Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
This past Friday everyone from the CNP offices attended the local Addy Awards banquet to see what kind of awards we would walk out with this year. The Addy Awards are conducted by the American Advertising Federation and the local competition is the entry point to their national competition. Awards are given across a multitude of categories from printed newsletters to TV commercials, product packaging to web sites.
Photo by Sean
Basically, how it works is that we submit our best works from the previous year to the local competition and based on several criteria are awarded a gold award, silver award or nothing. Anything that is awarded a gold at the local level is then sent on to the state competition for the next round. I'm pleased to say that at this year's competition we had four of our submissions receive gold and they will move on to the next level. They were:
cnp_studio (one gold for the web site, one gold for our logo/stationery/business cards)
SeaWorld Journey to Atlantis
Kelly Homes
The award on the Kelly Homes site is bittersweet. We're glad the site did well, but sadly the entire site design as well as the HTML and CSS behind the site were completely copied and used by someone who thought it was OK to do such a thing. Expect to see more on this in another post here.
Sites receiving silver awards include Girl Scouts of West Central Florida, Polk Transportation Planning Organization, TrueDemand Software and Heacock Classic Car Insurance.
All of this is a result of the hard work of an all star team (Mike, Pete, Sean, Jeremy) and our great clients.
Posted in Design, Development, Who We Are | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Friday was a fun day spent at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA launching the updated Yodel Anecdotal. Myself along with Mike and Josh from Voce Communications got together with Nicki Dugan (Yodel's Editor) to add some more cowbell.
Things started with a meeting on the redesign back in late July 2007 and led to what you see today. Some of the updates included in the upgrade are:
- Updated Design: A completely new look was created and a big thanks to Jeremy for yet another great one. This helped to allow for now more room within the post body as well as a wider sidebar. We feel that it gives things more room to breathe.
- E-mail Subscription: In addition to the RSS feed available an e-mail based subscription to post updates is available
- Tagging: Tagging has been added to help better identify content. Now Nicki has the fun responsibility of going back and adding tags to previous posts on Yodel. Fun!
Pete and Sean took care of all CSS as well as WordPress integration. Mike developed the Image Rotator plugin that you see at work in the header of the new blog (more on that coming soon).
Here's some shots of the old site as well as the new for comparison. As always, you can also check the portfolio for more info on the project.
Old Yodel
New Hotness
Posted in Design, Development, New Site, Social Media, WordPress | Add a Comment »
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
It's been a busy few weeks, to say the least. The end of the year crunch is always the worst. It's been nearly 2 weeks since I attended An Event Apart in San Francisco. An Event Apart is headed up by Eric Meyer, CSS Guru and King, and Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder of A List Apart and Happy Cog.
Alcatraz Island, nothing to do with the conference, I know, but still cool to see.
The conference was a great experience, and I gained a lot out of it. So I thought I'd put together this list of 10 things I learned, will carry with me, implement and [attempt to] teach others. I could easily come up with more than 10, but if I gave away more information it would be like revealing the ending to a good movie that you haven't seen yet. An Event Apart is just something you have to see/experience for yourself. Most of the items pertain to "An Event Apart" and some just to being in San Francisco, and the people we met.
Without further ado, and in no particular order: 10 Things I Learned While At 'An Event Apart' in San Francisco.
1. If you have ever seen Michael Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine', you'll recall a scene in which Michael Moore randomly visits a few homes in Canada. He walks right into the front doors, which are unlocked, and is greeted by friendly people. He also shows clips from the evening news which appear to be positive and upbeat (I believe the story was about a local town installing speed bumps). Dave Lockhart, a .NET developer that Nick and I met from Desire2Learn says that this is true - which I found just completely fascinating.
2. A way to make vertical/horizontal bar graphs strictly using CSS. No flash with XML fed into it. As a developer, I seldom have to worry about the CSS aspect of a project - but this is definitely a useful trick to have on the tool belt.
3. Jeffrey Zeldman gave a great talk about 'copy'. The different types of copy - 'guide' and 'copy' copy. Guide copy can be things like directions to sign up for a service, or instructions to guide you through navigating the site, or completing a task while browsing a site. 'Copy' copy is the content that can be found on pages, like an "About Our Company" page.
One of my favorite quotes "Design helps people read less, and when people read less, every word counts". Brevity and clarity are paramount, but slightly less enforced when talking about 'copy' copy. Web users are most often in "find" mode, and thus scan the page for information. No one wants to scan a sea of content that is not relevant to the company or what the user may be on the site trying to locate in the first place.
Consider the audience. If you're writing content for a site about an a hotel, chances are no one browsing the site is going to read the full 1,200 word essay you wrote about the history of the area the hotel is in.
4. Other firms, teams, and individuals have the same triumphs and pitfalls we do. I could take up this whole page and list some of what those are here, but suffice it to say that it's nice to see we're not the only ones with some of these troubles. Not that I doubted it, but it's easy to get wrapped up in the microcosm that is our office and our work-load and forget about what's going on out there.
