BKWLD has successfully had two – but not self-sufficient – offices for about 7 years. When Robert went to Seattle to open our second office out of his bedroom, we always knew it would be our main development hub due to Seattle’s inclination towards tech, while Sacramento would stay focused on design, production and management. The lines have since been blurred, and each office is much more talent varied, but the fact remains that working as one, finely tuned Frankenstein of interactive is crucial to our success, and inter-office communication needed to be second nature.

Here’s some thoughts on how we successfully keep morale high, the work awesome and use our two locations to our advantage when working with out of town clients and agencies.

“Work” based Pros
Having two drastically different locations has lots of merits. Having experience with what it’s like to work across borders internally is good practice for the ‘real world.’ Not having as many great local opportunities for work as we’d like, but loving the lifestyles that Sacramento/Seattle afford us, we’re able to easily work with out of town locations like LA, NYC, Denver etc. because we constantly work with people hundreds of miles apart – each other.

We know all of the tricks and tools to make working ‘remote’ efficient:

• iChat/Adium/Aim etc. – a constant barrage of conversation, sometimes bordering on stream of conscious, but the lifeblood of BKWLD
• Skype/video chats – for when we need some face time
• A weekly status meeting between both offices where we catch up on all projects, housekeeping stuff, etc.
• WebEx/Gotomeeting – for walking clients through CMS trainings, creative presentations, alpha builds of sites
• Basecamp – the best way we’ve found to house all files, pertinent messages, client feedback etc. It’s the nucleus between our offices and a client.
• JIRA – for testing and QA of a site, we’re having great results with JIRA and it’s bug reporting and classifications
• www.supportdetails.com – no more “what browser and version of flash are you running?” it’s the perfect way to find out the client’s boss is still running IE6 and Flash 5.

In an economic climate where a traditional agency in LA/NYC/London wants to test out a digital shop in a new location, since we have working remote on lockdown, it’s an easy sell to an out-of-towner why they shouldn’t be worried one bit to use a non-local agency. In fact, I have some clients who I just adore, and have actually never met in real life.

Furthermore, the pros of having multiple offices from a ‘business’ perspective are pretty obvious – multiple markets for talent, multiple markets for new business and just the perceived value of having multiple offices. Office-wise we keep morale high by having interoffice get togethers a couple times a year, and having a handful of internal ‘mailing lists’ that serve almost like forums. For everything from ‘check out this awesome website/article’ to video game reviews to funny viral videos, the inner office banter is always going on.

“Work” based Cons
It’s certainly not all rainbows and cupcakes, there are some things that aren’t wonderful about working with clients and coworkers across the country.

Some people are more visual, and just NEED face time to connect, to be held accountable, etc. It’s pretty easy to be a ‘telephone tough guy’ or hide behind emails, when just going out to lunch or grabbing a drink in person could have helped solve an easy problem. We always have a face-to-face kickoff and launch meeting with clients, but during the middle, some clients might need more attention, and a quick flight isn’t always an option. And sometimes a client wants someone local, no matter what.

Another con is something I call “Island Syndrome.” Suppose a project is being managed and designed in Sacramento, but only ONE person in Seattle is developing on it. It can be easy for this Seattleite to feel isolated and alone on a project, since no one in their direct vicinity is working on it or talking about it in passing conversation. We try hard to not let this occur from a resource standpoint, and the nature of our offices tend that people always want to know what everyone is working on, but it can still occur. Additionally, there’s nothing like some “designer-developer-one-on-one” when it comes to hashing out whether a design is possible, whether an idea is too big or just arguing whether or not flash is dead (which of course it isn’t).\

Lastly, sometimes we get “Sacramento? Why would anyone want to live there?” We shouldn’t be so quick to forget it is the capital of the greatest state in the world! It takes little explanation to prove why we love this quality of life, it’s proximity to Lake Tahoe and San Francisco, etc. But other people might want the gloss and glitz of a NYC or LA agency.

Overall, it’s more rare these days to find a successful company with just one office – it just makes sense to have a bicoastal presence. I think what makes BKWLD unique is our adherence to the west coast, with offices not in the largest of markets, and still finding ourselves playing successfully with the big guys nationwide. To this success I attribute everyone’s adherence to staying nimble, staying connected and staying on top of our projects, clients and co-workers.

Here at BKWLD we like to keep things such as our everyday work flow and culture as transparent as possible. I thought it would be a fun idea for everyone whom wanted to take part to list their top 5 or so most used apps.

Some of the apps listed are pretty standard and some not so much. We are always interested in exploring new apps so, please recommend away!

