Yesterday we have finished the last step in the great migration of Kolektiva away from us. Exported databases, switched everything, and closed this case. Yes, Kolektiva is no longer our client, at least not in the way it used to be.

We have started working on Kolektiva almost two years ago with Jeffrey Treichel and Martina Usmiani. They were Kolektiva, we were the full service agency supporting their project. Couple of months later, first Kolektiva version hit the web and it turned out to be a success. The Kolektiva general idea was nothing new, it was a Groupon clone, but it was the first clone in this region, and among the first ones in Europe (at the moment there is over 20 clones just in Croatia, which all followed and often unsuccessfully copied Kolektiva). We had no idea what we are building, how will the market react and how should it scale. Everything we did had to be super flexible in order to properly scale later, both server-side and design/front-side.

Kolektiva started with one daily offer in one city, and it quickly grew into more cities with more than one offer per city, from 2 employees to dozens of them. Then it went regional, outside Croatia, and even further, outside the Balkans. This growth was made possible by our flexible and customizable approach to our work. Everything is scalable, everything is upgradeable, everything is modifiable.

As Kolektiva was growing, they required outside financing to support branching to other countries. It really takes manpower to scout for the good deals in distant countries as well as good lawyers to bind everything together. Financing was found, and with it came the demands of the financiers. One crucial demand was that Kolektiva should be switched to the open-source solution for the backend. From their perspective, this is a logical requirement. First, this ensures that the project can continue even if the bubonic plague decimates everyone in Nivas - there will always be someone else that could open up the open-source backend and continue to work. Second - should anyone ever want to buy Kolektiva, the project needs to be one neat package which can be sold without ties to the outside Agency; us.

We nurtured Kolektiva to its full potential through scalable solutions, and now that it is full blown and it's specifications are well known, it can detach from custom built solution and go to adequate open-source platform. This could not be done from the start as in the start no one knew what would the project look like few months in the future. The future was uncertain, so everything had to be custom to support incoming situations, which sometimes were borderline paranormal.

As with all in life, you win some - you lose some. Kolektiva required open-source. Some of our other clients required closed proprietary system. Our backend is our closed proprietary solution which runs all of our projects. Although it's running on open source stack, our policy is that we keep our system closed; we do not give away the source code nor allow clients to write plugins or modify our code. For those, and many other reasons there will always be a need for open-source as well as custom built systems. We are here to offer custom built solutions with security and scalability when clients have no idea what the future will actually hold.

Kolektiva, through our joint efforts, bumped up a notch regional online shopping awareness as well as woken up some banks and institutions. During first year of Kolektiva's life, almost a third of the people who bought something on Kolektiva stated that this was their first online shopping experience. Kolektiva was Croatian online shopping enabler. A year ago, the amount of daily credit card transactions reached daily limits, which bank and credit card processor has never seen before. When the number of transactions reached certain limits bank just shut the gateway down for fraud protection prevention. Well, that wasn’t fraud what happened, but pure Kolektiva success. Afterwards, this repeated twice more and we hope that will repeat in future as well.

So long Kolektiva, it was a fun ride while it lasted, we had a great time working with you guys.

xoxo Nivas crew loves you! :)

Checkout more great wallpapers about design...

Few days ago Facebook unveiled their new looks. I am aware of the fact that every time Facebook changes something, people yell "AAARGG HELL NO", just to be silent 5 days later and accept those changes as good. And indeed, when version prior to this one came out, i considered it to be excellent because it solved a lot of architectural design problems, and made Facebook more, how should i say, interesting.

This version is just bad, and it is bad from two different standpoints.

First - too much faces.
I know this is FACEbook, but there are just too much faces now on the homepage. Every post has a face associated to it. In reality there is no need to put face of a person next to every action. Someone shares a link - i see a face. Someone adds friend - i see a face. This makes homepage look too chunky and too heavy.

Second - identification of MY facebook
Of all those faces i see on homepage, my face at the top is the same size as everyone else. This makes it hard for me to quickly comprehend that this is indeed MY account. My picture should be bigger, or in any way more visible.

Third - switch to Twitter-like "what's on your mind"
The switch from Status to What's on Your Mind makes Facebook too much Twitter-like. People are now compelled to spam their ideas all the freaking time. "Status", may he rest in peace, was more personal and more related to an individual. This switch will, inevitably, spawn tons of useless messages, diluting Facebook into Twitter madness.

