason for them requesting the blue color (as explicitly stated in the requests) was that they thought only blue could really be considered Holo. This was my first experience with the very passionate Holo fan. And yes: there’s a lot of them.

I don’t agree with the argument that our decision to use orange instead of blue was against the design guidelines. Here’s an excerpt from the design guidelines — it is the first paragraph on the ‘Color’ page.

“Use color primarily for emphasis. Choose colors that fit with your brand and provide good contrast between visual components. Note that red and green may be indistinguishable to color blind users.”

My idea during the building process was that, in the dark theme, the orange provided a good contrast against the darker background. The feedback we received was not what I expected. Users were shocked we could make such a mistake.

It was not a mistake. The use of color is extremely important in UI design and this is not dictated by Google. There are no constraints for colors to be used in applications. Especially with a strong branding, color is absolutely something to get right.

May I ignore the guidelines if they don’t fit my purpose?

This is a very tricky question. After all, they are design guidelines, not strict rules. On the other hand, straying too far from the design guidelines could alienate your users on the platform they use everyday. This could have a very negative impact on your product, especially in a competitive mobile environment. Among the most important areas of the design guidelines that should only be ignored at your own peril are navigation, selections, notifications and app structure. Interestingly enough, most of these do not necessarily dictate UI design. The most important concepts center around user experience. You want your app to behave like it belongs on the platform.

How you design the different elements to fit your brand is where you can help set your app apart from others. Just because every app has an action bar does not mean every app looks the same. There’s a lot of freedom within the structures provided, so spending time on polishing content presentation is sure to make your app unique. One particular design pattern seen more recently in applications is the fly-out menu (the one that slides out from the left or right of the screen). Personally, I have never felt this works in the context of all the other navigation structures on Android. Even certain teams inside Google have tried to implement this pattern. It feels very foreign to me, mostly because each implementation does something different and users are left guessing. Before you dive into using this method, spend some time thinking to see if you can work navigation differently. Challenging, yes, but it could be very rewarding.

The guidelines as a useful resource

The entire “Getting Started” section focuses on creative vision, design principles, and the UI overview. None of these sections tell you what colors to use, how tall to make your content items, or what type of navigation controls to use. They simply provide you with an understanding of Android as a platform. In further sections they give recommendations on sizing items, typography and iconography, especially in places where your application will display items in the context of the System UI. It won’t look very appealing if you decide to have a red notification icon when the rest of the icons on the user’s phone show in white. In your application you have the freedom to choose even the color of the actionbar icons you use. Fitting the style in the guidelines is the way to go, but nothing says they have to be white or gray. This is great for your users because the feel of the application is like the others on their phone and you are able to use branding and content to make it different. The idea is to be consistent with what you do. Changing how users access settings, contextual menus and so on, could impact the their ability to find those features in your app. The most important take-away from the design guidelines is not how to design your app, it is how to design the user experience.

An Exercise

The best way to work with the design guidelines is to spend time with them. Take something like a book journal application. An application where users can keep track of the books they have read. Think of this application in terms of Android navigation and get creative with the content side of the application. Feel free to mock screens up and share them on the Google+ link for this post. I think you’ll be surprised with the different designs and styles people come up with, even when thinking in terms of the same design guidelines.

Now that an extremely cold & dark winter is finally over, nature is about to shine in its most beautiful shape. After a day of work I took my camera and walked through town to capture some nice images, representing spring. Enclosed are four selected wallpapers. Feel free to download and share!

In the spring of joy,
when even the mud chuckles,
my soul runs rabid,
snaps at its own bleeding heels,
and barks: “What is happiness?”
—Philip Appleman

ACT I: THE IDIOT

“What idiot updates a website while the world is ending?" I'm sitting at a wooden table across from brother Jo. Jo, recognizing a characteristic Chapman rant, just listens. "Of all the dumb things to do!”

We're holed up in a little coffee shop, coffee cups are drained and so am I. It's my last cold January day in Port Townsend, Washington. I'd spent two weeks living on a bike, out of a bag, bashing my brain with this question.

Weeks earlier, Günther Beyer of Opoloo had sent me an innocent looking short story asking for input. I read it quickly, loved its potential and told Günther I'd work on some feedback during my trip.

