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Our thoughts

Okay, real talk, blogging often is hard shit. We care so much about you and your time. We don’t write posts for the sake of writing posts. If we have a passionate topic, you’ll see it here. Otherwise trust we are probably just busy making something great for the citizens of the interwebs.

10 years

If feels like just yesterday I convinced my very supportive wife I should quit a well paying easy job to start something new. Feels like yesterday, but it was actually 10 years ago. Oh I should also mention what a leap of faith factor1 was. At the time she had been laid off from a…

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The History of Typography

We spend a lot of time working on the right font pairings in our projects. We try not to get super geeky on you, but sometimes we do want to share the process, get your feedback, or just communicate why we did something. This is a great short animation on the history of type, showing great key…

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Change the rules

Sometimes systems and industries get big. The way its always been done grows bigger and bigger as time and more players join. The cost of entry becomes higher and the reward is smaller. I love what Actor / Writer / Director Zach Braff is doing on Kickstarter. The film industry has a broken model of…

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Hackers Point Large Botnet At WordPress Sites

Are you using wordpress for your website content management system or blogging platform? If so you need to read this. In recent news over the last few days, hackers have been targeting and sucessfully gaining access to wordpress admin panels by brute force. The most common issue is out of date plugins / wordpress files,…

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Sometimes you need to start over to get it right

When was the last time you used a company’s mobile app, and their desktop web site side by side and been shocked that the mobile is better? Yesterday I was using the ebay app on my ipad. I have buying and selling for years. Seriously, I think it drives my wife nuts. For years I…

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Sometimes you have cross the line

Who says public service announcements are limited to actual problems? I give huge props to  The Martin Agency for their Cool Whip ad and for breaking the rules and really making a legit problem blown out of proportion with a PSA. I mean come on, who hasn’t ruined a cake when spreading some icing.

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Good Design is…

I love reading about designers and what their personal mantras are. Dieter Rams is one of the most influential industrial / product designers in our time. He made Braun a household name in the 50s and 60s by creating simple products that worked well. Design trends that are still being followed and copied today. When asked if he thinks…

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Why you need to host with a reputable server company

Last week a friend of ours mentioned he was having website issues. As we dug into the conversation, we found out that ‘issues’ actually meant his site had been offline for 4+ months. Yikes!  Now he hosted his site with a friend, who was “working on getting it back up”. But 4 months is too…

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Using great video to promote concepts

Samsung released a new video promoting its eco-line of washing machines. They used a common modern video style of documentary / user produced look, even though its highly produced with skilled directors and video teams. The take away here, for me, is that telling your story in a simple, clear fashion, is an easy win.…

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Crate Coffee branding preview

Just a quick preview of a new brand we recently developed for Crate Coffee. Featuring locally roasted beans with unique blends specific to their markets. We designed the logo to have a rough, painted look, so to finish the brand implementation we used a rubber stamp on the business cards and coffee bags. It is…

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