So your client has an established logo, a design standards guide, a series of icons etc… How hard is it to customize a Jumpchart public preview (wire-frame or grey-box, whatever you want to call it)

In mere minutes, you can use the CSS to:

• Change the colors sitewide
• Add logos, and icons for links, bulletpoints, etc.
• Change fonts, and headline styles
• Add headers or footers

All of these things may help you to better convey your ideas to your clients without them being distracted by the process.

We can’t go too long with Jumpchart before somebody thinks of a different way to use it. Some hidden benefits have emerged as we have had time to digest our own creation.

• Like anything online, Jumpchart is always accessible. You never know when a consultation will turn into a pre-project planning session. You’re always ready where you have an internet connection.
• Paper is still useful… Although we have plans for better print styles, the paper versions of Jumpcharts are really useful.
• You don’t always want to collaborate with people. Have a public preview, or the ability to stick a Jumpchart on your own server is really useful.
• Clients can use Jumpchart to plan their own projects to more effectively communicate with their development applicants.

Using a product you have conceived of and designed can be a cathartic process for a company. It can be tough to draw the line between where you are stroking your own ego, and where the system is actually working. Over time, the difference is clear.

The short answer is that Jumpchart has totally changed the entire way we do business. W’re more precise about our ideas, quicker through the idea generation and build phase, and generally sleep better at night. Clients react to it as if there were no alternative. They take it for granted that this is how easy web design ought to be, -never knowing all of the lost time and effort they are saving.

We’ve noticed several things about our own process by using Jumpchart. Previously we had:

• Forced our clients to take a lot on faith.
• Allowed ourselves to become confused late in the build phase about what it actually was we were specifically building.
• Not understood the confusion our clients had about what they were purchasing
• Spent too much time on organizational tasks

After trying Jumpchart for a while, we noticed our efficiency, and joy growing proportionally. By having a simple agreeable format that people could rally around, we had solved many of the problems that made our jobs unpleasant. We spent more time doing the things we loved… designing and building websites.

We had happier, less apprehensive clients. We had more efficient, and happy employees. We could barely remember what it was like to do it the old way…

We come from a paper prototype background. It’s a great way to plan, show ideas, and quickly change your mind. Many times we’ve all been around a conference table with sharpies, and a stack of copy paper. It feels terribly liberating to be that careless with your ideas.

Of course eventually the ideas are all hatched, the people are all happy, and you have a stack of nonsense. So often we would get back to our desks after a great client meeting with a giant stack of pages that are all-but approved for building, -not understanding half of what was scribbled. It often went like this:

• We had just been forced, at some effort, to get everyone around one table at the same time.
• Had a whirlwind feel-good session that left everyone thinking more was figured out than actually was.
• If some sort of a summarization process wasn’t started soon, valuable information was lost as our memories receded. (Never have one of these meetings on a Friday)
• Nearly always we had to go back to the client with a different summarized format in some sort of alternate document format. All too often, this was more of an invitation to make more changes than a sense of finality.
• Once a summarized document was actually completed, we had nothing but a bunch of stale documents to again re-summarize into some format where they were useful to the actual building process.

None of these documents had momentum into the build phase. We needed something different. When we came up with the idea of Jumpchart, it was an attempt to solve several problems:

• Make collaborating remotely easy.
• Empower people to change their mind.
• Have a format that represented a more specific sense of approval
• Make entering the build phase easy

As the idea evolved, we added a few things here or there, but despite some feature creep, Jumpchart is still rather precisely targeted towards these goals.

Some examples of feature creep we’re not ashamed of:

• An expanded version of Textile that allows quick form mockups, and easy greeking
• Managing deliverables, and files on a per page basis
• Exporting valid css/xhtml that can be worked with easily and quickly
• A grey-box wireframe version of the site that is easily shareable without the need for collaboration

So, -how many features to include? The fact that seems to be ignored is that more features are better, -if they’re useful, and included usefully. There is a reason to lampoon companies like Microsoft, and Adobe, -they deserve it. They add items to bullet-point lists with no regard for product integrity, or actual performance.

So when is a feature useful, when is it a pain? The simple answer is “when it gets in the way, -it’s un-useful.” The problem with evolutionary development is that features tend to get stuck in odd spaces. Features that are planned for, find accurate and useful homes. Features that get incorporated in late phases tend to be incorporated in the place of least resistance.

The challenge of developers is to “say no” -or to “say yes” but not take the easy route. If incorporation of a useful feature requires modifications to 10 other screens, -then so be it.

Contrary to what you might expect, -we’re not code snobs. We’re much more interested in what works than what is popular. Like anything, code has fashion, and trends. While semantic code, and unobtrusive javascript are the cat’s pajamas now, -that may not be the case when technology has a moment to digest our culture.

So what are our priorities then? Our priorities are making something useful for our customers. There may be glamour in building thing a certain way. There may be a gold star for including some popular library or language… -“But does it help me get my job done today?”

Jumpchart is primarily about information architecture. Call it a site map. Call it a wireframe, it’s about organization. Planning a large website requires several things:

• Collaboration
• The freedom to change
• Ability to brainstorm
• A sense that the process has momentum towards a goal

There are an amazing amount of resources that go into a typical website. From text, to images, to pdf’s, they all have to eventually find a home within an architecture. There is a science, and a method to it all. From this chaos comes order…

Jumpchart helps us get away from emails, faxes, discs, phone-calls, and the like. In its’ simplest form, Jumpchart tries to get us all on the same page… Or better yet: the same pages.

You can’t be a design agency trying to launch your own product without taking a nod from 37 Signals. We’re self professed 37s adaptees. We’ll proudly admit it.

We love their interface designs, and several of us sleep with “Getting Real” under our pillows. We’re devotees if you will.

We’ve taken what we consider the best parts of the 37s philosophy, and tried to jam it into our own beliefs. We expect most of our users will be Basecamp users, so we tried to make our interfaces familiar to them. In fact, our goal from the beginning was “if you’re a 37s user, you should be familiar with our apps” -It would be dumb to ignore the fact that they are industry standard. We want to fill those gaps.

Paste Interactive is what happens with an agencies’ spare time. Entermotion Design Studio, who has been developing websites, creative marketing, and identities since 2001 has decided to use all of those spare cycles for good use. It’s like “Folding at home” for the 2.0 web design world.

• So why call it something different? It is something different… This is not client work to make someone else happy. this is work to make us happy. Just like 37signals.com, and countless others, we’re realizing the importance of tools. We see great potential in helping people in our industry. We would rather be friends than enemies.

• Why Paste? In short, it’s a cool name… Plus, what else would you do with a donkey (Entermotion’s logo) when you want to turn it into something different?

• Where do you see this heading? Don’t know really… We have about 4 apps planned right now. 2 of them are in progress. We’re excited about the potential of being our own clients, and excited to see where it takes us.