Weeks later I had nothing. Jo had been patiently waiting for me to get him a few decent bits of writing to start illustrating, but all the coffee, tea, chai-tea, chai-tea latte, yes-please-I-would-like-three-shots-in-that-dirty-chai got me nothing more than a few piss-poor paragraphs of piss-poor ideas, and a piss-poor attitude to suit. And whole lot of aromatic, organic, locally roasted, fair-trade piss.

Worse, I had threads of my life competing for attention: I wasn't in Port Townsend on vacation. I was here to find work and a home for my little family and two weeks later I had no answers for anyone.

Worse still, I had become obsessed with the aforementioned question at the expense of the others.

"I can't do it. I can't fuckin' do it."

(A different essay is required to confess the quantity and variety of "f"-words that went into the making of The Last Website.)

I closed my laptop and my piss-poor paragraphs with it. "Don't worry about trying to draw anything for this, I'll let Günther know I can't get anywhere."

I spend the rest of the morning watching the drizzle in Port Townsend Bay.

To say the least: I was pissed.

ACT II: THE SUSPENSION OF BELIEF

To be clear, I wasn't frustrated with the question: Who would update the final website amidst the collapse of humanity and life-as-we-know-it? I was frustrated I couldn't find a good enough answer.

To understand exactly what was frustrating, it helps to know a particular writing technique: The Suspension of Disbelief (originally Coleridge’s concept).

You're familiar with the feeling, if not the name. It's the moment when consuming fiction (or propaganda) that you stop questioning the plausibility of the setting or circumstances of the story and just enjoy the story. In effect your belief is suspended like a bridge between actual and imagined.

Any writer worth salt has a few techniques to help this process: world building, sub-plots, variety of characters and interactions, motivations, rich backstory, and on…

But early on I had set myself a strong constraint: The reading time of the story couldn't be longer than 10 or 15 minutes. Günther's original had power in the speed of delivery and that would get lost in a longer piece.

This meant I couldn't introduce the standard white noise that helps fill the gaps left by pure narrative. I had no leisure of dawdling in a drawing room, sipping tea and describing the intricacy of the drapes down to its dust motes; no meandering down memory lane, no stroll in slow-poke park. I had to cut to the center of the story… yet make it believable.

Every day I'd make my way to the coffee shop and attack my keyboard, every approach felt contrived or cliché.

The question became a specter of unfinished business lurking just below the surface of the dark coffee and mudpuddled bike paths of PT Washington. My mood souring; seriously, what idiot updates a website…?

I left the coffee shop a last time. The tail end of rainstorm — boarding a bus away from Port Townsend and toward the ferry to Seattle. From there it would be a quick flight back to Utah the next day.

Getting on the bus I thought I had left the question to lurk unanswered in Port Townsend.

ACT III: BUS-BUS, FERRY, BUS-BUS, VALVE, BUS and AN OLD STORY

Boarding the bus I was faced with immediate concerns: finding my way around Seattle, a place to stay, and a way to the airport early the next morning.

Turns out I had a cousin in Seattle. One I hadn't seen in around fifteen years, but we had recently reconnected with on a social network. Yes, you can stay at my place in upper Seattle.

It took the entire day on two busses + a ferry + two more buses to make it to upper Seattle with me running from one to the next. This, in addition to the walking/biking and mental/emotional drain, proved exhausting.

In the moments of rest during the rush of transportation I had much to reflect on. One layer of me was invigorated and exhausted from an amazing trip; two weeks of raw living is paradigm-shifting.

Another layer of me was homesick for my best friend and companion and our four-month old son who grew so much in those fourteen days.

Yet, another layer of me dreaded delivering unhappy news to hopeful people. I had to tell my companion I had no idea if our dreams of a simpler, healthier life in PT were possible; I had to tell Günther he'd posed a challenge beyond the storytelling abilities of The Brothers Chapman. As people that live and die by our word, this feels nothing short of failure.

All this made for a bittersweet parallax of emotions.

I meet my cousin. Odd sidenote: turns out she works at Valve. Turns out I got an impromptu tour of Valve, complete with a glimpse of Gabe's office plaque. We take a bus to her home and for the first time I hear her family's side of an old story. A story that happened around fifteen years ago.

