This is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. Chad is one of the designers from Vimeo. Watch and be amazed.

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

The 21″ x 13″ print can be purchased at my new store! store.thebigpugh.com

This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.

My life has changed a lot since i started this, so I thought it appropriate to include my friends, family and loved ones since they all were on my mind throughout the creative process. Enjoy!

On Tuesday March 25th, Justin Ouellette one of the developers from Vimeo launched Muxtape as a side project. The idea isn’t totally original, but its executed far better then the competition. Muxtape is a site that lets you make virtual mix tapes. You upload up to 12 songs from your computer and share the custom link with anyone who wants to listen. The design is one of the cleanest and easiest to use sites I have ever seen.

When Justin sent out an office wide link looking for feedback on Tuesday morning I googled “muxtape” and got back 33 results. I did the same thing the Wednesday and got back around 4,000 results. Thursday was around 9,000 and Friday around 22,000. I didn’t check over the weekend. I looked sometime early the next week and saw it was over 40,000. Tuesday April 1st, one week after the site launched google returned just over 100,000 results and as of today (April 4th) 121,000 result. That growth rate is pretty unbelievable and I would love to see at what point it stabilizes.

I talked to Justin today about the growth on his site, I don’t want to throw numbers out without his permission but he said the site is growing at a nice rate every day. I assure you it’s a pretty impressive number for a site two weeks old. He must be paying a fortune in bandwidth on Amazon S3. I want to say that he didn’t have a clue how big this was going to get, but then I would be lying. I think he knew damn well how the site was going to do before he even launched. He gave Vimeo two weeks notice Monday, the day before he launched. Thats a pretty ballsy move to go from a stable income to the unknown. But thats what separates the people who build great companies and the people who are too afraid and work corporate the rest of their life. I don’t know Justin that well, but I have had some interesting conversations with him and he really knows his stuff. He didn’t give me much insight to future plans. But he said theres a monetization plan in the works and a bunch of new feature. I think he is going to do great and wish him the best of luck.

Check out my Muxtape!

This morning at 5am Kunal Shah, Nick Dunkman, Jmo and myself launched a new version of the BustedTees website! Visually the site hasn’t changed much. Amir Cohen, one the front end developer for CollegeHumor did an excellent job recoding the front end. We spent the better part of the last 4 months recoding everything from scratch. The original version was built on the open source Symfony PHP framework several years ago (before my time). The site served it’s purpose and helped take BustedTees to a new level, it wasn’t that it was poorly programmed, it just outgrew our requirements.

(Dev Team at 5:15am)

I’m finding that a lot of the open source PHP frameworks that I have experimented with and seen throughout the community just don’t scale well. They serve a purpose and are great for average every day sites. But when dealing with a site the size of a BustedTees or CollegeHumor it really makes sense to roll your own framework, if you can. There are of course instances when writing a framework from scratch doesn’t always make sense. In the “unsure” startup setting it sometimes makes sense to get something out there quick and worry about scaling later. Scaling is a GREAT problem to have. If you are going to use open source code, not just frameworks, it’s important to really understand the underlying code. I can bet most coders don’t have a clue how the open source code they use actually works. Some of these applications are coded by excellent developers, you might learn something new by just reading their code.

Working on BustedTees has been an incredible experience and I have learned so much. I have worked on some small ecommerce sites as a freelance developer, but nothing of this size. Theres so many things I would have never thought needed to be accounted for. In future posts I will try and elaborate a bit. Right now I’m running on a few hours of sleep I got from a nap, so I’m going to pass out…