While we were on the road we had an overwhelming show of support from so many friends across the country. Thank you! This past weekend we sent out a little gift to the people that helped us out in someway or another. Yes, it is a car freshener and yes the scent is called, “five-months-in-a-car-with-two-smelly-dudes” aka fresh. So keep us on the road and we hope you enjoy. Oh and we signed the cards with the element’s back tire. Check out the vid.
We’ve been off the road for about three months now. Starting a firm has been tough, but everyone’s support and encouragement has made it much easier. We’re sorry we haven’t been able to update the blog much in the last few months. When we were on the road, the blog felt like our job. Now our job is cranking on websites and logos and what not. It’s too easy to put aside a blog update, but this year is going to be a great one and we hope to share as much of it as we can.
For instance! We were lucky enough to be asked to speak at the AIGA Dish student design conference in Nashville coming up in February. So if anyone is going, let us know! We’d love to meet you.
Project news, we’ve got an epic website that we’re finishing up this week! We’re really excited to go live with it and even more excited to share. So check back next week for a post about the project. We also have a couple identity projects / logo designs we will be able to share then too!
New information keeps coming at us faster and faster and it makes it more difficult to focus on what we are learning. When you’re thrown into it like we have been, realizing why we are adapting becomes harder to recognize. However, we’re trying our best to absorb everything, evolve and then realize why we’re doing something different so that we can share it.
Asking questions is pretty easy, but asking the right questions can be freakin’ hard. Our first experience with this was at the very beginning of Drifting Creatives. We had a client that wanted a logo. We had a meeting, asked a ton of questions and got responses of “Well I’m not sure”, “I’d have to see it”, “When I see it, I’ll know”. So did we ask the right questions? We left that meeting completely unsure of what the client wanted. At the time, I didn’t think it was our fault, but now I believe it was. As designers, we are communicators. It may be perceived that we only do it visually but when you work with clients, if you can’t communicate with them, you are done.
Communication isn’t just about how you verbally relay information. It is also how you obtain information, how you draw it from a person in conversation. We have to pull, sometimes pry, what we need from our clients and if we don’t, if we give up, we’re really failing our clients.
How do we ask better questions? We’re still refining our process. It is never going to be a strict list of questions. It will be learning how to better relate to our clients, getting into their shoes, and understanding how they perceive their business. Research!
We also think transparency is key. When you are with your best friend you can ask them and tell them anything. You have trust, you’re open and unafraid. Now obviously not every client is going to be your best friend, maybe not even a friend, but developing that trust, being transparent and approaching it from a friend perspective will help to have real communication. Communication that hopefully gives you a better perspective for what your client needs.
Barkley
Until we went to Barkley we had decided that if an ad firm had 100+ people — the firm would be lame. We wont mention any names that would have given us this impression, but, okay…it was the Richards Group in Dallas. Cubicle farm, corporate and stale are a few things that come to mind, granted the job security and monetary perks of working there may out-weigh the previously mentioned observations, for some.
Anyways, then we went to Barkley. This place was huge, but they still had that “human” feel that you would find in a ten person design firm. There was serious attention to details in the architecture of their building. Beautiful lighting fixtures, incredible art everywhere, rooftop gardens, amazing furniture, and the list just keeps going. Oh! And they had a huge TWA rocket on their rooftop. Craig Neuman gave us the tour of the place and it was easy to see that he enjoyed where he worked.
Sonic is a one of Barkley’s clients and something Craig mentioned that we had never thought of was how much money Sonic has to spend on menus. Think about McDonalds and their one menu at the drive-thru…Sonic has a million at every location. So every time they change the menu…bam! They have to spend some cash. Sonic is rad, they have delicious tater-tots.
Willoughby
This was a really sweet design firm. There was definitely a feminine touch to the place, something we hadn’t experienced at any other design firm. Ann Willoughby started the firm and has since done some absolutely amazing work. Zack Shubkagel, one of the few guys at the firm, gave us the tour and then we ran into him at the Make/Think conference which was pretty cool.
Most design firms we’ve come across have been fairly dominated by guys. Although, shortly after our visit at Willoughby we went to Hallmark — which I believe also had a higher percentage of women. So after serious analysis, Kansas City, MO is the epicenter for female designers. The next AIGA national conference should be in KC. Check out the sweet little tote-bag Ann gave us.
Reactor
Clifton Alexander and Chase Wilson are some awesome guys. We spent most of our time hanging out with them. Working in their sweet office and eating some delicious food. Clifton knows his food. He does some serious research. KC has some delightful barbeque and their tacos aren’t too shabby for a Northern state (”Northern state” meaning anything north of Texas).
