Until now we haven’t ever spent much effort or attention on “the pretty” — the visual aesthetics of our database systems. We’ve intended all along to incorporate a nice design at some point, but until now, ours and our clients’ focus has been on adding great functionality. In the meanwhile, we’ve been told again and again by friends, families, prospects, and ourselves that design is fundamental and “pretty” is going to sell better.

Well, tomorrow we have a big opportunity to demo one of our products to a franchise with many franchisees, and knowing that we have exactly what they need in terms of functionality, we just didn’t want to turn them away from a less-than-positive first visual impression.

So Daniel has been burning the midnight oil and has made some awesome progress on this that we’ll be rolling out into our products soon as well as demoing tomorrow. (Yay Daniel!) I’m quite thrilled at the progress but in some ways it’s like looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself.

We spent the majority of today working on incorporating the new design into our code generator, and it’s going to be a long night. And come morning we probably won’t yet be at the “luscious eye candy” level. But we’re going to be looking much better, perhaps even respectable!