We found the smile for the face — PIM.hu
2 weeks delay. This was enough for him to decide to join us instead. The Petőfi Literary Museum was looking for an IT expert, and found David Such, PhD student of ELTE Philosophy Professorship. Those two, PLM and David, would have been a good match. But every bullet has its billet, and David came in meantime for an interview to our company. After the programmer assessment we started to talk about existentialist philosophers, zombies and ethics. Vince immediately nodded assent and I enthusiastically introduced our new colleague to the team.
One year after I got a call from Zsolt Banki, head of PLM’s IT Department, who wanted to discuss pim.hu. One word led another and a few weeks later we started a cooperation.
It was a great experience to work in the Museum. One day we were sitting at Jokai’s table digging in the previous database structure, the other day we discussed the homepage buildup under Abel, Aron Tamasi’s painting. It also happened that we clarified invoicing matters in a room decorated with graphics by Andras Wahorn.
The weeks were passing by and after each iteration we got closer and closer to the final version and function.
It doesn’t happen every day that an excellent theme like this, optimal complexity rate and human factor are in such a harmony. It was a pleasure to participate in this project, and it got around in the company. So we tried to give everyone a chance to play a part in the development.
It was a challenge to integrate multiple databases and to implement a homogeneous search function, and it caused pain in the neck to migrate from the database built more than 10 years ago.
However the biggest effort was to invent a rich user-experience. It took two months to reach the final look. The logos and design, brought by MOME, seemed to be good raw-material. Szilard came up with a daring background idea and megamenu which immediately appealed to the client, so the direction, the whole web appearance thread suddenly became obvious.
For years we have been dealing with applications where the text has a huge importance. I can’t remember any project where it was such a great experience to work with scripts like on pim.hu. The Digital Literary Academy’s subpage is for example a real public good which I didn’t even know existed.
Szilard and Vince were hiding a couple of real jewels on the website during the development phase. My favorites are the Petofi signature hidden in a source code, and the “could not be found” Esterhazy quotation on the 404 site, paraphrased in the title of this article. The original phrase: “We are lucky: no face found for the smile”.
During this project no one mentioned the words “business”, “deal” or “budget”.
For many years ago we set a goal that we would like to reach results which doesn’t need explanation as everyone understands the value behind. This is the goal which makes us moving forward, and pim.hu is a fruit of this ambition.
We are thankful for being part of this project.
If you are interested in deeper details, you can read the official announcement here (in Hungarian)
