In developing the design of our application, we looked closely at other education sites, but more eagerly at successful RIAs like YOUTUBE and FACEBOOK. We felt that COMARKER’s generic appeal would work best if it broke away from currently available education sites and focused more in the zone of SOCIAL NETWORKING.

To capture our design perspective you need to take a look at our application, on which we have spent two years already. Your treatment of the commercial pages should prepare users to encounter the COMARKER application; thus certain design elements should be similar, if not exactly the same. In particular, color-palate choices should harmonize with our core metaphor.

When we describe the application as stripped down, we mean that we have avoided textures and stuck to basic tones. Most of our design critiques of the application resulted in REMOVING elements that were not ‘necessary’ and simplifying processes to make actual work smoother and easier. We aimed for the site to be visually attractive but simple, which of course is the most difficult of all tasks. Your approach to the commercial pages should be similarly ‘practical’ and minimal, and at the same time harmonious with the application.

COMARKER appeals to teachers. Now, I suspect that when most people think of teachers they think of aging (failed) intellectuals upholding dusty traditions, forcing children through dry textbooks toward state-imposed examinations. But COMARKER appeals to teachers, and teachers don’t see themselves as others see them. Instead, try to think of teachers the way they think of themselves.

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I suppose it is possible to develop a web application in a vacuum, but why would anyone want to. The web at present is filled with inspired creations by big brains all over the world. Some of the things that inspire us are:

The Freitag F-Cut tool – I just love how it involves me in the production process of the bag I love in such a beautifully fluid way. Freitag bags are functional, durable, industrial art. I just wish that they made one with wheels.

John Maeda’s blog, “simplicity” – I read through all the back pages, and still pop by now and again to refresh my memory. He isn’t writing it anymore, he left MIT for the lush, green pastures of RISD, and is now publishing his thoughts through the RISD blog. The inspiring bits are his rules for simplicity; simple in themselves, they shed light on why some designs succeed and why some fail. Simplicity is difficult, but Maeda makes it accessible.

37signals, Basecamp – it is our office. We have partners in three countries (Canada, the USA, and Taiwan), and our president is spending Christmas this year in India. Basecamp has given us just enough structure to organize our plans , record our accomplishments and communications centrally. Then we found their book, Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. At first I was pretty upset when I read it, because we had come to many of the same conclusions that they had, only we had to slog through weeks of mistakes and false starts to arrive there, but I came around, because at the base level we were on the path to simplicity from the beginning. They espouse creating something that solves your own problems (that is what we’ve always done). They advise delivering less than the competitiors (That is what inspired COMARKER’s genesis in the first place; our competitors’ applications are too complicated to be really useful). And they caution that bringing in outside investors is a mistake, unless the project can’t be funded internally (we have been way too busy to look for any investors).

Illegible, red ink scrawl on the back page of all of my college essays, and unexplaned ticks and marks all over the text. Someday, when the last red Bic ballpoint pen has finally run out of ink, I will run around my house, like a soccer player who just scored the winning goal in a world-cup game. I will be able to die a happy man.

I can’t think of any more right now. I’m all riled up, having just imagined the death of the red marking pen.