providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

Back into the flow of things

As you have seen, I've been busy at a big national conference I branded. it was a blast, although I was running pretty much full-tilt through the whole thing. But I am back in the Denver office, now, designing and developing and strategizing again, for everyone else. I'll post more here now that I'm back. If you want to see some images from the conference, visit the NAAMLP 4ToAll Flickr group.

Labels: branding

posted at 10:11 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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10.27.2008

How you know your brand awareness is really good

I designed the branding and marketing for a national conference (going on as I type this--my hotel room looks like a design shop and kinkos got together and had a love child in it), and it's great to see how integrated the branding is here: the website, programs, website, t-shirts, lanyards, signage, maps, agendas, handouts, CDs--they all have a consistent visual identity and language. It's making for a richer, more comprehensive experience for all the attendees here.

The thing that struck me, though, was when i pulled into the parking lot on Saturday, to see the conference's logo drawn into the dust on the rear window of an attendee's car:

Labels: branding, marketing

posted at 11:04 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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10.17.2008

Fun activity for this weekend? Early voting!

Usually my weekend activities at this time of year revolve around gardening, starting to design Notchcode's holiday card (and holiday cards for my clients. Clients: need a holiday card? It's probably time to get started!). But since it's an election year, and I live in Colorado, I'll be filling out my state's four page mail-in ballot.


Four pages? Yes sir! We've got all sorts of amendments, referenda, and county, district, state, and national candidates to vote on. It's Colorado's longest ballot in 96 years. I suspect I will not be alone in voting for the amendment which makes it harder to get amendment questions onto the ballot, since we are all pretty tired of having every little thing written into the state constitution, rather than being enacted as a law. Some may call me short-sighted, and unamerican. Whatever; I just want to take less time to actually fill in my ballot than I do filling out my tax returns.

I want to take this democracy-reated moment to remind you all about the AIGA's project to make ballots easier to understand, process, and be counted for everyone. I have written about it twice, here and here. check it out, and follow the links there to the site with the sample ballot designs. It's very cool, and if you are in a position to recommend changes to your local ballot's design, your fellow citizens would thank you if you helped to implement some of the changes shown here.

Labels: graphic design, information graphics, politics

posted at 3:54 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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Blogger and FTP: some useful info

I've been silent over here for a week or two, because my blog publishing software (blogger, which is now a google product) has been timing out when publishing my blog entries via FTP to my privately-hosted server. This may be partly an issue with having to reconfigure myFTP from scratch after my server crash, and also partly due to quirks within Blogger when publishing to external sites. Here are some useful links related to the issues, for anyone who has similar trouble.

Something is Broken: Google Groups discussion


FTP Publishing in Blogger, via Real Blogger Status

Two problems Google/Blogger dev need to address: active FTP and password truncation: Google Groups discussion

Main solution: move off of Blogger, and onto WordPress or Movable Type.

Labels: blogs

posted at 10:35 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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10.10.2008

...well, not quite

blogger is giving me hiccups in posting and publishing. So maybe it's time to move over to MT or WP.

Labels: blogs

posted at 10:46 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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10.07.2008

...and now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Of course, just as I asked a bunch of you to become a fan of this blog via Facebook's Blog Networks app, my server went off the rails. I was performing a software update of our operating system, and the server hung in the middle of the install...effectively leaving the server with _no_ OS to speak of. No trouble, right? Just reinstall via the system disc. Oh, except I _lost_ the system discs in the last move (although I had earlier versions handy). It never made much sense to replace it: the OS is a little out-of-date, and the machine it runs on it about seven years old, making it incompatible with the new OS that's commercially available. But a call to the manufacturer got me a replacement legacy OS disc in the mail, express (meaning 3 days later) and now I am back online. Yay!

Labels: crash, hardware, software

posted at 11:31 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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