As someone who has grown up using the internet, I always favor services that allow me to conduct business over the web. I do things like shop, pay bills, and bank online whenever possible. In addition to being convenient, I always feel a little better about not wasting paper and other resources required to facilitate these processes. So each year at this time, I’m always grateful for the ability to file my taxes online. And to do this, I’ve always used H&R Block…. that is until this year.
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We’ve posted a few times recently about one of our favorite projects, www.snowflakeworkshop.com. I stumbled across another similar site today: http://www.flurrious.com/. I’m not sure who is behind this site, but they took a very different visual and functional approach to making snowflakes. It’s pretty cool to see how someone else tackled a similar challenge. Additionally, they are claiming to donate to UNICEF for each shared flake– which if true is a really cool feature as well.
I thought Mitch’s recent post about his coffee making philosophy was a pretty interesting way to explore what he’s all about. So for the sake of comparison, I figured I’d also do a post that related my working style to food preparation. Suffice to say, there are some significant differences.
SnowflakeWorkshop.com
Whenever I come across creative work that I like, my first thought is often, “How did they do that?” As someone who works in the industry and knows all the moving parts that go into a great project, I find others’ processes fascinating. But the resources for discovering this information are frustratingly few and far between. So to do my part in providing more of this kind of background info, I am going to try to spotlight a few of our projects here on the blog. Hopefully someone will find it helpful (or at least interesting) to see us pull back the curtain a bit and reveal our creative process.
She Must Work Out
At Manning, we spend a lot of time trying to help our clients understand and navigate the rapidly changing media environment. Often times, this means encouraging them to take advantage of the explosion of ‘social media’. (I’m so sick of this term) The internet allows businesses and organizations to communicate in ways never before possible and to interact directly with their users, customers, etc. The benefits of this should be obvious. But convincing a business to throw out generations of conventional wisdom in favor of new models of customer service, marketing and PR can be an uphill battle.
More Bars In More Places (For a Fee)
Here at Manning, a good percentage of the staff consider themselves iPhone fanboys. Those of us who consider this gadget an indispensable resource love to extol its virtues. But like many iPhone converts, there is one major complaint we all share: if we want an iPhone, we pretty much have to become AT&T customers.
Designing for the web comes with a unique set of challenges and thus has its own ‘charm’. User interactivity, browser compatibility, connection speed, color calibration, flash, html, css… these are all factors that have to be accounted for when building a web page. (Each of these may become their own topic of discussion in time.) The sheer number of variables to control can make the process extremely tedious.
The technology underlying these variables is extremely new and is constantly changing. It’s a little bit of a ‘wild west’ environment. So, understandably, many of the people who commission web work are still a bit new to the whole thing and, therefore, it falls on designers and developers to educate and guide them through the process. Overall, it’s a rewarding experience. But you do sometimes have to overcome certain preconceptions that people carry over from their days in traditional media.
Newspaper Graveyard
Everyone knows that the internet has really rocked the boat of traditional media outlets. File sharing and iTunes have taken a bite out of the record industry. Newspapers everywhere are in the midst of a death rattle. And it hasn’t been that long since the WGA dared to protest the fact that they were not getting paid for work distributed over the internet.
It’s kind of a free-for-all right now. The technology is so new that no model really exists, and big media distributors are in a panic trying to find ways to squeeze revenue from this new system. But there is a silver lining for aspiring artists. Everyone now has relatively equal access to new distribution channels.
The Republican National Committee has put out an RFP for a new website. One can only assume that Obama’s successful web campaign and the GOP’s recent identity crisis has led to the urgency of this effort. The specs are pretty vague and the turnaround time listed (45 days) is slightly *ahem* ambitious for a job of this scope. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.
The full document is after the jump.
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In the most recent high-profile example of art vs. copyright, famed street artist and fellow designer, Shepard Fairey is catching hell from the Associated Press over a photo of Barack Obama. The AP alleges that Fairey’s ubiquitous ‘Hope’ poster infringes upon their copyrights for the photograph on which the poster was based.
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