Fresh

SXSW Interactive is almost here, so those months of giddy nerd anticipation are almost over! Hooray! But wait, have you studied the schedule yet? Picked your top panels? Perused the party lists? Researched the must-try restaurants and food carts? No?  Well don’t panic yet, you still have a little time. And to help sort through all the madness I’ve compiled a list of tools and sites that are helping me do some pre-planning this year. As a mere SXSW Sophomore I’m far from an expert on the conference or on Austin, but hopefully this post will help you get organized a little bit.

Finding Promising Panels

Sometimes a panel or session that looks amazing based on its short description in the official SXSW handbook turns out to be, ehhhh, not so great.  And of course the one you decided NOT to go to was the must-see panel of the day.  Although you’re not going to pick winners every time, you can help yourself by doing a little research beforehand.

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Over the last couple years I have been salivating over being able to attend the coveted SXSW Interactive Design Conference. This year I have paved myself a path to get down there and soak in the massive amount of inspiration that gets unleashed in Austin this time of year. I couldn’t be more stoked to take it all in… but how on earth am I planning on taking what I hear and retaining EVERYTHING I need to come away a better designer, thinker and doer?

Do I fill up countless notebooks with quotes and drawings, set up my handy tape recorder so next time I feel like re-living the whole weekend I can just flip a switch? Maybe I can just listen carefully and soak it all in, hoping the inspiration seeps in through my pores.

While I most definitely will have a pad and pencil in front of me, I will also have my iPhone, and where there is an iPhone in the hands of an interactive designer… there is the amazing micro blogging tool called @twitter. Have you heard of it? It is kind of a big deal these days. So much of a big deal that its use has become at times… well, overused. I am here to tell you a few easy steps to keeping your followers happy with your content stream. Remember kids, it is all about well placed, relevant content.

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In our line of work, it’s pretty common to have some angst between the Sales and Accounts teams.

Last week I went to lunch with a client who is an Account Manager at her company. We discussed her company’s recent merger and the marketing repercussions, and then moved on to the company’s financial health. She shared with me that during times like these, where budgets are tight and clients’ wallets are even tighter, the tension between her and her Sales team goes through the roof. Instead of striking out and trying to solicit new business (which is the role of this company’s Sales team), her Sales team colleagues are focusing instead on eliciting new business from current clients (which is part of her role in the company). This internal tug-of-war does not bode well for anyone involved.

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A never-ending battle has been raging since days of old about the virtues of custom, project-specific photography vs. stock photography. Each has its benefits and drawbacks and depending on your role in a project you could be on one side of the fence or the other. I am a designer with an extensive photography background. I have a bias, so if you’re looking for a true comparison as to which is better, stock vs. custom, look somewhere else. I have very clear views on the role of photography in design and how it can help achieve the goals of a given project. Achieving the goals of the client are always the top priority and finding the best way to do that is the responsibility of the designer.

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I am feeling a bit perplexed today as I think about something that really inspired me yesterday. Yes, perplexed how sometimes the smallest of things can unexpectedly inspire.

To fully explain I have to go back to last week when,  I very am proud to say, the team here at eROI brought home two AMA Max awards for our work with Wacom. The team dedicated to this particular project drew inspiration and input from almost our entire agency. It was a true team effort made all the sweeter for such great recognition. Our work even landed Best in Show. More than that, I think everyone here felt a great sense of satisfaction because we won with work that truly represents what we can do here and what we’re about.

So fast forward all of those good vibes to this week and my perplexing source of  inspiration from yesterday. I’ve spent the last 15 years working in agencies of one sort or another. I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of great people and doing a ton of great work. I think when you reach this point you sometimes think that nothing will surprise you. Read the rest of this entry »

While sorting through the cupboards in my bathroom this past weekend I was puzzled to discover that I owned 23 bottles of lotion: some of these nearly empty, some barely touched, and others well past their expiration date. This got me thinking as to why I seem to forget about all the products I already have at my finger tips, and instead go out and buy the first new item I hear about promising firming, moisturizing, and/or bronzing benefits in a bottle. Like myself, I often witness clients honing in on new technology, overly excited to snatch it up and apply it to their own online marketing objectives, before first asking themselves the question “Do I really need this?”

While change is good, there is something to be said to having a purpose behind each change. We are consumers by nature and always want that new best thing, but why not first take a look at the tools you already have at your disposal and assess if you are indeed using them to their full potential.

