Recently both Jeff and I were asked to contribute to an article in this month’s How Magazine about working on projects that conflict with your personal ethics. Although I was just ever-so-slightly misunderstood by the writer who summarized that my “primary motivation is making money”, says article, I was thrilled to contribute. Now do not get me wrong, I like many other business people am excited by a healthy margin, but for crying in the night it is not my motivation, let alone my “primary” one.  If that were the case wouldn’t I be dealing in hedge funds or commodities or something like that?  But hell, how often do you get asked to contribute to such a great magazine, and maybe even more valuable to me, I now get to complain about being misrepresented (the italics represent a sort of douche bag tone in my voice).  So that’s something too.

Thankfully for the internet I have the luxury of publishing what was sent to them as my true views on the subject, and thankfully for my not-so-very-prolific-blogging-career, I have an article “in the can”.  So here goes:

Quite simply put, it is the designer’s job to visually convey the message they are hired to deliver.  A lot goes into doing that well, and being diametrically opposed to a project’s purpose definitely would not help.  So then even if a designer did try to set their personal beliefs aside in the spirit of “gettin’ the job done,” at what point does that become irresponsible and a disservice to the paying party?  No matter how much you loath the purpose, to me that plain disservice becomes its own isolated case of ‘wrong’ as a business value.

To me I think a number of things go into considering an assignment, and certainly personal morals and values are not the least of which that would play a part of that filter.  Obviously the more typical filters for me as the CEO are, will it enhance our brand, is it financially responsible, will it burn out the team, do we like the idea, etc…Normally the project’s nature is much more innocuous then offensive to any set of morals.  You know, selling a backpack, an mp3 player, a piece of software, and so on.

Being of the more independent mind set, I would provoke any designer, or anyone else for that matter, to simply turn down what they want to turn down for opposing any personal moral or value.  Certainly freelancers have that liberty, and as an employer I give my team that same liberty.  Now sometimes we disagree on whether a project is good for the company, and we listen to those opinions as well.

Earlier on in our history we did get approached to do a couple projects that did in fact oppose my personal beliefs.  I think I’d prefer to not get into the nitty gritty as to what and why, but they started somewhat harmless.  We took the projects, and as they progressed through development, the projects became more and more opposing.  At first I simply personally backed-off from offering my help.  One of which we finished, although I would argue not our best project ever (serving my earlier point), and the other we resigned.  From those experiences I know now to stay away from projects I do not believe in.  But again, that encompasses much more then morals and values these days.

2009 had been a challenging year for all of us.  And in a year that I would of expected to take any paying project, we have turned down more then we ever have.  That does not mean every project is a party, but it does mean to choose whether or not to accept it through some sort of filter that you (either as an independent or agency) have defined so that you, your team, your portfolio, or your bottom line is served, and then in turn the client is best served.

In lieu of Christmas gifts, we here at Buk decided to embrace a great America commercialized holiday and send our clients and partners Valentines instead.

If you did not receive one of these little diddys, one of three things could be possible:

1. We totally blew it and forgot you

2. You are on our shit list

3. We just started hanging out and we are not on kissing terms yet

Either way, much love. josh

One of the services we provide here at BKWLD is producing brand new sites for our clients. One of the difficult things about a brand new site is getting the word out about it. I’m mainly a developer here, so I thought it might be a cool exercise to research more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and put it into practice on a new site we’ve built for our new product, Elastic.

About Elastic

Many of our clients are in the “Outdoor Sports” category. Elastic is a software tool that ties together retail dealers to the sales representatives of our clients so dealers can easily order product for their stores directly from our clients. Currently, the market consists of paper based order forms, catalogs, and phone calls for inventory checking. Some of the bigger players in the industry have their own custom software solutions for this, like Trek or Burton, but they can be a little unwieldy and they only work for the one brand. Other competitors in this space force clients to adhere to their limitations and conventions. We recognized an opportunity here, so Elastic was created.

Elastic is based on Adobe Air technology, so the software runs on the desktop (Mac or PC), but  can also run in an offline mode. We designed it this way because typically sales reps would have the software loaded up on their laptop and bring it to the dealers directly. WiFi isn’t exactly pervasive yet in these environments, so always having an Internet connection is not an option. Sales Reps also travel a lot, so not relying on the Internet directly keeps them productive on the ground or in the air. Once the sales rep reconnects their laptop to the Internet, orders are placed and inventory totals are synced.

After the break we’ll get into it!

Read the rest of this entry »

WebGrind is a great tool for analyzing your PHP app and finding where slow down is occurring.  As stated on the Google Code site for the project, it is a “ Xdebug profiling web frontend.”  Here’s the steps I took getting it working in MAMP.

Install xdebug (taken from debuggable):

1. Download the latest Xdebug binaries for your OS from Komodo.  They will be labeled as “PHP Remote Debugging” for Mac OS X.  When you unzip it, you’ll see the xedbug.so file.
2. Copy the xdebug.so for your PHP version to your extensions directory (/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/xdebug.so)
3. Find your php.ini file (Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini)
4. Add the following lines to your php.ini configuration (MAMP):

[xdebug]
zend_extension=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/xdebug.so

Enable xdebug
Note, you don’t want to do this in a production environment.  Add the following to your php.ini file:

xdebug.profiler_enable = 1

Install webgrind (from the install wiki)

1. Download webgrind
2. Extract to a directory in the web root
3. Browse pages of your site
4. View the directory webgrind lives in.

