I originally posted this on Dribbble, but I think it might actually be of more interest here. This was ultimately an experiment in software marketing, so what follows in as a postmortem for others to learn from. Hope you, guys, find it useful.<p><pre><code> <cite>
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A couple of years ago I had a weird idea to try and enter our software product into the Red Dot Award [1] competition. Somehow a thought of being able to stick that swirly red sphere on our website was highly appealing, so I emailed them and asked if there was a way to enter with a software product.<p>Surprisingly, that exact year they decided to start collecting money on that front as well and included the Interface Design sub under Communication Design category. For mere few hundred euros one could submit their work for their expert analysis on condition that they were prepared to part with additional 1.5K upon obtaining an award.<p>Long story - short, we applied, paid the fee and I then killed a couple of weeks of drafting this presentation. Mind that there were absolutely zero guidelines on what they expect from it except that physical products should be shipped well in advance. One of the options was to submit a link to the presentation (rather than a PDF), which is what we ended up doing.<p>Being expertly versed in modern web technologies we added a couple of lines of Javascript to report some events from the page when it was viewed.<p>The judgement time comes and we get a page hit.<p>Very exciting as you can imagine, but then we look at details and see that they read through about 1/3 of the application, looked at one animation, scrolled to the bottom and left. And that was it. In and out in two minutes.<p>You'd imagine that judging an Interface Design competition entry would involve, you know, trying out said Interface or perhaps reading through the actual application, but I guess that'd be setting the plank too high. So needless to say that was quite underwhelming and as you can probably guess we won a nice round zilch.<p>In any case, here's our application in all its three-color glory. I still like it and I still think we did a pretty good job with this particular piece of software, Interface Design included.<p><pre><code> </cite>
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[1] <a href="http://www.red-dot.de/" rel="nofollow">http://www.red-dot.de/</a>