Thirteen23 takes Austin’s Phizzpop Design Challenge

A friend (who won a Zune, lucky bastard!) and I went to Microsoft’s Phizzpop design challenge in Austin earlier tonight. The attendance level was great and the designs were off the charts. The design problem involved creating a video portal for a Houston based indie film company called Micro Cinema.

The competing companies were Frog Design, Telligent, Projekt202, Thirteen23, Pop Labs and Neudesic. Each team received 2 days of intensive WPF and expression training, after which they were given the design problem and a little over 2 days to design / code the solution. The results were more prototypes than applications, and some were nothing more than back to back images.

Frog Design’s entry was pretty impressive, just for the sheer amount they had completed. Working videos and a good portal structure, and a decent design helped earn them a middle of the pack placement in my mind. They focused a little too much on the “emotion” of the movies though.

Projekt 202 really impressed me in the competition. I had heard of the company before, but their entry caught me completely off guard. Though I thought their design was not that impressive visually, they showed a tremendous understanding of the goals of the portal and of Micro Cinema. They easily had the best vision for the portal out of any of the competitors. Again, the only thing that I thought could have been improved was the aesthetics of their design.

Thirteen23 really stole the show with their design. I had never even heard of them before tonight, but man do they have some talented designers and developers. They really showed an in depth understanding of the technology and top notch design ability. Though I thought their entry lacked the vision of Projekt202’s, their implementation was incredible. Unless they were playing tricks with URL’s, the site was actually online, and looked really complete when compared to the others. There were animations in the interface, and you could tell it was just much further along than the others. Congratulations to thirteen23, they’ll move on to face the winner’s of the other regional design challenges at the SXSW Interactive Festival!