Of the projects that I've worked on recently (and in the past), I'm amazed at how much people are willing to spend on "superficial" design, but forget about the little they spend on "functional" design. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but rarely do people get both.

Generally, when I'm called in, I'm called in for ideas. This is a big part of our job. Clients bounce ideas off of us, "Would this be possible?,"Why would we do it this way?","Take a look at this and tell me what you think?","How can I increase sign ups?" One of the really great things about working with companies who place a value on this sort of thing is that they like science anytime it gives them results, and they actually want to hear about the science.

So, when I was asked my opinion on an auction project (in October 2007), I was very surprised that while over 40% of the site was forms, there had been no importance placed on actually designing forms for accessibility or ease of use. The same thing happened on an auction project I looked over in December! I'm getting excited now, because it was obvious that these companies put a lot of money into the sites.

Here is an image I created as part of a campaign for a tourism company (unfortunately, it was not accepted), but because the campaign they actually chose (also one I designed) looks completely different than this I've been given permission to use it in my portfolio. I'll also be asking for more unused work from other companies I've worked with. I also used this photo in our Summer newsletter. We used the very awesome, campaign monitor to deliver it.

So here we are: what was initially asked for was just something that was hip and funky but which also had the coloring of the popular, "Curiously Strong" Altoid ads.

Creative Process

I comped together about 20 photos, created some pixel patterns, and handmade drawings (some I did and some old stock I had because I was running low on time) and about after 20 hours of work, I pitched the original to them (sorry can't show).

Second version, I ended up with this:

Jeremiah and I will definitely post more about this and later on probably update with a working calendar. We've been so busy working on client projects that we haven't had time to work on our own. However, I have some availability in the next few weeks and I'll be able to update a bit more regularly.

On to the slots:
Slots For June

Alright, three issues that we're tackling right now, because of the busy-ness of our schedules. Our time is so pressed that we're not really available to work on outside projects.

Issue 1: The issue of new blogger. We had planned to bring Brian on a few months ago, but because of our schedules we never had a chance to sit down and train him because of scheduling conflicts. Our plan now is to bring in another blogger, but we don't want to jinx that before it's secured.

Issue 2: Because we've had an unexpected increase in our workload, we're unable to finish our own personal projects (which were pretty damned awesome, by the way). So we're currently reworking a schedule that will allow us to complete some of our own projects. There are some projects that we weren't able to get to.

This was the error that ruined our lives! Alright, not to be so melodramatic, but for the week that we've been without the entire Adobe Master Collection CS3 it certainly feels that way. We'll start with what the problem was, a dreaded MSCVR80.dll error. It started a full week before with crashing of Photoshop randomly. Then it progressed on last week to crashing on the splash screen.

We'd click the applications, they'd crash. We immediately started searching online for how to fix the problem while trying to keep up with other work we had in queue. Luckily we had backup copies of Adobe CS1 on-hand (which as you know taking from CS3 and putting into CS1 leaves a lot to be desired and all of Adobe's programs).

A little background
This has been a known problem for Adobe since earlier last year. Even after assistance from Adobe, few on the forums found a resolution to this problem. Based on the forums there are more than a few people with an expensive icon of failure on their desktops.

There were a few possible causes we learned from the Forum, but these were reported the most resolved: