Creativity Killed the Recession

My City Lives Launches! But shhh, don’t tell anyone…

My City Lives starting living two days ago and in homage to the unconventional, we hope that no one notices. If you’re reading this around the timing of writing though, it’s likely that you have noticed or on your way to do so (since, in honesty, we anticipate there are not many strangers reading this blog right now). As such, you’re getting the first sneak peak of what’s to come but I’ll throw down the caveat that there is still much to do and many things to fix. We relate our situation to being half-dressed.

To continue with that analogy, here’s what we have on so far:

To ensure compatibility with multiple browsers, almost all websites are created with purposeful whitespace (typically on the sides) to ensure that all content is visible. The decision to not follow this convention on My City Lives was in part symbolic of our relationship with space, while simply also possible given that our sizing and content is always dynamic due to the nature of the application. The result: a living, growing and good looking map.

The slider was one of those things that when the gents from Jet Cooper first explained their vision for, we didn’t fully understand. This wasn’t surprising since our experience was with a more horizontal form of navigation where you select a link and get taken to a new page. As you’ll notice from the image below, the slider performs vertical navigation by ‘sliding’ down to take you to a new page or video. The advantage to doing this is that the user never has to leave the map (indeed, you can see it still in the bottom portion) and thus remains always connected to the reason why they’re there. The slider, therefore, validates one of the reasons why we chose to work with Jet Cooper as it leverages the concept that great design can concurrently have great purpose.

Now zoom out, all the way out. Toronto is our starting point, but boy do I get excited about the possibilities when I see this image (i.e. imagine if our default view was the most popular video at the time from each continent?)

It’s taken me two days to write this piece which, given its brevity and rather simplicity, should leave you scratching your head as to what took me so long. Since we’ve launched live, we’ve been identifying and swatting bugs while slowly rolling out the content, so I’ve been working perhaps inefficiently in a dozen tabs at once (the platform itself, the admin section, email, twitter, docs, fantasy basketball, etc). The majority of our content to begin is in-house, primarily created by our StoryCatchers who you’re going to be hearing a lot about soon but scroll below to see one of their videos (this particular one was created by doc maker Aliyyah Fazil).

In the meantime, please bear with us as we get things working properly and know that as happy as we are for reaching our launch milestone, it’s not without deep appreciation for the help you provided*.

A & A

*Don’t think you’ve helped yet? That’s cool, you probably already have without knowing it.  But if you’re really eager, just share MCL in about a week and then tell us to receive our “refer a friend” kickback: a virtual fist pump.