Jeff Toll – Creative Director

Photoshop - “Open and running every day, all day.”
TextEdit – “I get grief for using this but it’s lightweight and simple, simple, simple. I’ll start using a more robust text editor sometime soon. I use it for writing quick storyboards and concept explanation etc. ʻPagesʼ is upon the horizon…”
xScope- “Covers my ass for screen resolution guides at the very least.”
iChat- “Communicating with our Seattle office and random jackasses.”
iCal -“I’ve been getting better and better with my organization.

Robert Reinhard- CTO & Partner

Pages - “I haven’t touched MS Word in over 2 years and haven’t looked back. I love how it handles styles, it’s like easy CSS in a word processor.”
OmniOutliner - “For taking notes on conference calls.”
MAMP Pro - “Powers My LAMP dev environment. Makes it easy to setup additional testing vhosts (test dev rather than local host).”
TextMate – “When is 2.0 gonna come out?! I’ve been flirting with switching to Coda, but I miss some of the hotkeys.”
Socialite -“Aggregates feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Digg all in one place, plus allows me to post comments/tweets.”

Scott Thiessen – Flash Developer

Safari -“The Activity Window and Web Inspector alone are enough to make me feel like the king of the Internet.”
TextMate - “Lots of power for so little toolbar.”
Sequel Pro – “This is phpMyAdmin’s gorgeous, sophisticated sister. Unbelievable that this app is free!”
Spot Color + Developer Color Picker - “Slick way to grab colors from the screen, tweak them in your favorite gamut, and spit out hexadecimals.”
Quick Look - “Not really a stand-alone app, but I’ve definitely forgotten what it’s like to use a computer without it.”

Matt Aebersold – Flash Developer

Flash + AS3 - “Although thereʼs a steep learning curve, learning object-oriented AS3 has opened up so many doors, and is such an intricate and expansive programming language. Itʼs allowed me to create some kick-ass web designs.”
Coda – “Once a site project is completely set up, the complete integration is incredible, and so intuitive. Once I made the switch I’ve never looked back.”
MAMP - “Helped me do PHP dev on my local machine. Extremely helpful in every way.”
Things - “Awesome to-do app. Easy to set up and manage. So simple, and It’s what’s not included that makes it great. plus syncing over dropbox has make this invaluable. That said…”
DropBox – “Awesome cloud storage. If I point my apps there, than they sync on all my computers (iTunes, Things, etc…). Plus online file recovery is very easy.”

Sean Monahan – Flex Developer

Eclipse w/Flash Builder 4 Plugin - “Paraphrasing a Josh Reddin-ism, ʻItʼs a text editor for fully grown men.ʼ Upgraded from Flex Builder 3 stand alone and my opinion of Eclipse has greatly increased. Eclipse also has plugins for PHP dev, Unfuddle (our ticket tracking software) and Ant (for oneclick builds)- all this allows for a one-step development environment for Elastic.
Calculator -  “Boring, I know, but good for doing quick math. I use this a lot when programming Uls. Bonus: it has a “programmer” view for doing fancy binary math.”
Last.fm – “I like its music picks better than Pandora and the artist bios and photo streams are freaking sweet.”
Photoshop – “What doesnʼt it do?”
Adium - “A slick IM client that supports just about every IM service in existence.”

Aaron Egaas – Web Applications Lead

Chromium - “Browser of choice, nightly version of web inspector is as good as firebug without the performance hit.”
TextMate - “Code keeps me paid, and TextMate keeps me sane.”
iChat - “Remote communication, PM requests.”
MailPlane - “Multiple Gmail accounts? Like to keep ‘em separate? Notifications? Native web app feel with label and everything? Gets me into GCal, too.”
Terminal - “I gotta ssh into servers to push code, so I use some sweet aliases to keep it all organized.”

Dave Brown – Senior Interactive Producer

Adium
OmniOutliner - “Great for taking notes.”
FontLab Studio - “Converting fonts.”
Justinmind Prototyper - “Havenʼt really used this yet, but Iʼve heard great things.”
Adobe Media Player - “Checking/watching native flv.”

George Plendl – Front End Developer

Linkinus - “Best IRC client for a mac. irc.freenode.net, #jquery is a great place to learn and ask questions.”
Alfred - “Quicklaunch application for which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Replaced ancient Quicksilver app!”
Snippley - “Basic text and organization app.”
Beyond Compare - “Easily compare files, folders, images, anything. Itʼs great!”
TextMate - “The best text editor for Mac and a powerful abbreviation engine for HTML and CSS. Saves hours!”

