STRAYLIFE

With development for the new site underway, and self-enforced milestones looming, it was time to start tying down some of the ‘loose ends’ on the site.

Most of the content and imagery was pretty straight-forward – we had numerous existing images, press content and project documentation to transfer, jobs to get up, and a back log of blog content to kick off. Potential blog ideas had been thrown around, but no firm decision had been made as to which of those would make the final cut.

After a series of unsuccesful ideas (including a ‘Relationship Advice’ blog – from a bunch of gamers), and time rapidly slipping away, a late night session saw two finalists emerge. The first – designed to connect the oustide world with our home away from home – would be our ‘culture’ blog. The second would be related to development happenings, acting as somewhat of a “developer diary”.

The culture blog name was a give-in – STRAYLIFE. The term was coined by one of our freelance artists who, while working in-house, came up with a series of comics to illustrate our way of life at Straylight. Coming up with a name for the ‘developer diary’ blog, however, was proving a little more difficult.

So we put it through a rapid fire version of our usual design process. We kicked off with an all in brainstorming session to boot the name ‘developer diary’ and come up with something more… well.. us. Amongst those ideas gathering momentum were ‘the distant future’, ‘ASSERT’, ‘Binary Solo’ and ‘DEVel Up’. A short list was compiled, and the remainder put to vote. A sub discussion emerged about the fairness of the vote and how collectively we thought was best to conduct it… and once conducted, led to two clear favourites. More discussion, and a combination of the two came out – which landed us with one final name… ‘THE FUTURE SHOP’.

Satisfied we had all contributed to the process, we called it a day (well, we called it a meeting).

Then we found these guys