You’ve most likely seen their business cards because they tend to be featured everywhere you see one of those “50 most radical business card designs ever!” blog posts. They really are epic cards so check em out.
Hallmark
Another exception to our big-firm-equals-stale-and-boring theory because Hallmark was able to pull off the corporate feel but still have a pretty sweet work environment. It obviously had the farm of cubicles but then it had these magical gems scattered about the campus. Walking through the cubicles, we saw some of the most beautiful hand drawn typography. It also felt like being back in school. The place was big enough to be a university campus. Pretty rad dining services, cafeteria, library, art galleries and awesome people.
We only met a couple people there but our lovely tour guides, Bess Baumgarten and Erin Mills, were incredible hosts. Then we met Tom, a paper specialist. He gets to fold and create paper sculptures all day. His work was incredible but the most inspiring thing about him was how much he loved his work. It was so cool to see how excited he was to show us his little amazing paper creations.
Thanks to everyone in KC that let us stop by and hang out.
We really appreciate it.
Charlotte was super nice to us. Somehow we manage to show up in cities just when all the fun design meet-ups are going on. There was an AIGA happy hour and an early morning “buzz” meet-up, needless to say, we were a bit late to the buzz session. It was however, very cool. Charlotte has a very active design community. Huge thanks to Nikki Mueller for letting us crash at her place and setting everything up for us. We had a chance to get some coffee/dinner with Jason Keath, pretty rad dude. He’s rocking the social media conferences at socialfresh.com. We also had a chance to meet with two design firms that do some amazing work, Studio Banks and Mode. We’ll post their interviews shortly.
While we were in Charlotte we were invited to go on a Typographic tour with a design class from CPCC. Someone from the class has a better photo of everyone so send it to us if you can!
Mmm typography and textures!
Adobe did some pretty awesome stuff for the AIGA Make/Think conference. Among them was the Music Cafe they set up in the “design fair” area. Local talent entertaining the designers while they wandered around grabbing samples from all the great sponsors. It made the Memphis experience much more genuine.
Adobe also had a couple of workshops, one on the CS4 trinity (PS, AI, ID).
Here are a couple of sweet little nuggets we picked up at the workshop:
Content-Aware Scaling. Not sure if you’ve played with this yet, but you should.
Edit > Content Aware Scaling
Shortcut on a PC: ALt + Shift + Ctrl + C
Shortcut on a Mac: Alt + Shift + Cmd + C
You can create a mask channel to protect objects you don’t want to scale, if it doesn’t scale like you want. Basically PS looks at the pixels and wherever it sees a lot of detail (change in color) it leaves that area alone. When it finds areas that are similar colors, ie the beach in the photo below, it knows it can most likely stretch this without losing much detail. Pretty nifty.
Workshop #2
Nugget #1
One of Adobe’s ideas is, “You shouldn’t need to learn to code to express your ideas across any media” which sounds pretty sweet for us non-coders, but will this ever be a legitimate reality? We don’t really think so, people are always going to want to customize and there is only so much you can template. Not to mention, developers are always pushing the limits, and adobe will always be behind. But, who knows, maybe this new software will be killer. Adobe Flash Catalyst is in open beta right now. Apparently you don’t need to know any code and it is specifically built for designers to create interactive web sites.
We just watched this video about it here, there is some cool stuff at adobe labs worth checkin out. If anyone has used this software yet, shoot us a comment, let us know what you think. We’re going to dive into it soon and play with it a bit.
Nugget #2
Apparently InDesign has some interactivity buried in it also. Window > Interactive. Some great stuff here for portfolios, like buttons, page transitions, etc.
Nugget #3
That fancy looking page turning effect you see a lot on web-based magazine publications is as simple a checking a radio button when exporting in ID. It is very simple. With a multi-page file opened. Click File > Export > change the “save as type” in the drop down menu to “.swf”. A new dialog box will pop up. Under “Interactivity” check the “Page Curl” option and then bam. Done. Save and open your file in a web browser.
Nugget #4 Adobe Browserlab. Okay this is pretty rad. This app lets you view your web designs in any browser. You can view one at a time, two simultaeously or you can even onion skin. Definitely worth checking out.
onion skin view of ie 6 vs. ie 7 on Martin’s site using browser labs
Memphis is full of soul, so when you have a conference (AIGA Make/Think) there, it is to be expected that it will be full of delightful music. The amazing Colonial Middle School Choir, a sing along with Sagmiester, an overweight Elvis kissing Debbie Millman, and a Janitor singing about gremlins (We think). Not to mention all the great music on Beale Street. Thanks for being so nice to our ears Memphis.