Shelby White – Design Intern

DropBox - “Best app for managing projects between projects. I also use it for freelance in getting assets.”
Adium/iChat - “Adium manages contacts better but iChat actually sends files.”
Coda - “My favorite app with FTP for html/css.”
Wordpress - “ Where I’ve spent most of my last year and a half.”
TweetDeck - “Nice for managing my tweets…”

Joe Leoni – Producer

TweetDeck - “Best way to stay informed of Chad Ochocincoʼs daily workouts or Snoop Doggʼs ʻbreakfast activitiesʼ.”
iChat - “Instant messaging: extreme convenience and extreme inconvenience all wrapped up into one.”
Garageband - “Now anyone can be a MC, and youʼll probably be better than 99% of radio hip-hop.”
Pages - “Iʼd rather be using Word, but close enough.”
Solitaire - “The best way to play with yourself.”

Veronica Skarshaug – Administrative Assistant

Stickies - “Nice way to save on physical sticky pads, and info that I need on a daily basis is easily accessible.”
TaskMate - “Great for keeping my to-do’s in order.”
Numbers - “I like to make spreadsheets, I’m a total nerd.”
Preview - “Makes things easy, easy, lemon squeezy.”
iChat - “Because, duh.”

The Hit List – “Awesome and free GTD app to keep my days/life organized.”
Transmit – “Gorgeous UI and experience to easily upload my files.”
Adium – “My favorite chat client especially when used with the iPhone message style.”
Cicero – “Dashboard widget that fulfills my Lorem Ipsum needs. Used and abused daily.”
Photoshop – “There is a light on under this icon all day. Content aware fill has come in handy on more than 1 occasion.”

Over the last couple years we have had the opportunity to speak to various classes and programs full of folks enamored with the sort of work we get to do, and clients we get to do it for.  What’s funny is that we are always beside ourselves and left slightly confused with how enamored they are.

Just about this time every year for the last nine, I get several emails from local, national, and some international folks looking for a summer internship.  And for the last nine we did not offer anything.  The truth is we never saw the value, for them at least, in having a handful of young people running errands, and handling miscellaneous to-do’s.  Nor did we believe we had the time to really offer the hopeful lot what they might be looking for.  But that was then, and this is now…

This year we decided to kick-off a new kind of summer program.  One not for the faint of heart, lazy, or half-assed.  If you are looking for an internship that sends you on coffee runs, or where most of your time is spent on your own Facebook page, this isn’t for you.  If you are looking to get a first-hand, and hands-on perspective into what and how it all really goes down, this is for you.  It will be fast-paced, stressful, fun, exhilarating, you will want to pull your hair out, you will want to dance in circles.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Over the course of six weeks, a select group of six interns will be fully immersed in one fast (normal in the real world) paced project. You will be a part of client management, pitching ideas, and complete digital strategy including web, mobile, social and experiential…as well as all of the production headaches and home runs that we get to experience in a full day here at the Buk.  All of this will be done for of a real BKWLD client and if your work makes the cut, the client loves it, your work may even be used in the real world.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We are looking for a small group of dedicated and hard-working people.  We have no age limits, experience requirements, or education minimums.  However, we are looking for people with an inherent interest in marketing, design, and digital (duh). The right candidates will be interested in careers as producers, creative directors, technical directors, art directors, developers and storytellers. We expect this group to take it serious.  100% attendance, attention, and effort is required.  And like our friend Donald, we reserve the right to “fire” those not fully participating.

THE CALENDAR
In a nutshell, the weeks will look a little like this:

Week 1 – Immersion

• Introduction
• What is the process
• Client introduction
• Product discovery

Week 2 – Conception & Planning

• Story boards
• IA / Wireframes
• Revisions & Approvals

Week 3 – 5 – Production!

Week 6 – Case Study

• Document strategic analytics
• Write & submit case study

INTERESTED?
Sound good, want to see if you make the cut? Head over to www.bkwld.com/u to sign up and learn more.

Central Park

Yummy Dinners

Racking up loads of frequent flyer miles for personal use…..

All sweet  perks of tireless travel, however the insights gained and personal bonds created with my clients far out way the value of my deep and diverse Gowalla passport!

Over the past three years BKWLD has cultivated a fairly rich stable of retail clients; challenger brands that need to create a one on one relationship with consumers through a truly “branded” web experience in order to grow market share and earn relevance in saturated vertical categories.  A brand website, not to be confused with a B2C e-store (even though they can work in cohesion) in the one chance brands have to, truly tell a story especially when we are dealing with minimal media dollars  limited to aspirational life-style shots and cheesy headlines for half page ad in the typical industry pubs. To truly look  and the DNA of the brand, the common thread of products sold and the motivation of the consumers purchase decision is a healthy and sometimes eye-opening exercise I enjoy conducting at our now custom and mandatory brand discovery kick-off meetings.

