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 »

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!

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

Say you have a table of names that you want to alphabetize.  Of course you could SELECT and ORDER BY name ASC.  Lets assume that’s not an option and you want to save their alphabetical order in a special column so then you can ORDER BY this column.  This might be useful if you have an application where users can manually order their items but you give them them option to reset to alphabetical.  Here’s what your table looks like:

people
- id (int)
- name (varchar)
- sort (int)

Here’s how you can populate that sort column with integers that, when ordered by, put the results in alphabetical order:

SET @i=0;
UPDATE people
INNER JOIN (
SELECT id, @i:=@i+1 AS i FROM people ORDER BY name ASC
) counter ON counter.id = people.id
SET people.sort = counter.i;

The SET command initializes a variable.  The subquery orders the list and adds a new column (i) that counts off each row effectively.  Then the outer query joins on this by the PRIMARY id so that we match the ordered row from the subquery with the outer query.  And lastly, we store the i value back in the table.

I’m not sure if it was Demetre’s last blog post or the deafening crush of hearing “Twitter” come from every web, marketing, entertainment etc. person for the last few months, but it’s abundantly clear that Twitter is not going anywhere, and that’s a good thing.

Not to recant on my previous post regarding Twitter’s penetration – and after re-reading it, I realized that I sounded as if “your mom having a twitter” was a bad thing. Quite the contrary, it’s a fabulous thing for the web and for my industry. For at it’s most basic level, anything that keeps people using and talking about the internet is good for interactive shops.

That’s why I was especially stoked to see this New York Times article talking about how small businesses are using Twitter to get their name out there and connect with other customers and businesses.

One quote I found particularly poignant was the following from Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter:

“We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit.”

I think this is the real value in Twitter – immediacy & intimacy. Whether it’s breaking news spreading like wildfire through the “Twitterverse” (please slap me for using that term) like Michael Jackson’s death, or an impromptu Dave Chappelle appearance turning into a gathering of thousands of people, to much smaller scale things like that New York city street vendor broadcasting his location and menu items for that day, there’s nothing fresher on the web than a tweet. Read the rest of this entry »

Best Buy has just launched Twelpforce. The service allows for Twitter users to converse with Best Buy specialists on anything from selecting the best video game console to instructions on charging their new camera.

It’s refreshing to see a brand like Best Buy allow such an open dialogue with their customers and at the same time embrace a technology like Twitter in such a broad way. The new broadcast spots perfectly sum up the concept, conceived by our friends over at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

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.