SODA's Click 2009 - 10/01/2009

This past thursday (10/1/09) our creative directors, Jeff Toll and Demetre Agres and I had the pleasure of attending the Click 2009 SODA event at the Art Directors Club in NYC.  There we got to hear from amazing boutiques like Unit9 (particularly loved them), Syrup, and Poke, as well as from some of the agency juggernauts like Goodby, CP+B, JWT, and Ogilvy, all introduced and hosted by the after-hearing-him-talk-I-truly-get-why-he’s-such-a-likable-force-in-the-industry Michael Lebowitz (which I am pretty sure I learned is “lEbowitz, not lEEBowitz) from the infamous Big Spaceship.

The topic and discussion points varied from more granular subjects like “Branding with numbers” (which I found surprisingly intriguing) to more general monsters like “What is the future of entertainment”.

First off I have to say what a pleasure it is to hear from such talent in one room, on one day, and in person.  I mean Jason Zada, Lebowitz, and Mike Geiger to name a few…truly a pleasure.

Of all the nuggets of wisdom I can take away from the discussions, what is interesting to me is that despite agency head-counts, annual billings, specific focus, country of origin, or AOR vs. project-based orientation, we are all facing similar issues; digital agencies finding their autonomy from the traditional ones, an ever-changing set of tools, an even more-changing option of techniques and services we have the option to render should we decide to, and a myriad of ways we can manage the whole damn thing.  But here in-lies the beauty, though facing the same obstacles and issues, the lot of us are choosing completely different approaches to the hurdles, and its working.

We have the luxury of working in an industry that is defining itself each day, and that works for me.  After all, what are we if we are not problem solvers?  At the end of the day we are simply choosing what tool we want to solve the problem with.  So I welcome and embrace the luxury of being able to re-define, re-shape, and re-focus. What fun it is after all.

So after a wonderful day with our peers, and a couple others enjoying an amazing city with good colleagues and friends, I am glad our industry is a kid.  It has many options, and oh so much potential.  Im not sure if its the couple cups of coffee, or the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack I am listening to as I type this, but I love this kid and want what’s best for him too.  So let’s keep talking.

Art Directors Club NYC

Woohoo! Our friends over at CampaignMonitor have featured the latest Bkwld Newsletter in their gallery of well designed email campaigns. Take a look at some of the other inspiring designs or better yet, signup for our newsletter.

I don’t often batch import layered files (PSD, PNG) into Flash or even copy graphics into it.  But what I DO find really handy is copying text between the apps.  This worked in CS3 but it’s gotten better (more accurate) in CS4.  You can copy a whole group in and the font, size, and color are all maintained (or close enough, you usually have to nudge line height).  This saves tons of time when you’re populating a whole FLA from a text heavy design while keeping the text editable for the inevitable copy change.  Notice in this video how I can bring in multiple text boxes at a time.

I love Photoshop. Okay, now that’s out of the way I can tell you about why I think every other web designer should consider checking out Adobe Fireworks for their next project. I realize this may be a touchy subject and that everyone is quite comfortable at the point using Photoshop and sometimes even Illustrator for web layouts. However, Fireworks is truly made for just this.

The first thing you’ll notice about Fireworks vs Photoshop is it’s ability to work with vector objects much better than Photoshop. I find this to be one of the biggest and best differences for me. This is extremely helpful when rapid prototyping projects and putting together wireframes.

I also love how Fireworks handles gradients over Photoshop. Giving you a simple handle to modify the direction and length of your gradients over the Photoshop guess and check method.

Another big deal for me is the Pages and States panels. When working on a large site it’s easy to get lost in Layers and constantly turning things on and off. With Pages you can easily setup a global layer that handles consistent elements like a primary nav, and then have a clean set of layers for each section of the site. I also find this functionality extremely helpful when brainstorming concepts and saving constant iterations through out the design process.

Another one of Fireworks big strengths is that it works very seamless into the Flash production workflow. You can copy a vector object from Fireworks and paste into Flash while retaining the vector object without having to create a bitmap, one of the first thing to wow our developers when introducing them to Fireworks for the first time.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the features in Fireworks that I use on a regular basis that improve my workflow and hopefully inspire some people to at least open it up and check it out. I think once you get used to it you’ll find it’s an amazing tool and hopefully integrate it as part of your web production process.

As of lately I’ve really been meaning to explore Photoshop CS4’s 3D tools. After researching the programs new native 3D tools, they seem to be much more powerful than I had initially imagined. I also was really impressed with Adobe’s latest promotional site “Meet Dweezlbug” where artists Genevieve Gauckler and Erick Natzke created a beautiful creature using the suites new tools. The site features a brief breakdown on all the tools and techinques used such as the new native 3D tools, adjustments, 3D layers and also a bunch of new flash tools and techinques.

I love it all!

Enjoy!

Over the years, I’ve tried cataloging some of the inspirational things I find on the web. It’s been a bit of a labor of love since it’s not the most seamless process and takes forever. However, now that’s all changed. I installed Realmac Software’s web page capture software Little Snapper, and with a few key commands I can quickly save entire web pages or just a selection. Once inside the app I have the ability to quickly tag and categorize each snap.  Not only is the process of cataloging inspiration easier, Little Snapper looks amazing and is polished beyond belief. They just released an iPhone version of Little Snapper I have yet to check out but it looks very interesting and has the ability to post your snaps to Twitter.

While busy working away on creative for Gregory’s 2009 product launches, and in desperate need of some seriously great photos, we needed to find someone who shared our vision and could deliver the exact imagery we needed. Enter über talented photographer Tim Kemple. We spent the last week hopping around Northern California with Tim and an incredible group of talent including the amazing climbing machine Joe Kinder. From Grass Lake in Tahoe to Bolinas and the Bay, Tim captured an amazing set of photos we literally cannot wait to unveil.

We have recently been using Cufón on some of our recent projects, most noticeably version 3 of our own site as well as Mering Carson, replacing sIFR which worked but was resource heavy as well as a cumbersome task of creating fonts.

This has opened a lot of creative freedom for our creatives, knowing they can use a font and to see it exactly the same from design in comparison to the build. I would have to say this makes Jeff’s and Demetre’s job a lot easier.

The nice thing about Cufón is it’s still SEO friendly as well as very lightweight compared to the flash solution that has been the de-facto method of typography treatment for the web, sIFR.

One downfall of Cufón is you can’t select text, although sometimes you get lucky, it just isn’t supported. You might be thinking, oh no?! But hopefully in later builds this won’t be a problem, and it will be the most “usable” solution. What are your thoughts?

While working on website concepts for our good friends at Sacramento ad agency MeringCarson. We started playing with concepts based on a line from their mission statement; “Think ‘Till It Hurts”. One of the ideas that kept sticking with us was to actually take the statement quite literally and show the staff of MeringCarson beat up and injured. After doing some rough comps I remembered a great set of images from photographer Nicolai Howalt titled Kid Boxers. The series of images documents children in their early teens before and after a boxing match. The images are extremely compelling and served as a huge inspiration for beating up our agency friends.

While working on all of the post production on the images it turns out it’s much harder to beat someone up in Photoshop than with your fists. There is an extremely fine line between making someone look beat up versus someone ready to go Trick or Treating on Halloween.

Visual effects studio OOOii was given the opportunity to create the visual interfaces for JJ Abrams new Star Trek movie. Typically, this is all done in post production and the actors have to pretend they are interacting with a super computer from the future. However, with the power of Flash and AIR, OOOii created numerous interfaces allowing the actors to interact in real time with actual working applications during many of the films scenes. Read more about it on Lee Brimelow’s Flash Blog.