Charleston is easily one of our favorite cities. We landed a job. The weather was amazing. Our clients let us stay at their awesome house for a couple nights. It couldn’t have been better. Huge up swing from Spartanburg, where we couldn’t find any work.

This project was a logo for a Christian fitness center.

New work: Five epic t-shirt designs. We did this for a very inspiring young business owner in South Carolina. We had free range and can’t wait to see them printed. Check ‘em out.

OMG. St. Louis you are unreal. The last two days have just been incredible. We spent all thursday working/hanging out with Atomic Dust. These guys are unbelievably talented, super fun to hang out with, hilarious and all around badass. Atomic Dust is a graphic design and marketing firm and they specialize in awesome. Seriously.
They hooked us up with a project to design a poster for their conference room. Check out some of the pics they posted on the Atomic Dust Blog.
These guys also had a sweet studio space. Check it out:

St. Louis was absolutely amazing. Tuesday evening we met up with @Zakmorris, very cool guy. He hooked us up with an awesome dinner and a place to stay. Zak has some big ideas in the making so watch out. Huge thanks to him for helping us out.

All Wednesday we hung out at Infuz, an interactive design firm in downtown St. Louis. To all the design/dev students that just graduated, this firm should be at the top of your list. These guys are so freaking awesome. Jason and Ryan, the CEO and VP respectively, cleared out their schedules for us. We spent the day swapping stories, soaking up advice and we even managed to do some work. We all spent a few hours brainstorming for a really exciting project they are starting. It will be a community driven, story sharing project and we seriously think it is going to be epic, so watch out. We should be able to share more about it once it gets closer to launch.

What did we take away from this experience? One piece of advice that made an impression on us is something Jason talked about.
Managing expectations. This idea can really apply to anything in life but is critical to project management. Defining exactly what the client needs and making sure the client knows exactly what they are getting will hopefully remove most surprises. Surprises are not fun and obviously not entirely avoidable, but if the project expectations are understood across the board, everyone will be happier in the long run.

Okay, so, putting ourselves out on the web like this means that we might show some work that we aren’t satisfied with. It’s okay, we want to be completely transparent. The latest project was a website for La Casa Rosa, a Mexican food restaurant in Texarkana, AR. We did it in about 10 hours. We are getting better about coming up with our ideas quicker and faster but we still need work on making them a reality. We’ve done about 4 websites between the two of us. Not one of our strong suits. We are working on this. Regardless, we feel confident the style of the restaurant is reflected in the website. It communicates effectively, there are just some things, given more time, that could be improved on.

The best part about this experience was how cool the client was. She was super nice and even hooked us up with a couple of meals, which were delicious.

What did we learn from this? We learned we need to design within our coding abilities.