So now myself, the assigned CD, PM and often times CEO Ryan Vanni (he picks great restaurants) all shlep out to: Boulder or Carlsbad or MorrisTown New Jersey to meet with our new clients and learn everything there is now know about these brands and why people actually pay full retail for the stuff they sell.  We start out asking what we think are pretty simple questions: Who is your target,what does your brand stand for, what other brands do they wish to emulate etc. Often to blank stares and confused looks around the table!  Not only is this shocking but exciting as we begin to peel back the layers of what really makes these brands special.  This exercise had lead to some of our best work and would have never happened had we not got off our ass, and pushed these brands to think a little.

Currently we are “getting personal”  with Gregory packs on some product launch strategies, Smartwool on a new brand site, and Chobani Greek yogurt on a new social media platform, that being said my next three weeks are booked with face to face meetings that will lead to  some new Discovery Gold!

My Two Favs:

Gravis http://www.gravisfootwear.com/
Status Quo: T&A, Tats and killer tubs.
Discovery:  Gravis is smart, stylish and interesting to people who just like to be rad.
Results: an award winning brand site that makes the killer product the star, not the killer backside 720 the sponsored athlete can boost.

Red Ledge: http://www.redledge.com/
Outdoor Industry: Beards, Fleece, and snoot bubbles as we climb K2
Discovery: Red Ledge is real, honest, functional and funny as hell!
Results: a site the pokes fun of the industry and speaks to the real consumer, and a tagline that says it all: “Functional, Affordable Clothing – For Those Who Exist in Reality.”

Brian Gossett’s mixes are regularly being played over the speakers up here in the Seattle office for quite some time so I wanted to take this opportunity to post one. To introduce this mix let me just say that it is a fairly dour and chilly compilation intended to capture the essence of the months of November and December. The artwork—always nicely done—is a clear reflection of the music.

This mix was contributed to The Mixtape Club which invites artists, musicians, and all around music lovers to make 10 song mixes. The mixes live on their website for about a month so be sure to catch them.

Cold Wind Blowing in the Witching Hour

I have been playing around with a handful of social integration utilities for Wordpress and so far the Simple Twitter/Facebook Connect plugins from Otto are by far the easiest, most feature useful and stable that I have found.

You will see that this post was simply, and easily posted to our FB Fan Page – http://www.facebook.com/BKWLD and tweeted (http://twitter.com/BKWLD)

The plugins have some really fun features – like automagically grabbing any “@” handles and linking them back to twitter – @BKWLD

Do you guys have any other favorite Wordpress plugins or add ons you find endlessly useful?

I tried out some of the newly announced Facebook features today, specifically the Open Graph markup and the Like social plugin.  They were both technically simple to deploy, as promised.  You have less control over the appearance of the Like button than I’d like.  For instance, they don’t have an option to ONLY display the like button without a list of total likes.  You can work around this by reducing the width of the iframe, but it was an unexpected restriction.  For us, the goal was to provide a handy way to Like us on Facebook; we don’t care to give screen real estate to showing your friends who have also Liked us (for the majority of visitors, I expect there would be none).

I initially went about including the Like button the wrong way.  In the demos they showed at the F8, it appeared that they would expect each deep linked article page in a blog to have a unique Like button, like how CNN is implemented.  So I did this:

However, when you click Like, it adds a link in your profile section on Facebook for that specific deep link.  For example, check out the article link added here from CNN:

You could imagine that very quickly this area would be cluttered with all the articles a person had liked on news sites and blogs.  Then I noticed this suggestion from the Open Graph Best Practices:

Make only real-life things into objects. Users don’t want news articles and other transient content as objects on their profile.

This advice makes sense, though it’s inconsistent that Facebook would tout their partner (CNN) whose implementation contradicts this.  Thus, I moved the Like button into the footer, making it site wide, and added a Digg link in it’s place.

Ideally, users clicking the Like button would be added to the BKWLD Facebook page (we previously had a group, which we’re deprecating).  So far, I’m not seeing this happen; users who Like our Facebook page and users who Like us on the BKWLD site appear to be dropped into separate buckets.  The Social Graph markup doesn’t have a field to specifically relate the object (our site) with a Facebook Page.  I assume that Facebook uses some black magic to join the references to BKWLD in the Social Graph metas with the BKWLD references in our Facebook Page.  Possibly this isn’t working because our Facebook page is so new.  Or possibly something got confused during my initial implementation that was per blog article.  It also doesn’t appear that the “fb:admins” meta tag is having any effect.  I’m curious to see if this generated page will be automatically merged into the official BKWLD Facebook Page in the next few days.  Or if a person Likes a site on the Facebook site and that site has Open Graph markup on the home page, does Facebook read it and pull that info in?

In sum, I think the social plugin and Open Graph standard are pretty great in terms of functionality for users that can be added with minimal effort by developers.  I hope some clarification comes from Facebook about how (or if) merging works between different pages.

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!

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