Who designed etoro.com, mint.com or vark.com?

28 Jul 2010 - 3:47am
2 years ago
6 replies
1886 reads
NeedhamMatt
2010

We are looking to launch a web business later this year.

We are currently in the design phase, and have been using etoro, mint.com and vark.com as examples of 'what good looks like'.  Quite honestly, our designs so far have not been close to the etoro site, both in terms of user experience and look-and-feel.
 
Could someone point me in the direction of the agencies which designed the original etoro, mint and Aardvark sites.  There could be some work coming their way...
 
Many thanks in advance for any help on this
Matt

Comments

28 Jul 2010 - 7:05am
Joe Lanman
2007

http://jasonputorti.com/ designed mint.com


On 28 July 2010 11:37, NeedhamMatt <matt@lovedthis.com> wrote:

We are looking to launch a web business later this year.

We are currently in the design phase, and have been using etoro, mint.com and vark.com as examples of 'what good looks like'.  Quite honestly, our designs so far have not been close to the etoro site, both in terms of user experience and look-and-feel.
 
Could someone point me in the direction of the agencies which designed the original etoro, mint and Aardvark sites.  There could be some work coming their way...
 
Many thanks in advance for any help on this
Matt

(((Pleas
28 Jul 2010 - 8:05am
Fredrik Matheson
2005

If I remember correctly, Mint was designed in-house.

http://twitter.com/movito > >

28 Jul 2010 - 12:20pm
DaveBreeze
2010

Mint's "Agency of Record" is Atomic PR. I don't believe they physically build the website but they did play a pretty big role in building/maintaining the brand image and positioning. I'm sure they'd speak with you about their capabilities.

Etoro's PR Agency is The Top Floor Agency. Again they probably didn't do the physical build, but it also looks like they have a pretty big hand in the brand.

Don't know about Ardvark.

If you don't turn anything up, let me know. The shop I work for Erwin-Penland (Hill Holliday) has done some work in this area and could likely help you out.

28 Jul 2010 - 1:59pm
Dave Malouf
2005

Dave is there a resource to find an "agency of record"? Curious about how ya had these so readily available.

29 Jul 2010 - 3:03pm
jstanford
2003

I am pretty positive that Mint was designed in house. We spoke to mint a while ago when they were first starting out about helping them with design work but we had a conflict of interest because intuit.com is our client. At that point they told me they were planning actually to hire someone in house and my understanding is that they did. Vark was also designed in house. Don't know about etoro.

29 Jul 2010 - 7:05pm
Fredrik Matheson
2005

On a related note, here's an interview with Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.comhttp://www.workhappy.net/2008/02/interview-wit-1.html 
In it, he states:

"Mint.com has one of the best graphic designers ever (Jason Putorti) – he cares about every pixel, all the fonts, all the transparencies and effects."


Another interesting quote, from ThinkVitamin:http://thinkvitamin.com/business/aaron-patzer-on-how-to-take-your-start-up-to-the-next-level/


"We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one. Having that in one person means a very high bandwidth system, and it also means that the idea that they had is rendered true on the website, instead of going from the graphic designer to “I can’t do this, I can’t cut it this way. It’s going to be too large.” They can make all those tradeoffs themselves. That was important."

Lessons learned from testing with real users (same URL):

"The first UI we put [the users] up against, they didn’t understand it. Those dumb users, they didn’t understand how genius we were – and it was our fault. 


People advised Patzer to outsource the design of Mint.com:http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/a-20-something-makes-a-mint-and-sells-it-to-intuit/

"Q. What was the worst piece of advice you got when you were starting your company?

"A. Mint has won a lot of awards for our product design and visual design. But when Mint was younger, the investors said, “Look, you’re an engineer by training, you don’t know anything about product design and you don’t know anything about usability and user interface. You really ought to outsource this.” They were drastically wrong. It would have been disastrous — we would have ended up with something like everybody else.

For great design to happen, someone with clout needs to care how their product looks, works and feels.  

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