So, every two years AIGA hosts a design-oriented/mind-altering/mind-rejuvenating/mega conference. We think it’s a pretty big deal and we’re pretty freakin’ stoked to be able to go. We magically got hooked up with some tickets and we’ve been giddy since we found out. This year it’s called Make/Think. It’s in Memphis, TN (still need a place to stay). It starts Thursday, Oct 8th and goes till Sunday, Oct 11th. We’re going to take over. Here’s the plan:
We are going to connect with every single person that goes to the conference. No seriously, we’re serious. We’re going to take our Flip camera and track down everyone and ask them three mind-boggling questions. This is where we need your help. We want to ask two questions that have yes/no responses and one question that has a fairly short answer. One question should be hilarious, one should be controversial and one should be personal but unrelated to design. We have a few thoughts, but we’d love to hear what you guys think we should ask.
So if you have a question that you’d like a ton of designers to answer, please comment! We really need your help.
Oh and check it out, Obama flew over us when we were in DC. Hi!
Don’t even read this post if you don’t have time, just spend what time you do have checking out Nicholas Di Genova’s site. Seriously, quit reading this and go look at his website. Okay, that’s a lie, you should also watch the video. When we were in Toronoto, we got a chance to hang out with Nicholas for a bit, see some of his latest work and chat about his process.
Here is some of his work from his site. The detail and time that goes into each of his pieces is unreal. So Nicholas has two different styles. In one he draws collections of creatures, usually fantastical and strangely cross-pollinated with other animals/plants and the other style is his grid work. I think I remember a quote of his from another interview where he says that he wanted to see what 8,000 birds look like just in one place and so a lot of his work is just that. Titles like, 315 canines, mixed flock of 315 birds, 88 fiercest amphibians in the animal kingdom, again, check out his site — be amazed. His latest show is going to have a massive piece with 20,000 different butterflies. We didn’t get a chance to see it but he said it was about 4′ x 6′. He said that from about 5ft – 10ft away it looks just like a gray scale. The detail in his work is unbelievable. Another crazy thing is that he draws everything twice. Once in his sketch book and then the final. That’s not too crazy, to have a sketchy version and then the final thing. He tried to tell us the ones in his sketch book are rougher, but then he showed one of the “sketch book” versions…it was beautiful and it may as well have been the final.
One of the awesome perks about this trip is that we’ve been able to meet a lot of the people we looked up to in school. Nicholas is no exception. Martin and I actually started a project where one of us drew a monster and then passed it off, redrew it/evoled it, then passed it back. The cycle continued until we created the perfect monster. This was something we did in school and it was purely inspired from a project Nicholas Di Genova was involved with called the road of knives. The blurb from their site describes it as, “Zak Smith, Shawn Cheng, and Nicholas Di Genova take turns drawing monsters fighting each other… ” It’s that simple but it’s an epic battle, check it out sometimes.
Nicholas is a super chill guy, really down to earth and incredibly passionate about his work. We were so stoked to be able to hang out with him for a bit. He also hooked us up with two of his books that he has published. Imagine some delicious chocolate that tastes magical in your mouth, well that’s what every page of his book is except for your eye balls. One is about 5in x 5in and we keep it on our dashboard and look at it when we get bored. Clearly we’re huge fans, we just don’t want anyone else to miss out on this dudes work. If an Eggtopus Borg can’t inspire you, something is wrong!
Minneapolis. A homeless guy asked us to sign his shirt and then convinced us to pay him for it. We rocked out at a Ferry Corsten concert because Tony, the designer we stayed with, was a baller and did the promotional posters for the concert. It wasn’t really our scene but good times were had by all. We found a sweet designer toy shop called Robot Love. We went to an AIGA meet-up at a swanky bar, something that still boggles us. We’ve been able to attend quite a few AIGA meet-ups and they all seem to be in expensive bars. We’ve also noticed half the people that go to these are freelancers that recently lost their job. AIGA: designers don’t have the cash to spend nine dollars on a drink. Try going to a dive bar, so the broke dudes can get drunk enough to network. We met a ton of cool young designers, some still in school and some killin’ it professionally. It was super inspiring. We also met up with Mr. Bolger. We were able to set up a time to meet him at his print shop. “Shop” isn’t the right word, this place was huge. Check out the video for a little tour.
@martinhooper & @gavinbraman just graduated from Texas A&M University. We are creative problem solvers, aka designers. One problem we are trying to solve is joblessness. What are we doing about it? We are taking our design skillz to the road. Too many small towns don't have access to smart design. We know we aren't a huge design firm, but we think we can help out.