Fourth - the ROUND CORNERS
This point touches me more than any other. Facebook was one of the last bastions of safety and refuge for web designers - any time a client asked "can my website have rounded corners", web designers could answer "well, it could, but we suggest not to, because Facebook is massively successful and it does not rely on rounded corners". I hope you folks reading this realize that from today all websites will have rounded corners. How can you battle against client's argument "well, Facebook had square corners, and now they redesigned into round"?

New web awaits us, and it is fat, rounded and chunky.

Unfortunately, it is my duty to report another Logitech G9 failure.

Before I begin, here is some sweet talk, just to put things in perspective. Now, generally I love this mouse; the ergonomics fit's my hand far better than G5 (harassed that one for years), looks like a 7of 9's breast implant - combining both sexy and super geek. The precision is noticeably better than G5, and the left mouse click just makes you want to ... well, click it. A winner on paper statistics for sure.

For those following our rantings, u should be familiar with Daemon's initial post describing the issues with trashy grip problem also known now as the „G5 skin disease affair“. I am sure many of you returned to more closely inspect the Hi-Res images, and documentation presented in the post.

As we expected, we where contacted by Logitech representatives, the mouse was replaced, and all was well (with a little help from some sticky grips).

4 months latter, the disaster strikes again!

This time the left mouse button stopped working and started irritating. Daemon says it is no surprise since he can hear me stomping on it in from the other room, but i know he is just sticking his head out for the love of Logitech. The truth is – there should be no excuse for a 6 month old Logitech G9 to cancel obedience.

I design, I click, I play Quake, I play TF2, and on average, Nivas Design crew spends 12 hours a day hard-core clicking, and yes.. I do believe the harder you press the button, the faster the bullets will fly (almost, a scientific fact, ask any gamer), but you don't buy G5 if you don't know your mice.

Fact is, my colleague is still pounding away on my old Logitech G5. The same G5 which passed a proper Guantanamo treatment in my hands for about 1.5 years, and now 6 months in his hands - and it is still working flawlessly!

What in the name of Christ and all that is holy and unholy, is wrong with this product?! Logitech G9 is seriously best mouse on the market while new. But durability of that mouse is just awful! How can they be called "Gamer grade" mice, when they cannot withstand hard core usage? Logitech PLEASE don't make me go out and buy Razor, 'coz we all know they look like a truck ran over a squid.

Daemon edit: to answer your question, yes, Nivas designers do work with Hand of Sauron

The no-bullshit, no visual clutter, maximum functionality, minimum system resource drainage Winamp skin is finally here. We do not believe in bloated pieces of software that eat up your eyes, system and screen real estate just to do simple tasks, like play music. Therefore, we made this black Winamp Classic skin. It's easy on your suffering eyes, with visible yet subtle buttons, and has that sweet neon glow. Also, being a Classic skin - it eats considerably less amount of memory, opposed to that bloated Modern junk.

To download and install just press the big button, and if you have Winamp installed, it should sort itself out one way or the other. Enjoy the Deep Black.

Some say they are two former graphic designers, and that they sound a bit like Daft punk… all we know is, they are our favourite players – bow down to Justice.

Much has been said about the notorious iPhone. Well, today it hit Balkan grounds and I must say; it’s damn fine. Clearly the first broad audience device that made me feel like the future is here… well if not the future, at least the Federation. Just holding the device made me feel like I can teleport from the crappy mall I was in, on to my superfly spaceship high in orbit. The build quality, the design and the overall futuristic feel of the device, make it a worthy acquisition. You may think it’s retarded, hell I might even agree, but it’s the mother of all hi-tech bling. And that’s a cold fact.

We are happy to announce this year’s FESTO 2007 — leading advertising festival in Croatia, awarded Bronze Bell (some say Croatia is low on silver, so second place is bronze) award in category “interactive advertising — web sites” for jasnasurina.com.
Digitel approached us with a groundbreaking idea to present a book’s release on the web as a… BOOK! A series of authors video clips where packed into slick book design, making a strong concept which was recognized by the festivals jury.
A fine example, of how an overused technique can still be put to good use with some creative thinking. First place was taken by our dear friends and identity father’s sudarpitarević, for their more than miraculous “Lavlja
i Tigrova mast” (Lion and tigers ointment).

Happy times at Nivas :)