Development:

Histograms, nested sets and saturation: It’s not easy conversation over in developer land. Suffice to say – it’s all good, it’s all progress and all starting to fall into place. It’s always a nice feeling when the site finally get’s it’s skin.

Design:

The site design team are mopping up the last pieces of the jigsaw, filling in the gaps and relying on more and more matchsticks to keep the creatives coming.

Marketing:

Blogger outreach: The DrHue Blog is up and blog.drhue.com. As you can see the first post is a little treat for those who simply adore colour – the chance to win a free mystery gift in your favourite colour simply by blogging / tweeting about Dr Hue (his is for real – you can actually win!).

Here it is, in all it's glory.

Yessssssss! We’ve finished a workstream. 7 hours to go and the logo is done. What do you think?

—

And, we’re now seeing what a search results page will look like:

Want blue? We got blue.

Biggest news after 4 hours of the most manic work any of us has ever done is… wait for it… the Dr Hue holding page is now up! You can go there now and sign up for updates.

Actually, that’s not much news at all is it? (Sorry – I’m knackered!) The REAL news is what each of our teams have been up to. (Oh, and that the eBay auction is now up to $250). Here’s a summary from the teams!

—

Design

Excellent progress here. Obviously with a proposition like “shop by colour” the biggest task is going to be navigation of the site. The plan is to make it really easy for people to choose a colour (either by clicking, or uploading a ’swatch’ image to sample), and then make it easy for people to refine that search, bringing them closer to the colour of product they want… then people can worry about what type of product they want!

He's getting more helpful by the minute... (Clicky for bigger)

There’s also a lot of work going on with pens and paper as to the way that search results are displayed and refined, and the secondary navigation (i.e. by properties other than colour!) Should have more pretty pictures of that stuff soon!

—

Tech

The techy dudes have progressed at an amazing rate on 4 fronts:

• Data import. John’s been working like a madman at this. He’s now pulling very close to to 13,000 products to our database…
• …which Ed’s built and nearly finished creating Search for, and has all the relevant fields for our colour information…
• …which is a TOUGH nut to crack! Rich is doing that and it’s looking really cool. He’s doing some amazing magic with OpenCV, paving the way to match our search results with…
• …colours derived from people’s uploaded photos, which Dan is sorting out with some JavaScript / AJAX and PHP awesomeness!!!

This is an amazing achievement, but, unfortunately at this stage the guys have no idea if they can pull these 4 streams together, and then skin them with the design templates in time for our midday deadline… which is in 9 hours! (Whiskey bottle status update; down to 2/3 full!)

—

Marketing

Yep, this stream has now started in earnest. It kicked off with a remarkably intense brainstorm, considering it started at neary 1:00AM, and carried on until 2:15!

"Seriously guys, let's do it MY way!"

"OK, cool, let's do it your way."

To cut a long story short, two hours later we had our campaign thought… Dr Hue’s Colourful Personailities. What does this mean? Well, it dropped out of thinking about who would most naturally want to “shop by colour” – i.e. people who are really confident with colours and use them to express themselves… and also thinking about other people who wish they were!

Colourful Personalities

So, this is a social media campaign, designed to celebrate people who are colourful, publicly. These guys are our influencers, and by going after them first, and showing them how easy Dr Hue makes it for you to shop by colour, the idea is that – as aspirational people in the fashion and home furnishings markets (our two key markets), people will copy their behaviour and start to use Dr Hue too. Of course this is where all the super-simple UX design will really come into its own.

Pantone stylee

First Aid for colour shopping!

Pick a colour...

Making a splash

Crosshairs

SO, which is YOUR favourite… let us know in the comments and you might influence the final one. After all, Nick’s got a good few hours left to finish it!

—

Also, Ben’s been working on the main man… Dr. Hue himself:

Dr Hue; He does magic science stuff with colours!

—

On the development side of things, we’ve hit a few snags – wouldn’t be a proper development run without that, eh?