ACT IV: SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE

3 a.m. – I'm almost asleep.

I was placed on the floor of my cousin's son's room, he has glowing toys everywhere and I am in that funky spelunky space between awake, asleep and dead.

And it happens.
I realize I'd been asking the wrong question.
It wasn't What or Who, it was Why.

Why would someone place such a high importance on updating a website in the midst of human collapse?

And I knew my answer.

Write it down.

No.
No. No. No.
Not now dammit not now.
I just want to sleep. Need sleep.

It's now or never.

One truth I've learned in years of writing hundreds-of-thousands of words, one lesson I can share with writers: it doesn't matter when you find your answer, you write it down in that moment or risk losing it forever.

Oh, I just want to sleep goddamit.

Dots connect; my experience-addled, sleep-deprived brain draws imaginary lines connecting all the glowy things into a constellation.

Fuck. I roll over, flip open my laptop, and the story of The Last Website spills out of me in it's entirety. I can't tell you how. I don't know how. I shouldn't have been able to handle a keyboard, let alone a sequence of thought.

I can only say I was there, I was ready.

With less than a couple hours of sleep I board my plane.

And the solution? The simple, elegant solution I had been chasing through all of Port Townsend finally arriving when I had truly given up. What do I call it? What do I call her?

Alibi.

ACT V: EPILOGUE

Five months later

It's mid-May.

The Last Website launched a few weeks ago to much positive review. We couldn't ask for more supportive and excited fans.

The journey from my initial draft to the magical portrayal of LastWebsite.io is it's own story, filled with epic rants, bouts and bursts of inspiration between The Brothers Chapman and Opoloo. One I won't be telling here.

The bulk of writing is fundamentally unchanged from my sleepless Seattle spillage. Though it has trappings of major themes like love, life, humanism, death and meaning I wouldn't say it's a story about any of these themes. It's an exploration of why we do what we do.

The end result is a story of resolve and reflection told at a restless pace, making for a beautiful parallax.

And what about that old story of my cousin’s family?

It's a small, but significant telling of my uncle and his children being ostracized from friends and family for being open about his homosexuality. The blind embrace of dogma led to an unnecessary division of over fifteen years; my parents were paranoid. As kids, I and my siblings didn’t understand why we couldn’t go see our cousins and close friends. As for influencing in my writing, read into that what you will.

The rain in May is splashing in Port Townsend Bay. I put final lines to this essay, watching through the same coffee shop panes. Here to stay.

I’ve many new chapters beginning in life. If you’ve yet to read The Last Website, it’s worth a read, and now you know why.

I've been reading The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel. Apart from the fact that this book is brimming with knowledge and wisdom and stylistic smoothness, one passage struck me in regard to all the commotion going on in the discourse of digital publishing and modern storytelling.

The following is a lengthy quote, but it's worth considering:

In our time, bereft of epic dreams — which we've replaced with dreams of pillage — the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, the Web is volatile […]. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present — which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell. Alexandria and its scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new reader engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
—Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night, p. 28.

Which takes us to the rebirth of the story. We should not try to reinvent the book. What it does and can do has been proven through centuries. It does what it's supposed to do — sometimes crappily (like some cheap editions with two slabs of paper as a cover, disintegrating pages after the first reading, ugly typography and smeary ink), sometimes in an incredibly beautiful way that electronic/digital media cannot hope to equal (the smell and texture of the page, the physically different volume and weight in your bag, the type and pictures in graspable three-dimensional presence).

There are other ways to tell a story, though. And really: those unexplored, uncharted paths are the mare incognitum that keeps luring us into doing what we started with The Last Website. Slowly exploring these paths is indeed giving birth to the story over and over again. It is not so much reinventing it (we wouldn't be so insolent or presumptuous to believe that). It's more like the Darwinian origin of the species: with the structure of The Last Website we represent a tiny branch of the story tree. But, as we believe, a particularly beautiful branch — flexible, transformable, with leaves and buds, with the breeze drawing across it, making a marvelous sound to the accustomed ear.