Here are some questions to ask when considering whether or not to invest in the next latest and greatest marketing tactic. These might help you figure out if your money is best spent on what’s new or if it’d be better spent fine-tuning what you’re already utilizing.

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While much of the country is still reeling from the effects of massive winter-ness, PDX has had an untimely run-in with Spring for the last week or so. Our cabin fever has been relieved for the moment, and so our thoughts turn towards happy hour on the patio and unplanned use of vacation days.

Now, some of us have a not-so-healthy idea of fun (spring cleaning, anyone?). Of course, often it’s necessary to purge clutter and bad habits, and spring is as good a time to do that as any. In this spirit we wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the best practices we’ve found when working with your design files. Good habits can make the difference between a seamless development process and a complete nightmare, one that will try everyone’s patience and waste valuable time. We’ve even included a little treat at the end to help get you started. Ready to clean house?

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Because we have a team of developers here at eROI and a plethora of projects to build and maintain, it is more than likely that the code written by one individual will need to be edited by another developer at some point in time.  When an edit to a site comes in, the original author of the code will inevitably, at one point or another, be on vacation, be sick, or no longer work here (yes, it happens, sadly).  This is why it is so imperative for our team (and any development team) to follow certain guidelines to keep our code clean and legible, so that anyone can jump onto a project, easily see what the code is doing, and start making edits quickly.  Here are five ways to keep your code readable and maintainable:

1. Indent Your Code
   This is number one on the list for a reason.  No other thing you can do can help or hinder the readability of your code than the indentation style (or lack thereof).  Nested child elements should be indented one level more than parent elements in order to show a visual hierarchy.  Opening and closing tags in HTML should be on the same indentation level in most cases; items inside the opening/closing tags need to be indented one additional level.

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When I was down in Miami for a recent conference, I had the good fortune of staying a few extra days to visit my grandparents in Southern Florida. Despite being in their late eighties, my grandparents are full of life and still have their wits about them. And, after being married for almost 65 years, they’re still completely in love. They’re incessant bickering over the years is legendary, and is one of the most hilarious things to experience.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that my grandma pretty much runs the show. Upon my arrival I usually have a small list of chores to help them out with. On the list this year were the usual suspects: dusting light bulbs on the ladder, lifting heavy stuff, a lot of Windexing…and replace the computer!

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I am the bridge between two very different users of technology – my mom and my daughter. The thing they have most in common is that everything in this digital world is new to them. My mom has the advantage of living through inventions such as a car phone and answering machine and just about everything is new to my 2 year old daughter. My job is to help them navigate through this fast paced, hands free, Google alert world.

I am about to make a visit home and my mom wants a new phone. Frankly, she barely uses her existing phone but she wants to start communicating with my younger siblings the only way they know how – via text. I don’t want to send her into the phone store alone because she will walk away more confused then when she walked in. Just throw out a few buzzwords like tweet and app and she’ll be halfway to the car.

Nothing “makes sense” to her and rightly so. After doing a few trainings on Windows, how to double click the mouse and avoiding the pop up ad I have come to see that not everything is as easy-to-use as it claims. With her I like to eliminate the clutter and focus on just a couple features that will truly make her life easier and more fun.

Making my daughter’s life more fun is the easy part. She has a blast copying everything we do and part of that entails trailing us around with her fake phone and pushing buttons, or as she calls them “butts”. The amazing thing is when she has my touchscreen phone in her hands she already knows how to navigate through the icons and slide the windows up and down. She can pull up the pictures and scroll through them by herself. Very impressive and a thumbs up to user interface designers. It seems we are finally at a point where working these gadgets is intuitive. At least for a toddler!

While I’m not actively pushing digital devices and Internet browsing upon her, we’re still happily watching the old standby television, I do need to be aware of what is happening as one day she will be showing me what to do.

Keeping  up with new inventions is top of mind. So far so good as I work in the interactive field but there will be one day when she is taking me to some store to decode and translate what to do and what to get as if I don’t speak the language. If the world seems fast paced today, I don’t know what it will be like tomorrow… but I am sure it will hit me over the head in the form of an eye rolling teenager.

For now, I am good to go, channeling my efforts as a happy medium minding the generational gap. I’m confident I can find my mom the right phone (so there won’t be a need for the technical support package) and keep the electronic toys at bay for my daughter so we can control the pace… for now.

Perhaps I should just send the two of them out for a day of shopping and stay home with a coffee and that large, smudgy black and white package that my parents call the newspaper.