Fresh

Music and design, in my eyes, are inseparable. I get inspired to draw and come up with new designs when listening to music, and feel totally strange if I am ever designing without tunes blaring or earbuds jammed into my head. I am a design nerd, and perhaps bigger music nerd, and If I had my way, would never have one without the other.

Certain songs or genres of music aid me in different working scenarios.  Sometimes I find myself knowing exactly what song or album to play for my current mood or for the task in front of me. If I am on a deadline, if I am wireframing a new site, if I am working late, or if I am just plain old stoked on a design direction, zoned out, head down, gettin’ it done, I know what to listen to to make that task more enjoyable. There are songs for reading your RSS on Monday morning, drinking coffee, ramping up for your week, and there are songs for your Friday afternoon, winding down your open projects, and thinking about your upcoming weekend.

Here are 10 tracks, old and new, and the web-design/interactive dork scenarios in which they feel most appropriate, as those scenarios fit into a 5-day work week.  Try them out and tell me if they work for you too. Hell, you might learn about some new music, get way better at those deadline pushes, or at least grumble a little less to yourself when burning the midnight oil.

NOTE: These choices are based on a combination of the general pacing and mood of the songs, and their subject matter and lyrics. Sometimes more one than the other, sometimes a perfect balance of both. One thing remains consistent: It is all subjective jibba-jabba according to one interactive designer and illustrator’s listening habits. Take it or leave it.
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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. (more…)

Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. (more…)

In thinking about what key pieces of technology make up a great website, I went to my teammates to collaborate. When the team at eROI was asked “What piece of technology is strongly underutilized?”, I anticipated people to almost exclusively mention website-related technology. This is eROI – this is what we do; that seems like a logical assumption, right?

Boy, was I wrong. Although several website-related references were mentioned, it appears as if other pieces of technology are underutilized more and noticed more poignantly. These non-website items could use an upgrade according to my eROI cohorts. And, since random bits of fun are a cultural staple around here, I threw in a few other questions into the mix to keep us on our toes.

I’m curious to see what your take is on these three questions. How would you respond?

1. What is the most underutilized piece of technology out there?
2. If you have a half-hour to kill in between meetings, what do you do?
3. What’s your favorite cocktail to make at home?

Finding The Perfect Storm

Often email gets overlooked as a space for telling stories. The primary function is, rightfully, prompting action. However, sometimes the right mix of elements can come together to bring both of these things into one piece. This project was one of those opportunities, so we wanted to share it here.

Icebreaker is an apparel company focusing on a very special product that mixes the versatility of an outdoor technical product, the sleek aesthetic of an activewear product, and the sustainability few companies can boast with its refined merino wool fabric. They have a fantastic brand story and push the envelope with their presence, often using provocative and mythical imagery to support their ethos that reminds us that “it’s about our relationship to nature, and to each other.”

In this instance Icebreaker wanted us to help announce their newest line of clothing for the Spring 2010 season (It’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere). We took this opportunity to not only elevate the presence of their brand in email, but also to use some unique ways of getting their message across. We created two versions of this email, one vertical and one horizontal. Some background on why we wanted to try this out can be found on this previous post by Dylan over on Email Wars.

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Crafting a Better Experience

We have all sorts of fantastic projects that we get to do on a day-to-day basis. Some amazing clients come to us with challenging problems and often we feel very proud of the solutions. Solutions we think many of you’d probably like to see, and more importantly, know the thinking behind. This is what prompted us to start this new series called Fresh Projects. We hope you’ll find it useful and interesting. As always, we’d love to hear comments and critiques on whether we hit the mark.

This first time around we wanted to show a recently launched site we did for Wacom Technologies – namely, Pen Scrappers – a resource for digital scrapbookers.

Although we had previously worked with Wacom to create the first iteration of Pen Scrappers – which was essentially a contest site that helped generate awareness for Wacom’s Bamboo Craft pen tablet – we were given the chance this time around to up the ante. Wacom had identified this audience as one that they could talk to more specifically, and they wanted to foster the community that already existed by creating a website that would be a strong resource for those looking to hone their craft.

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You may have checked out the mobile site we launched in conjunction with touch.wacom.com after we mentioned it in our post, “Menagerie of Mobile Madness.” We’re really proud of that little beauty, and excited to see its getting some recognition out there in the interwebz. Big thanks to Mobile Awesomeness for featuring it in their gallery (And if you haven’t checked them out yet, go do it!)

Sterling Communications is a technology services provider located in Portland, Oregon with a national customer base. They specialize in VoIP business phone systems, colocation, and hosting.  Sterling came to eROI this year looking for a complete strategic overhaul of their website, which had grown stale over the years and didn’t reflect what they truly had to offer their customers. Take a look at the home page before we got started:

Sterling wanted a solid working relationship with a trustworthy, local agency. After having been through several agencies in the past, they were looking to work with someone new to give them a fresh perspective on their website, company branding, and marketing materials.

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Every Friday the design team here gets together and we have a “lunch n’ learn.”  We use the time for watching tutorial videos, inspirational TED talks, interviews with artists, and other such things that get us excited to be creative. We also eat delicious food cart grub. Today we all brought in a site or project that we thought was stellar to show the rest of the group. Here is the result:

The Selby.  Artist Todd Selby interviews and photographs interesting people in their homes. Great site to browse through for beautiful interiors and color inspiration. Each interview at the end is really unique and often includes little drawing tid-bits.

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WEB Visions, a conference in Portland about everything web starts tomorrow. As part of the conference are the 2nd annual  Webvisionary awards and celebrates fantastic work from categories from motion graphics to blogs. This year two projects from the eROI team have been nominated and have made it to the finals. Our team of web ninjas will be in attendance with cameras in hand hoping for yet another reason to continue drinking.

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