Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

A brand new day

I’m very excited to announce something we have been working on for a long time. Back in October of last year we asked Damien Huze to join our leadership team at W&R Studios as our Chief Design Officer. Design has always been an important focus with our company and Damien, who had helped us launch W&R Studios back in 2008 with our corporate identity, product logos, and the original Cloud CMA UI/UX, seemed to be at a time in his life he wanted to make a change. We, and I think the industry, will be glad he was ready for that change.

Old Cloud CMA Logo
Old Cloud CMA Logo

Damien quickly hired another designer Jesus “Jay” Cardenas whom he had collaborated in the past. First up was to bring a brand new look and feel to our logos. We told them that nothing was sacred, the look, feel, naming conventions, everything was up for grabs.

Branding surveys were sent, pencil was put to paper, stylus pressed to glass, mouse was clicked to desk. Since Damien was the very person that designed the original Cloud CMA logo I was curious what he and his team were going to come up with.

I was not disappointed. But let me let Damien tell the story….

The New Face of Our Brand

Upstream reveals new logo

Upstream Logo

Man, this logo is no joke!

W&R Studios adds Chief Design Officer

Really excited about this!

DAMIEN HUZE JOINS W&R STUDIOS’ LEADERSHIP TEAM AS CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER.

“HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA (October 29, 2015) – Privately held software company, W&R Studios, announced today that Damien Huze will be joining their leadership team as the Chief Design Officer. Damien has been involved with the company since 2008. He designed W&R Studios’ corporate identity as well as consulted on the UI/UX and identity of their flagship product, Cloud CMA.

Damien grew up in Paris, France. Both his parents were in creative fields. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized the impact of growing up in house where there was always a sketch being drawn, a story being written, a canvas being painted, or an object being fabricated. The trash bin full of concepts gave me awareness of the grind a designer has to go through to do valuable work.” stated Damien. Later, when he was a teenager they moved to Florida.”

Looking forward to introducing Damien to everyone in San Diego.

Flipboard for the web

Great article about how they created Flipboard for the web. It is a bit technical. I love to use Flipboard on my iPad. This quote caught my attention.

60fps on the mobile web

“Early on, after testing numerous prototypes, we decided our web experience should scroll. Our mobile apps are known for their book-like pagination metaphor, something that feels intuitive on a touch screen, but for a variety of reasons, scrolling feels most natural on the web.”

That’s exactly the same conclusion we came up with Cloud Streams. On the web people love scrolling through streams of data (think Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest). And when you think about it most MLS portals display some excel looking spreadsheet you need to click to move on to the next 25 properties.

Also this is why none of those viewer plugins popular with publishers to turn their paper Magazines in to a “digital” version never really took off. The interface was lousy and seemed like a hack job.

People want to scroll.

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