As you can see, we’ve been doing some work around here. What started as a simple update to the look of the site turned into a full blown redesign complete with corresponding updates to the app, and we’re pretty happy with the result. Also, despite rumors to the contrary, Freddie is alive and well, and he’s more handsome than ever on our new colors. We’ll post more about the design process and all the bells and whistles we added behind the scenes, but for now, have a look around and enjoy the new site.

Our designers have an internal battle to see whose login screen gets the most tweets. They started this after Linda did her Winnie the Pooh design tribute to A.A. Milne (which she hand-illustrated and water colored) and it got more attention than we’d ever seen before. Ron, head of our DesignLab, responded with his “May the 4th be with you” login screen, and it got 145 total tweets. He is the reigning champion.

Above is a photo of Ron’s wall, where the designers are keeping score. If you look closely, you’ll see evidence of  just how competitive these designers are. Someone filled in Ron’s username with “poop.”

Cut. Throat.

But the latest WC 2010 – themed login screen, from our designer Andrew, looks like it’s going to be a contender:

Plus, there’s more to come.

We’ve come a long way since I was the only designer at MailChimp. This was my World Cup login, circa 2006:

I know, amazing right? Plus — and you’ll want to be sitting down for this — the little ball was actually animated. Eat your heart out, Google pac-man screen.

It’s a really great time to be a web designer. HTML5 and CSS3 – the latest versions of the core technologies behind a majority of web pages – are finding greater support in contemporary browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome to name a few). It’s now so much easier to design elegant interfaces that load faster, and that means a better user experience on web apps like MailChimp. Read More

We’ve already talked at length about the new MailChimp logo that Jon Hicks recently designed for us. I won’t bore you with more details on that, but you should definitely read Ben’s excellent blog post about it if you haven’t already.

One of the most exciting things about our new chimp is the fact that he now has a body– unlike before when he was just a floating head. We thought that this definitely called for a celebratory gesture, and what could be better than a life-size cardboard cutout?

We like to think of ourselves as trend-setters, meaning you’re probably asking yourself where you can procure one of these for your business. We ordered our chimp from Party Standups, a company based out of Bradenton, Florida (near Sarasota). All of their cutouts are made from weatherproof corrugated plastic and can range in size from 1 ft. 4 in. up to as large as 8 ft. The image itself is printed on white 4mil vinyl using 6-color process inks, and then laminated to the corrugated plastic before it’s cut to shape. The ordering process is super simple– just upload your artwork (most standard image formats are accepted, although the company recommends a resolution of at least 100 dpi), choose your desired options (like size), add to your cart and voila! In 5 to 10 business days you should have your very own life size friend.

In typical MailChimp fashion, the folks around here have been thinking of all sorts of creative things to do with our new pal. (No, not those kinds of things.) If you’re in the Atlanta area, he is rumored to be making a guest appearance on Friday, October 3, at the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session. (Bananas may or may not be involved.) The Webmaster Jam Session is a two day event that brings together web designers, developers, marketers and visionaries to learn about the latest ideas and trends in web design, development, search engine optimization and social media. On Friday, MailChimp Co Founder and Email Marketing expert Ben Chestnut will be talking about designing for email. In his own words, “email might suck but it should still look good”. You can also catch Aarron Walter, MailChimp’s user experience designer, in these sessions on topics ranging from web standards to what’s important when building a website.