The launch of a service or product on the internet is a complex process and I am far away from beeing an expert in this field but I wanted to take the time and collect some aspects of it by analyzing the launch of the Silverback app by Clearleft.

Talk about it

The first crucial thing you need to do for starting the needed buzz is to talk about it. If a simple blogpost or a big announcement is adequat depends on the focus and appeal of the promoted “thing”. The first time I heard of Silverback was in Andy Budds blogpost about it over at Blogography.

Spread the word

After the first curious comments on the initial message and with the help of effective teasing the word starts to spread. Leaving some things unsaid and having people guessing about the service helps definitely to build a hype around it. With the support of opinion leaders writing about it, high digg rankings are a snap. We’ve seen a fair amount of mentionings of Silverback in the blogosphere lately. See Jeff Croft or Harry Brignull write about it.

Create visual impression

Beeing remarkable is one of the most crucial things in corporate identity. Again this is field with a scope far far beyond this post so I leave it with this simple statement and continue rather documenting the superb decisions Clearleft made in the past few months

Having Jon Hicks do the Silverback artwork was a very clever decision. He created a remarkable detailed Illustration of a silverback gorilla (well, what else!). The quality of the work follows seamlessly his previous works and serves very well as the brand recognition. One point that pushes the usefulness of this cooperation to another level is Jon’s kindness in sharing his work on his own site. View the working process at hicksdesign.ch.uk. Furthermore his work gets discussed and honored on flickr for example.

The only official representation of Silverback is the signup page and again they did a great job in creating something very special. Paul Annet, frontend-designer at Clearleft, designed the page and implemented one of the lately most discussed technics aka parallax-scrolling. The layered leaves from the background create the illusion of a three dimensional space by moving with different velocities when resizing the browser-window.

Doing great work is nice but having it presented and discussed by many pushes the effect even further. Paul wrote a extremely useful and comprehensive article about this technic on Vitamin. Again, the generated traffic supports the product itself and helps build up it’s reputation – even in it’s not yet published status.

Conclusion

We’ve seen some great things happening around the launch of Silverback and as we can expect this is only the peak of the iceberg. When it comes to opening the app for the broad public we’ll certainly see more of the buzz-magic Clealeft provided so far.