5. During one of the breaks, I met Zack Schneider of Schneider Digital based out of my birthplace; Buffalo NY. We shared a lot of ideas, horror stories, and talks of "cool" things to do in Buffalo. Then he told me something that is so simple and easy that it makes me wonder why I didn't think of it earlier. So it's going to be a new policy here at cnp_studio.
We will not begin design until we receive all the copy to be placed on the site.
Wow. Simple. Beautiful. It has happened all too often. Projects where we plan, design, receive approval on that design, cut up, implement, stage, and then boom - nothing. The staged site will sit there - plenty of blank pages, but no content. My own little Duke Nukem Forever projects. Months, and yes sometimes even a year later things are finally ready to get started on that project again. You're knee deep in other projects now, and of course it's needed yesterday because hey, it's time to go NOW. Then I pull the project out of the dusty subversion archives and re-familiarize myself with it. Frustrating.
Facebook head-quarters in downtown Palo Alto.
6. Unfortunately, people still use Internet Explorer. I'm a developer first, and someone who needs to work with CSS second, but Eric Meyer's talk about IE7 and CSS was very insightful. In addition to learning about visual link typing, selectors, and a little bit of form styling, Eric also shared a JavaScript library that makes IE 6 behave more like standards compliant browsers, (yes, I know Nick also mentioned this!).
7. Forms. I hate forms, styling forms, and testing the styling of forms across the different browsers. Aaron Gustafson gave a great talk with a more "hands-on" approach to quickly creating a great looking form that will definitely alleviate some of my troubles. Aaron also provided screen shots of how the various browsers treat elements like buttons and select drop-downs.
8. Jeffrey Zeldman wrapped up the conference on the 2nd day with a great talk on "Selling Design". A lot of what he said sounded great. "Avoid bad clients", "Learn to smell trouble". If a client doesn't have time to complete a simple questionnaire because they are in a hurry, or "need a proposal ASAP", then you should probably steer clear of them. They end up being nothing but trouble. This all sounds well and good, but it's not as easy for a smaller firm like us to turn away work - no matter how much trouble we smell.
He also made a lot of great points about how to sell your design to the client, and not just hand it over to them and say "So, what do you think?". This will leave you with a lot of room for them to tear the concept apart, instead of providing insight as to why things are placed where they are, the color they are, etc.
9. "Your emergency is not my problem." Enough said. But, it's also in the delivery. Lets say a client calls me and says "Listen, I screwed up, I need this up on the site as soon as you reasonably can. Whatever you can do to help me, I would more than appreciate it." A little self-deprecating humor wouldn't hurt either - "I know I screwed up and I'm an idiot!" - but it's not necessary. I digress, what I'm trying to say is that I would bend over backwards for that client to get them what they needed.
If you call me and say "I need this up there now, I know I e-mailed you about this last week (lie)" and they use words like "ASAP" or send you "high-priority" e-mails, or doctor up their e-mails to their bosses to make it LOOK like they e-mailed you last week - guess what? I just moved you to the bottom of my priority list somewhere below "alphabetize Firefox bookmarks".
I understand clients make our world go round. I do. They pay the bills. They make it all possible. Doesn't mean I'm your doormat.
10. Joyent is awesome. We use Joyent Accelerators to host any of the Rails apps I do here at cnp_studio. While Nick and I were out in California, we met up with Kristie Wells and Jason Hoffman from Joyent and had a good time over tacos and beers [If you're ever in San Francisco check out Nick's Crispy Tacos]. It's nice to see the faces and personalities behind the support tickets and forum postings.
If you ever get the chance to go to An Event Apart, definitely take it. Whether you design, develop, both or neither (and just want to learn about what's going on in the industry, best practices, ideas, etc.) there is a lot that can be gained by going.
Posted in Design, Development, Who We Are | 2 Comments »
Friday, October 12th, 2007
The blog continues to suffer as things stay busy at the office. In the past three weeks in addition to launching a new site (full post and portfolio pages still to come) we've been to BarCamp Orlando, blogorlando and then finished things up with a trip out to San Francisco to this year's final An Event Apart. All events definitely had their own unique offerings.
BarCamp Orlando - Thanks to Hyku for the photo.
BarCamp Orlando brought together a collection of developers that I don't think the event organizers expected. Any time you can bring together developers in an environment where there's plenty of beer it's a good day. Since with BarCamp you never know what you're getting until you get there and see who has signed up to talk the material was a toss-up. For me, one of the interesting takeaways was needsharing.org. Definitely an interesting take on matching donors with those in need. My father-in-law is the president of the United Way of Central Florida so it's even more interesting to compare the approaches.
