Shot of the homepage.

Shot of a photographer’s page.

We also had the chance to work on a few other things for their site. This is a PDF we designed for their spring portfolio. It was pretty easy to put together because all of their photographers are just ridiculously awesome, so no matter how you show the photos, they look rad. Below is a shot from one of the pages.

We also worked on a post card to announce the new site. Our inspiration came from a status update on facebook from our clients: “We are making progress on the new site….it’s like giving birth…. slow and filled with anticipation. We are so happy with the designers we are working with.”
Actually…we’ll just show you our gchat conversation about the postcard:

“me: thoughts on what this post card should say?

Martin: Small : check out out new site

Large : designed by these two magical beasts (our logo)

me: perfect

Martin: Umm

Martin: Probably just something like, we are so excited to announce blah blah

me: the birth of our new digital baby

they did tweet about it being like childbirth :0

Martin: That’s good

Make it like a birth announcement

me: heh, done.”

Oh and here is the postcard.

We were lucky enough to work with some really awesome clients (Emily & Susan) and can’t wait for what’s in store for the future. Huge thanks to Mel Hogan for letting us crash at their place while we were in KC and connecting us with O’gorman-Schramm. That is why you go to AIGA meet-ups and have drinks with rad people. Designers are rad people.

Here’s a taste of what’s coming.

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The Dallas Watersports Complex* has been an awesome project for us, especially since I’ve been wakeboarding for about seven years. Be passionate about fields outside of design! Woo! This is an example of how it can pay off. It’s something that is always brought up at conferences (check out our Make/Think video, Sagmeister mentions it..which puts it up there with the ten commandments). Anyways, we designed this rad logo that they’ve been using on everything to promote their launch! So great to see it in action. We also did some sweet business cards for the owners with a cute little map on the back. (We didn’t do their website.) Oh! And we’ve been using 4over.com to print business cards, these DWC cards turned out perfect.

Speaking of cards, here’s our new ones. We’re pretty stoked on using 4over.com, we had a snag with the first set of cards they printed for us but they reprinted them for free and look awesome now. They also have super nice live support people that speak English and say things like “lol” which is awesome. On our cards we used a 16pt paper with a spot UV on both sides. Might be a bit hard to see in the photo but the text on the back of the cards is just the UV.

Another fun project we’re in the middle of is for an interior design business called, Plan it Home. She decided to expand her business and change her name so we helped slip a little freshness into her new identity. Check it out!

Below is her old logo. Her old name was Windodressing and we wanted to make sure her clients still knew that this was her business. So we used the Zapfino font from her old logo and attached the old name to the new one. Once her brand is more established we’ll be able to remove the windodressing part. We think this will be enough to make her audience aware that her brand is really moving forward but it’s still the same business, doing the same great work.

Here’s another fun project for a student band. As you can see we’ve had a pretty wide range of projects lately, which is really awesome. Keeps things exciting. Look for part-2 of our work on Monday. We have a huge website that we just launched and we’re stoked to share.

*What’s a cable park? It’s basically a lake, with towers surrounding the lake. Cables connect to the towers and pull wakeboarders around the lake. It’s an alternative to having a boat, but it has become its own style and there are now a lot of tricks that come from cable riding. It’s pretty rad and if you’re in the Dallas area, definitely check it out when it opens at the beginning of summer.

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!

Thanks for stopping by.

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.

How do you ask the right questions?

We’ve been back in Texas for about a month now. We’ve actually landed a pretty decent amount of work. Enough to keep us busy, but not enough to be working non-stop. As most freelancers/business owners know and we’re quickly finding out, everything comes in waves. In fact, things are about to get really crazy, waiting on a couple of different clients to get back to us/pay initial deposit and then bam, everything is going to hit.

We’re in the process of four really big projects, which we will be able to show around late December / early January. Here are a couple we’ve completed recently. The first is a logo for Anne McCrady in Henderson, Tx. Her business is called InSpiritry and she basically inspires people via seminars, writing, podcasts, poetry, conferences, etc. She brings people together to become better then they thought possible. Anne has been one of the best clients to work for, she trusted our opinions, communicated exactly what she needed and everything went perfectly. Some of the points, from our initial meeting, that Anne wanted realized in the logo were: go out into the world, widen your perception, open up – do more, see more, learn more, come together, grow, etc. These are very abstract ideas, but we think each of them comes together in her new logo.

This next project we did for Speks Creative, a pretty rad design firm in Pheonix. Yes, we design websites! We are not going to lie to you, the website is pretty awesome, we’re really proud of it. Check it out here: http://www.pchbeachball.com/

Lettuce know what you think!

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.

The resource section of our blog is also going to continue to grow. We still have a ton of content to get up on the site, in fact, over the next week, Martin and I will be editing video non-stop. Our new direction is to show a different side of things. We’re essentially going to open the doors to our design firm so wide that everyone can see what’s going on. We want to share all the good/bad experiences of starting a design firm. If you ever have suggestions or questions, email us — driftingcreatives@gmail.com — we’d love to hear from you.

Check out our Hire Us page and be on the look out for a whole lot of scrumptious design goodness in the next couple of days. You wouldn’t believe how much video we have!

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