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in Friends, Inspiration, Interview, Uncategorized on February 21st, 2010
Just outside Chicago’s Humboldt Park at North Central Park and Potomac Avenue, I approached a somewhat clandestine warehouse where a burly man donning all the gear you’d a imagine a Hell’s Angel to have in his closet—plus the imperative lengthy grey beard—stood outside. He tugged on his golden retriever’s leash.
I’m not a dog person (you can blame my parents for never getting me one), so I instinctively took a step back for every one I took forward as the retriever leapt toward me with thick drool flinging from its mouth.
“Hot Glass?” the Hell’s Angel asked me.
“Uh…yeah!” I answered.
The Angel opened…
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in Code, Design, Findings, Inspiration, Uncategorized on January 28th, 2010
Every so often I come across a company or community of developers (and designers) who put out great, inspiring, innovative work…for free.
I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow. On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.
Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained…
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Posted by
in Reviews, Uncategorized on November 25th, 2009
User experience expert – John Yesko, gave this latest presentation and the topic was “Rich User Experience Documentation – Beyond Static Wireframes.”
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Posted by
charles
in Business, Uncategorized on July 16th, 2009
…to the 3rd floor!
Though we’ve only been in our new space here at Lake Street for one year, it’s time to grow and move into a larger studio that accommodates even better our creatives’ and programmers’ needs. Natural light. Ample space. Relaxing amenities. This is the place! Thank to everyone whose talent and dedication makes this exciting new chapter in our agency a reality. Thanks also to all of our valued clients – without you…well, you know. Come and visit us when we open the doors on August 1.
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Posted by
ted
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on March 19th, 2009
Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:
- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great
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Posted by
ted
in Code, Findings, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized on March 5th, 2009
Below are the first 5 “specific quality guidelines” in Google’s Help pages, which are an ideal guide for creating any SEO friendly web site:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
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Posted by
ted
in Business, Uncategorized on March 1st, 2009
There are many benefits and a few detriments to incorporating if you doing contract/freelance work. I’ve personally started at least 10 corporations of all types (C-Corp, S-Corp, LLP, LLC), so I possess a little bit of knowledge worth sharing.
The positives
First you are protected legally/financially by the corporate shroud once you are a corporation/propriety. Second, you can write off expenses through the corporation in ways that are well documented and easy to follow. Third, you can control your salary to yourself via dividends, which typically allows for better tax treatment. Fourth, many companies’ accounting departments will treat you a little more…
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Posted by
ted
in Business, Uncategorized, Usability on February 19th, 2009
Steve Krug discusses doing usability testing with 4-6 people about once a month can lead to solving problems typically yield big efficiencies and return on investment. We wholeheartedly agree, Steve!
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Posted by
ted
in Uncategorized on February 18th, 2009
I really like how this software, Visuwords, brings a visual interface to something as common as the thesaurus and dictionary. The application has nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs all color coded, in addition to the relationships between the words (opposes, entails, is a member of, is similar to, causes, etc.). Some might pontificate that this is information overload, but I find it a useful tool, probably because I learn and retain information usually better with sight (as opposed to auditory).
I first stumbled upon a visual thesaurus from the M-W.com site, where I saw a promo for the Visual Thesaurus. Their…
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Posted by
ted
in Code, Reviews, Uncategorized on February 9th, 2009
For years we’ve supported open-source development and creative commons, building some of the first instances of ecommerce on Linux machines and JRun. Now that we do less hosting and more design/development so we primarily use Linux machines as desktops. One favorite flavor of *ix we like is Ubuntu, both on Windows boxes and many more as virtual machines on MacIntel. Here is a collection of tools we use for web dev and design:
Creative Tools
Wonderful 2D drawing program called Xara Extreme.
Inkscape is similar to Illustrator or Xara.
An easy to use 3D modeling app called Art of Illusion.
Full featured 3D modeling app: Blender.
A…
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