Future Sight - A Preview of PucaTrade 2.0 WRITTEN BY Eric Freytag

Once the dust settled from our recent crowdfunding campaign, we had a chance to dive deep and begin production of the features we are also excited about for Puca. For those who are new to this site, the five features, which we call "Future Sight" are:

Support for digital (Magic Online) cards

Support for Non-English cards

Support for cards of all condition

Mobile support / Responsive design

Support for Quantity & card packages

In web development, all quality work and new feature development begins with design, and one of the best parts about the success of the crowdfunding project was that it enabled us to bring three All-Star designers onto the team:

We quickly realized that Future Sight represented a major overhaul to almost every corner of the site, and that corresponding design changes to the entire site were needed. Similarly, the new design team had a very different aesthetic to that of the designer who templated the PucaTrade of today (the Puca we call "Revised").

It should also be noted that there are many areas of "Revised" that are essentially un-designed; in the past we haven't always had the luxury or financial freedom to hire a designer every time we build a new feature. For that reason, many of our existing features were simply mashed into our overarching template, or fashioned collaboratively by myself and the development team.

We realized that the success of this crowdfunding campaign afforded us with an incredible opportunity to put design first as a priority for Future Sight, and rather than trying to fit in a new aesthetic to an old-style we decided to start from scratch (from a design standpoint).

The design team quickly went to work compiling what was to become the look and feel of Future Sight by assembling mood boards, which are a collection of images that represent an overarching visual style. The one we liked best was called Helvetic Ambient, and you can check it out here. I love Helvetic Ambient because it exemplifies cleanliness and modernity without being dismissive of antiquity.

Helvetic Ambient Represented on Our Splash Landing Page:

Your Profile (Helvetic Ambient)

I don't know about you, but every time I see this picture I get so excited for Future Sight.

The first thing you probably noticed is that the new experience will be so much more visually rich. We love the idea of allowing everyone to set their profile wallpaper to their favorite card art (Jaime Jones' Progenitus is a pretty amazing candidate).

We noticed recently that it's becoming common for people to copy-and-paste the number of trades that they've completed to their profile pages. This seemed like an auto-include, along with some cool other stats like the number of cards they have and want. We also want to call out all sorts of in-site achievements, represented by badges that can be displayed on the profile as well.

The other major thing you're probably noticing is the sidebar. Currently, we have sidebars on the left and right (that only contain grey backgrounds), but in this new version the sidebar will contain real-time activity and relevant notifications. I'm really excited about moving in-site messaging in the direction of chat-style messages. In contrast, the PM's we use today are reminiscent of an email style paradigm (which is quickly becoming outmoded).

But let's not dive too deep into the features that you see in the sneak peek. My main intention is to give you a sense of the visual aesthetic towards which we will be moving, and to highlight the first steps that we've taken on this journey towards building the five core features of the Future Site.

I hope you're as excited about this journey as is everyone here on Team Puca!

Give and Let Give,

Eric Freytag

PucaTrade.com

Founder

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