What should furthermore not be neglected: this is still reading. True, it is not exclusively text, but rather letters, colors, and sinus waves in interaction. The experience we draw from this, however, still remains a reading experience. With all the problems — conceptual, intellectual, and technical — there still remains the most hopeful prospect of Manguel's proclamation: constant renewal throughout (dis)solution.

This is the "sequel" to "That's pretty cool, but… what is it?", to be found on this blog.

In the process of working on The Last Website, we created, tuned, and polished graphics until our eyes started bleeding and we thought: "What the hell – let's make some wallpapers."
So this is to thank everyone who has participated in creating, but also in experiencing this project, especially those who sent on their valuable feedback.
Download them, enjoy them, share them at your own peril and pleasure.

What is The Last Website?

About four-thousand individuals from all over the world have experienced our latest project – The Last Website – in the two weeks that it's been online. We got some nice feedback and it's been approved as an official Chrome Experiment.
So all is well, one should believe. But as it is the case with most new things, people seem to either hate it or love it. Whatever your feelings about it, the one issue people seem to have trouble with is the question: What is this thing?
So here is an attempt to define this, in all regards, new thing. Let's start by stating what it is NOT.
It's not a book. Quite physically it isn't.
It's not even an ebook. It goes far beyond of what is considered an ebook these days. (Hopefully, our conception of ebooks is about to change soon as well.)
It's neither a website in the common sense, nor is it an article of any sort.
It certainly is not a video, although it is very visual and it has a soundtrack.
It's also not a web application as commonly referred to, although we're getting closer here. But it's not a program either.
Then what the hell is it? It exceeds the limitations of these labels. We'll have to find a new name for it, and we're all in for suggestions.

Let's make this perfectly clear: I'm not talking about the specific text, nor the images, or the music. I'm talking about structure.
In this regard, it most certainly is literature, a "thing made from letters", something you read. Only that it exceeds that latter part also: the text, the visual artwork, and the sound in constant interaction. None of its parts is more important than another. They supplement each other, the sum of them becoming more than its parts combined. It is a new and hitherto unexplored form of literature. This will sound pretentious, but I will go as far as saying that it is a small step into the future of literature. It is a challenge to our synapses, to our innate sensitivity, to emotion.

The structure of it – and I am still speaking regardless of the specific story told in The Last Website – is the nucleus of the story; not a sequence of events in time, but rather the story in itself. A narrative that appeals to us by way of us being able to connect to it, of being able to relate to it on an emotional level. Something that is told, aesthetically. It is the frame and the core of the story at the same time. It is constant interaction without the strict parameters that, for example, a video provides. Its elements that are structured rather in the fashion of a game. Text, music, and graphics interact in the smallest space, but you may enjoy every one of them separately for as long as you like, or experience them as a conflation, at interplay. This, for me, is a representation of the elementary-ness of a story.

You may carry this as far as you like. I (as a person who has spent the greater part of his life with literature and the way it works) believe it is the heart of the story stripped bare and infused with mescaline by a radioactive robot from another dimension (which, as I just noticed, doesn't speak much for my literary education, I guess).

Anyway, to attempt an answer to the initial question: It has become a system. The system of the modern story. It is a system that is already inherent in most of us: when we read, we tend to visualize and everything that surrounds us (our environment at that time, as well as emotions and memories) will be part of the story we read. Now, we will able to have this but more: by way of the pictures and the music specifically designed to connect with the text, a new way of immersiveness is born.

The Last Website is, among other things, an immersive story system.

There's quite a fair chance, that you read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's a great story over three books, with very emotional writing that you can relate to easily. If you haven't already, I can deeply recommend it to anybody who's into science fiction, dystopias, or strong storytelling in general.

I remember being home, quite late at night, reading the third book. I couldn't put it down. The protagonists were just trying to escape through a tunnel system, chased by monsters and explosions, and climax was slowly but surely approaching. The whole setting and especially this scene was very immersive; I was excited and felt chased and stressed myself, all at the same time.

But suddenly I stopped reading. Something seemed to be missing. Music!

I was sitting there with a modern, affordable tablet PC with long battery life, full colored display and strong audio capabilities, and all I was doing was literally turning white pages with black text – on a touchscreen.

