Introducing Perks.io

by Authentic Archive on Apr 18, 2013

Perks.io is a new microsite that randomly displays listing data from Authentic Jobs, but only the job perks. (Think bacon and ping-pong tables.)

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We’re in the thick of Hackweek here in Sarasota, Florida, where we bring our tiny team together for a week of strategizing, building, and good food. One of our objectives was to design and build a site from start to finish during our time together. Perks.io is the result.

The premise was simple: Expose the data in our listings in a fresh, unique way. The idea for extracting job perks sprang from one of Cameron’s featured job tweets (example). The first iteration was a simple, static comp:

From there, we began building and refining concurrently—Cameron on design, Adam on code, and The Lumineers on Rdio.

For the logo, we settled on Thirsty Rough pretty quickly. It’s a new typeface from Ryan Martinson that has a nice distressed, scripty feel to it. Adam was quick to point out that the ‘P’ was a little too Pinterest-y:

A little time spent modifying anchor points in Illustrator resolved the issue, though it meant we couldn’t use the webfont version to render the logo. With a quick build like this, we were okay with the trade-off.

A few more rounds in Photoshop and a bokeh photo later, the site was taking shape. Adam had nearly the entire site built—front-end markup and back-end code—by the time Cameron had finessed the aesthetics. It’s built on the Laravel PHP framework with a healthy dose of Sass and a dash of Backstretch for the stretchy header. Data is pulled from the Authentic Jobs API, as you might imagine.

So have a looksie, and give @cameronmoll and @adamjspooner your 2c about our little project, if you wouldn’t mind.