BlogOrlando, headed up by our buddy Hyku Hallett brought together some of the same people from BarCamp, but added a much larger audience of local Public Relations professionals. We hardly consider ourselves bloggers here at cnp_studio, but we do quite a bit of work with them and can't help but hack up and have some fun with a WordPress install. After the keynote by Shel Israel, the "Tech" track was where we spent most of our time. Mark Jaquith gave us some new information on the highly anticipated WordPress 2.4 and Jeremy Harrington from crawlspace gave some great design resources via his ma.gnolia links page. When Jeremy was told by an attendee that they had their logo designed through a contest on their blog a somewhat bewildered Jeremy was quick to ask "Would you have done the same with the roof on your house?" Thanks for fighting the good fight Jeremy. Then it was a deviation over to the hyperlocal blogging talk by Tommy Duncan, the author of Tampa's hyperlocal blog Sticks of Fire. All in all a great, worthwhile day.
An Event Apart San Francisco, CA
Then it was off to An Event Apart out in San Francisco. The main thing you need to know about An Event Apart is that if you're a Web Developer and you haven't been yet, you need to go. Jeffery Zeldman and Eric Meyer put on a heck of a conference. This was my second An Event Apart and while there were a few overlaps, for the most part it was great new content. Sean was in attendance at this event and I will let him put his thoughts together so as to prevent he and I posting the same thing. One thing of particular interest from the conference though... for those of you experiencing those IE6 pains (that would be everyone) be sure to check out this javascript file that helps make IE6 behave like IE7.
Posted in Design, Development, Who We Are | Add a Comment »
Monday, July 16th, 2007
Speak Up, a graphic design blog I regularly read, recently posted an interesting article on the dreaded "Design by Committee" and it got me thinking about this subject.
It is generally thought in our industry (and really any industry that involves providing visual design for others) that the more individuals involved in the decision-making process on design, the more likely the integrity of the project is shot. That is to say, the more people you have saying...
"I like this."
"No... I like this."
"Well, you both are wrong, because I like this."
Means you will never gain a consensus and rather end up making a Frankenstein concept with bits and pieces that everyone likes, but no one loves. It takes an article like the one by Armin Vit over at Speak Up to bring me back around to what is truly reality.
If your vision of a career in graphic design does not involve clients and you have the resources to maintain a sustainable practice of self-initiated projects then you don’t have to worry about committees. Lucky you. Otherwise, your work life hinges on the rapport and dynamic between you and any given committee. Mythically, the committee is the evil association of people sarcastically portrayed in the previous paragraph, faceless drones that eat away at good graphic design like termites at yummy wood. Realistically, they are the group of people you work with, to varying degrees of involvement, from the start of a project until the end. Whether they are note-takers, brand managers, vice presidents or CEOs, they are the people that you talk to and e-mail with, they are the ones that brief you on the project and sit through the presentations of your work, they are responsible for informing your process and ensuring that the work is beneficial to their organization… they are the ones you celebrate with once the project is completed. They are real and they make or break your days, weeks, months and years. And this is why using “designed by committee” as an insult or an explanation for poor work, even if meant as a joke, is detrimental to our profession, and perhaps an underlying thread of why graphic designers are less prone to be taken seriously — if we don’t respect the decisions made by those we work with, why would anyone want to respect ours?
Read the rest of The Perils of “Designed by Committee” as a Pejorative
Posted in Design, Development | Add a Comment »
Friday, June 1st, 2007
When I see titles such as "Top 10 Things Not..." or "5 Reasons Why You..." it usually catches my interest. I recently came across the article 19 Things Not to Do When Building a Web Site and I have to say that they're dead on. I'm also happy to say that these are things that we do not do. Here's a few of the better "rules."
If your website requires the visitor to load your home page, and then “launch” your real website in a pop up, YOU LOSE.
If your website is ALL Flash, FIRE your web development company, and if you made it, add it to your portfolio under “Useless web projects I’ve done” and start over.
If you are a print designer, and “do websites on the side”, STOP DOING websites and providing “advice” to your print clients about web design. Print design to web design is like designing an ad for a race car, and actually building and racing that race car.
If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS.
No blinking text, no Frontpage, no pop-ups (even requested), no scrolling text, no font downloads, and no Flash intros.
...if the user has to mouse over your graphic or small image to know what it is, or where it will take them if its a link, quit your job and be a magician or a blackjack dealer, making web interfaces is not for you.
Posted in Design, Development, Usability | Add a Comment »
andrew:
hey mike -- thanks for the reply, let me clarify what i mean.... I know that PHP fu...
nick:
Hi Jeff, Thanks for the heads up on the link. It's all fixed now and you should...
Jeff:
I would love to try your plugin, but the download link appears to be dead again. Ca...
mike:
@Denise: 1. The image is selected randomly each time the code is run. So normally ...
andrew:
hey -- great plugin and would like to use on several different pages, not just the ...