The Blueprint
Okay this is really cool. We browse the excellent articles of Smashing Magazine on a regular basis and today we were extremely surprised and honored to see that the design of our main menu made the list of Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples. A lot of care went into our menu when we designed it and it’s awesome to get recognition for our hard work.
Allow me to throw a little love back to Smashing Magazine. If you are a designer or developer and are not familiar with Smashing Magazine, then you owe it to yourself to visit their site and subscribe to their article RSS feed. It has proved to be a great resource of inspiration and information for us. Plus you can clearly see that they have good taste.
There’s a lot that goes into making a successful company and the #1 element is having a great work environment. We’re going to start a series on things we do to keep ourselves entertained day in and day out. Some of it gets pretty creative becuase we don’t have a dedicated office space… so the easy things like unplugging cables or putting water on a chair don’t work. Here’s the first look at a conversation Phil and I had about image resizing.
Let me set this up. We had a client that wanted to add an online signup for an event and we were just using a big jpg of a flyer they created as part of the page. I got into the design and this is what unfolded via IM…
Ryan: hey
I noticed that flyer jpg is like 215kb
can we get that to around 20kb
Phil: which one… the small graphic or large graphic?
Ryan: that big one
Phil: you want the popup image to be 20k?
Ryan: please. it takes a while to load
Phil: to do that we’ll have to size it down actually smaller than the image that’s on the actual page. or it will be compressed all to hell
Phil: wait
Ryan: you’d never be able to go to this church
Phil: you said the 215kb one but then you said “yes” to the large one
the one that’s on the page is 224k
the really large one that opens is over 500k
which one are you talking about?
Ryan: well both I guess
half a meg is a lot
you could get that thing down to like 50k right?
Phil: the big one?
Ryan: what are they teaching you?
Phil: that you’re freakin nuts
Ryan: yeah the big one
i’m really glad I don’t have a webcam
Phil: so get this
Ryan: you’d see me getting off the floor right now
Phil: if I compress it to 5% quality (this is the smaller one on the page) I can get it down to 46k
Ryan: lol
Phil: and it looks like ass
seriously bro, there’s no way
it’s just a big ass image
i can get it smaller than it is currently, but there’s no way to get it to 20
Ryan: aren’t you on a mac
Phil: do you want me to do this or not?
Ryan: I thought it was magic or something
I’m utterly disapointed.
Phil: talk to Adobe then
Ryan: I will
Phil: okay i can get it to around 100
but it’s pixelated in some areas
Ryan: dude. stop.
lol
completely messing with you
Phil: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT????
lol
Ryan: I think I just achieved it
Phil: I ain’t got time to be beebopping in with this crap
Ryan: haha
I just got me a new status for my IM
are you ever going to talk to me again?
This kind of stuff happens all the time and is the key ingredient to our happiness with what we are doing. We’ll be giving out a lot more goofy things that happen as time goes on.
Well, leave it to us to launch a site geared for us to take over the world of web design and 6 months later we completely re-purpose our entire company. This blog was stunningly quiet for months after the first post and eventually was removed altogether because it’s not a real blog if we aren’t making posts right? I figured it was time to catch everyone up on where the company is and where it is headed in 2008.
Starting last year at SXSW we realized we weren’t taking business as serious as we should. As a result we began to take some small business classes and getting some council from various mentors that we meet with. What we realized was that we were unhappy with our current business model and began to brainstorm ways to change it.
The following weeks we went from completely closing our doors to hiring some staff to help us work through the areas we have struggled in. What we finally landed on was a departure from pure and simple Web Design to Web Application development. We’ve had many ideas that we think an online solution would help several groups we are involved with, so we have taken a step of Faith and gone with our gut and made the move. The grayness of our future is beginning to clear up as we work through this transition and we are all very excited about the months to come.
Which brings me to our next piece of news that I’m most excited about. In order to make this work Phil and I knew that we would need some help with something the size of an application, especially given our new found knowledge of our company analysis. We called a lunch with Chris Nilsson… a guy that has helped us for years work through our harder UI and coding problems on various projects. The result of that lunch is Intereactive bringing on another full partner in the business!
So here we sit.. Chris, Phil and Ryan… ready to take on the thousands of Web Applications that have failed. We believe that ours has a chance not becuase it has the potential to make money, but becuase we feel there is a need for it. Our eggs are in one basket, the blog is resurrected, and in the words of Jesse James… all we lack is finishing.
After 3 years, it’s time to say goodbye to the first version of our site and welcome in its successor. This is a moment we have been excited about for awhile now and it’s awesome to finally be at this point and watch the transition take place.
Launching “V1 - Creation” back in 2004 was a big moment for us and the site got the job done for the most part, but was lacking in multiple areas and needed an overhaul. The site was just not reflecting who we are and what we’re about as a design company. If we go to such great lengths to ensure that the sites we build for our clients accurately reflect who they are, then obviously our site should do the same. Our new site, “The Exodus”, was built to do just that.
One of the biggest areas that needed updating was our portfolio. Our work is the main ingredient of our company and so with our new site we’ve given our projects more focus as well as elaborating on their individual details. We also beefed up our who we are section to include detailed bios of our team members which really show off each member’s individuality. In addition we incorporated this blog which we feel will help communicate our personality as a company, as well as individually.
So have a look around and let us know what you think.