• Rich is working out how to isolate objects from their backgrounds in product shots, isolating regions of colour. Not easy!
• Ed is debugging some database action.
• And John is wrestling with the affiliate feeds (apparrently listening to Sepultura helps!).

—

And finally… HUGE thankyous to Corinna for baking three cakes for the team. I’m off for some more Brownie…

Any prospective buyers, look away now.

Anyway, hours 8 and 9 have flown by in a blur. But there’s been some awesome progress.

In order to make Dr Hue perfect for people who want to “shop by colour”, we needed to do a focus group. So, a bit of twitter-action rustled up long-time friend on Nonsense, Anna Hutton. Anna is pretty much the perfect one-woman focus group for this for 2 reasons:

1. She manages a shop that sells the kind of things we envisage people will buy through Dr Hue – Oliver Bonas.
2. She’s an artist, and one who places particular emphasis on experimenting with colour and space.

Perfect!

Thanks Anna! xxx

Dave and Rob interviewed Anna in front of sketches of key pages on the Dr Hue site. Two important things dropped out:

• More emphasis needed to be placed on people being able to find complimentary colours. Previously our search tools focussed on matching colours – which is important, but now we’re thinking about how to deal with that too, and make suggestions earlier.
• Our search results won’t all have photos (the feeds we get from the stores often only have 1 photo for a product with, say, 4 colours available). So, our original plan was to return these results too, along with the “wrong” photo… the chat with Anna made us realise people will just think the site doesn’t work. So, now we’re looking at a way to separate those out.

ONWARDS!!! (Yes, I am getting a bit delirious.)

UPDATE: we want as many affiliate product feeds to play with as possible… anyone got some for us?

Can't we just photoshop this?!

However, because of the (totally understandable) wrangling over a name, the creative side of things is playing catch-up – with the dudes still on sketches! So, logo design needs to happen FAST and so does web design. Eeek!

Does anyone know a magic spell to turn web developers into graphic designers?

(On the plus side, we just ordered loads of pizza.)

OK. 4-5pm was a BIG hour!

The branding team have now decided upon a name and we have the domain names registered. ‘Dr Hue’ is the winner, with ‘Killa Colour’ and ‘Hue Choose’ coming in a close joint second place!

Also, Will’s cut a little video from the idea-choosing process earlier today:

—

The development team have now reported that feeds from affiliates are starting to come through, we now have Dorothy Perkins and Wallis and are working on a few really big large ones as we speak – we could really do with as many of these as possible, so if you;re reading and can help, please do!

Thanks to the Twitterers for all the ReTweets, @Replies and #24hourstartup hashtags on Twitter so far, and to all the bloggers posting about it!

Oh, and now that the noise and arguing has died down a bit, the webcam now has sound!

The branding guys have been having a bit of fun naming our service. This normally difficult task has been made all the more of a pain in the arse (or more fun, depending on how you look at it!) because the product is still being talked out in terms of how it will work. So, all they’re going on is that it will help people “shop by colour”… which is a bit vague.

One funny thing though – there’s been a lot of debate amongst the lads about whether to use the UK or American spelling of “Colour / color”… we put the question to our growing band of Twitter followers – with one pretty awesome response in particular from @Winn1!

Some rejected names:

• Suits Hue
• Swotcher
• Pizzazz

—

John talking to TradeDoubler on the phone!

Then, a quick wander over to the Tech team (tried not to trip over all the Cat 5 cables!). They’ve already started some interesting conversations with TradeDoubler; who I hear are being very helpful – cheers guys! That seems to suggest we’re on a kind of passive-income revenue stream tip… hmmm. More will be revealed when the business plan is being written in the early hours of this morning!

There was also some really fascinating chat about identifying colour pallets from images and object detection stuff too. I hung around until this got so technical I was just smiling like a moron!

—

Finally, I stopped by our Ebay auction and saw that we’ve had 18 bids already and are up to $154.00! Cheers to the two bidders who are currently duking it out. Any more for any more?