Did we miss something here? Despite all the advancements in technology, we're still reading books like we have done for hundreds of years. Even worse. Books tend to have colorful covers, illustrations, sometimes little sketches or vignettes with every chapter, and detailed twirls with on letters here and there. Now everything the Amazons, Apples and Googles of today are shipping with their digital stores are boring white pages with black letters.

I can understand the argument that the nature of books is meant to create fantastic, beautiful paintings in your head. But there's no arguing that music is the strongest carrier or emotions, while images, illustrations and photos can be grasped most easily and quickly by the human mind.

Sure, there are many forms of art and entertainment bringing together different types of content. There are videos or movies. There are childrens’ books disguised as apps or vice versa. There are comics, physical or digitally animated. And there are video games, melting together the best of all worlds. But all of those have one thing in common – they are very cumbersome to create and even harder to publish.

Now think about this: Our advancements in technology have made it almost stupidly easy to create two kinds of media – text and images. And for a couple of years, it has gotten so much easier to create decent music without huge budgets and crazy amounts of work.

Today almost everybody can tell stories, capture images and create music. Almost everybody is able to create amazing, multimedia content and distribute it over the web quite easily, let alone saving it for all times on a hard drive somewhere.

So far the content.
Now tell me – why are we still turning white pages with black text on a touch screen?

Remember the short story we published just a week ago – The Last Website? I wrote this over Christmas without any further intention. Totally unexpected, this short story turned into a seed.

Jared Chapman, a friend in Salt Lake City, read the story shortly after I wrote it. He came back to me, letting me know that this simple piece really inspired him and if I would be ok with him diving a little bit deeper into it. Of course I was.

What happened then was pure magic. The kind of magic, that just happens when people across the world collaborate and build something together, far greater then the work of an individual: As it turned out, Jared had two brothers. One was a visual artist, the other a musician. Together, they used the initial short story as a baseline and built something much greater. At the end of January I got an email from them about a quick demo as they called it. The demo consisted of 7 well-written chapters, outlining a dark, science-fiction story about an artificial intelligence called "Alibi". It came with beautiful artwork and 7 amazing audio tracks by his brothers, Jo and Nathan.

I certainly didn't expect that. While everything was very rough around the edges, this new take on my initial story was so much stronger, so much more emotional. The additional artwork and music took everything to a completely new level and everybody who experienced it was extremely moved after reading, seeing and listening to it. I realized: this was something special.

Now dealing with today's state of media and publishing for quite some time, I felt that we had to make something more from this. This was exactly the kind of humanly handmade storytelling with a modern, digital combination of different media that I had been looking for.

Suddenly, it was not just an idea anymore. It had become an ideology: the pursuit of an idea with a defined aim. That aim was to build the framework for the elements provided by the brothers, to create an experience of an immersive story that was not based on old metaphors as the turning of virtual pages. It was to bring together artists as well, to collaborate in projects. It was to provide a structure for modern storytelling. And since it is not exclusively at home that we want to experience a story, most of all not on an inconvenient, large computer screen, part of the idea was to make it work for mobile devices. The Last Website is our first humble attempt to revolutionize the way stories are told.

The rest is history, as they say. With the content available, we “only” had to build the framework and publish the experience. How that happened, the thoughts that went into it, the problems we encountered, and what we learned is another story, soon to be told. Stay tuned.

My worn ioboard recognizes the path of this pattern. Faceless keys, pads and dials dip, bend and arc under the press, stroke and stab of their fondest friends: my fingers.

When you're working in the field of cutting edge technology, big or small, you probably will have many moments of pride. For example when you just created something special. Some of those moments are bigger then others. Today is one of those bigger moments of pride for me.

In early February Opoloo teamed up with the mighty Brothers Chapman. We set out to create a unique storytelling experience, melting together text, illustrations and music in the most immersive experience possible. The catch was - this should run nicely in a mobile browser.

To make this short: Grab yourself a good coffee, your favorite mobile device (Nexus 4, Nexus 10 or iPhone 5 work great) and some headphones and find a calm place to sit down. Now head over to http://lastwebsite.io/ and enjoy about 15 minutes of modern literature.

Don't forget to come back and let us know what you think of the story and share it, if you like it. Also expect plenty of making-ofs in the upcoming days and weeks.