That’s it!  There is some useful additional ini settings I found in this blog post:

# Set the filenames generated by xdebug to use REQUEST_URI instead
# of the apache process number
# so all requests to the same page end up in the same file.
xdebug.profiler_output_name = cachegrind.out.%R
# Set xdebug to append data to files instead of overwriting,
# this means you can view aggregate
# function calls over multiple requests.
xdebug.profiler_append = TRUE

I’ve already found some major instances of slowdown that can be cleaned up in the application I’m testing.

The SEA office flew down to Sacramento before the holidays to meet in person as a group, plan the next year, and have fun together over 4 days.  My shoulder was (and is) out of commission (bike accident) so I missed this years ski trip to Tahoe; it sounded like everyone got along fine without me though.  Going up to Tahoe is sort of a BKWLD tradition at this point, I think this was the 4th or 5th time.   Of all the photos I took, these came out the least blurry, which is pretty sad.  If someone with more skills and a better camera has some shots, please replace mine in this post!

Happy New Year everyone, looking forward to an amazing 2010!

Amen!

Brace yourself – a lot of the people at BKWLD play and love video games. I know, shocker right? From PC to consoles, to MMOs to handhelds, like most interactive shops and people of our age group, we all play and love games. So it’s no surprise that we enjoy making online/web games, whether as full fledged mini-sites, or in banner ads.

Recently we were interviewed by .net Magazine and one of the questions was what sort of things we felt made an online/web game successful. I enjoyed the question, and thought I would expand on it a bit in a blog about what Robert and I shared with them.

We basically boiled it down to four points we felt made for fun and success.

1. Competition & Recognition
If there’s one thing Twitter, Facebook and frankly, this blog proves, it’s that people love attention. Even while I am typing this, I am hoping you are enjoying reading this! So it’s not a surprise that people love to see their name at the top of a scoreboard, or to blast on their ‘wall’ that they just gained a level in Farmville. A game that doesn’t allow someone to ‘tell a friend’ about their score and challenge that friend to beat them is missing out.

2. Variables
I remember about 4 years ago we made a game for the California Tourism Committee that had you skiing against Governor Schwarzenegger down a mountain. Almost immediately, every high score on the board was “14 seconds”, because once you figured out the best path, that was the absolute best score you could get. Not very fun.

So by adding in some crazy score multipliers or jackpots, and things that might only show up in 1 out of every 100 games, you’re easily injecting not only variability, but also giving players a reason to keep trying.

Additionally, throwing in ‘bad’ items like point subtractions also helps make the game not about just trying to gobble up every item on the screen, but gets a little strategy into play.

3. Incentives
This is probably the most obvious of them all, but when someone is playing for an iPod/Corvette/cheeseburger, they are going to play. And play. And play. And tell their grandma to play too.

I think giving stuff away should be two pronged though – give something to the best, but also just give something randomly. In other words, you can give the Corvette to the person with the highest score, but also have 2nd and 3rd place prizes, and even a ‘boobie prize’ where any person who plays, has a chance to win that cheeseburger.

4. Keep it simple stupid
There’s a time and a place for an 80 hour epic gaming adventure. And that place is certainly not in a 300 x 250 banner on yahoo.com. If ever there was a time for a game to be ‘pick up and play’ it’s when it’s a banner or a minisite game. I think a good rule of thumb is if you need more than one page of instructions, it’s going to be too complicated for a ‘casual gamer’ and not complicated enough for a ‘hardcore gamer’.

Overall, there’s plenty of examples however where a game shines in just ONE of these categories, and that’s enough to keep people playing. But if you try to intertwine all of these into your next game (and let’s not forget about the actual ‘design’ of the game) you should have a winner on your hands.

We love making games, and for a while we always had at least one in development.  The demand has waned in the past year as companies focused on more direct kinds of marketing.  Here’s hoping we get more excuses opportunities to make games in the new year!

PS – here’s some of my faves we’ve done over the years.

• http://funnevergrowsold.com/game/
• http://www.whodouwant2b.com/game/
• http://yourcowtown.com/game/index.htm
• http://bkwld.com/work/indiana-jones-the-staff-of-kings
• http://www.firstbank.bkwlddev.com/728×315.php

From here.

Recently, a port of OpenCV, a library of object detection functions, was created for AS3 which has sparked a lot of interest and creativity in the flash and flex community. Stemming from this came facial recognition for AS3.

It is often difficult to find useful applications for these new technologies. Luckily, BKWLD was recently approached by .net magazine and was asked to write 2 articles. Jeff Toll, who’s article can be seen in this month’s issue, worked with me to come up with a design for a facial recognition application that will be featured in an upcoming issue of .net magazine. Together we came up with an idea for a virtual window, where the users can essentially fly through a 3D flickr gallery.

For the true experience you can visit the following link (you must have a web cam): http://bkwld.com/headtracking/. If you do not have a web cam, I have uploaded a demo video onto Vimeo at the following link: http://vimeo.com/7092048.

Here is the source if your feeling adventurous.
HeadTracking.zip

There are a couple things to note about the source code. First, this was developed using flex, so if you want use it in flash you will have to set HeadTracking.as as your document class. Second, I did not leave my Flickr API key in the source for obvious reasons. So, you will have to apply for a Flickr API key if you don’t already have one and enter it in the init function of the HeadTracking.as class file where it says “Enter your API key here”. If you find any errors in the source code be sure to yell at me in comments.

The following resources were used:
http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/26/realtime-face-detection-in-flash/
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000687.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

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