As I work in this beautiful site about jewelry, I am thoroughly entertained. I am not really a big fan of standard jewelry. Unlike most women, diamonds don’t do much for me. What really interests me is more along the lines of unique, maybe a little unusual without being tacky, like the charms on Chains-and-Charms.com and Pandora Jewelry. And as all jewelry does, it should have a meaning or memory. On every page of the charms section of the Chains-and-Charms site, there is an abundance of facts, some that i never knew! So many of these spark my memories and I am so fascinated by these little tidbits of information that I can’t wait to work on the next page so that I can read more. And each page is written with a bit of humor that makes me smile. I have to give so much credit to our copywriters. Not only do they manage to handle project coordinator duties, but they also consistently  produce creative copy that is entertaining and informative. And most don’t realize that all this is done with keywords designed into the content. These little invisible workers work to help Google help you find what you need. They handle every type of copywriting service, from advertising copywriting, web copywriting, direct mail copywriting,  and most important, SEO copywriting.  So, enjoy reading the fun bits of information on any website, but remember, there’s more than meets the eye here, and you just might learn something new.

What makes people want to create art, design brochures, or study feng shui? I think we are compelled to recreate nature, because we’re part of it.

People find great beauty, peace, drama, and connection in nature. Everything on the earth is interconnected, literally by the earth itself, and it’s organized, just like our bodies are composed of organized, interconnected cells. The world and our bodies are full of form, color, pattern, and purpose. We recreate these qualities in music, on fabric, in poetry, and in writing, and we search for patterns to understand more about the world through science and astronomy.

Today feels pretty warm, and I might go outside in DDA’s back yard to sit on a bench and eat my lunch. It would be great if the wall to my office could slide open on a nice sunny day, or if I took more breaks to walk.

In some ways much of my home and work environment is artificial in the sense that it is man-made, but in a very real way, as I sit in my office at a computer creating brochures, I also feel connected to nature.

I just received my new WD 500 gig My Book this morning. I immediately started setting it up so I could begin the long process of transferring my data. I don’t remember if I mentioned this before, but my current HD takes forever to transfer data! It once took me a whole day, from 9am-5pm to transfer 12 gigs. 12. My beautiful TB HD I have at home uses her super fast fire wire connection to transfer 12 gigs in a matter of minutes. Even my 500 gig HD, which has a USB 2 connection, transfers really fast. On a side note, when I bought my 500 gig HD over a year ago, I wanted to get the firewire version. However the sales person at Best Buy convinced me to get a HD with an eSata connection. He also assured me that I could acquire the card for my mac when they had them in stock. It wasn’t until a month later that I found that eSata cards were not made for macs. The archiving session I had a week ago was painful only because it took me forever to back up my files via external HD. I am really hoping that this HD will rise to the challenge and be able to transfer my data at the speed of light. Yes, the speed of light. Perhaps I should name her the Millennium Falcon? Naah, too cliche. On another note, completely unrelated to my HD, I am closing out a number of projects due to my upcoming travel. (I will not be in Thursday or Monday.) I just uploaded a newsletter for print production, translated three web designs into html expandable pages for the client to see and approve, and finished various website updating/alteration projects. Today’s tasks are to start and complete concept sketches of a town setting, get further in the DDA Sketchbook, take some product photography, make a few graphics/roll overs for websites and complete some other site updates. I need to finish these before I leave today.

Like I mentioned in a previous post, we like to give our clients design choices to review and from those choices we (both client and designer) are able to develop the final design rather quickly. Website designs, brochure cover designs, and logo designs are all usually delivered to the client after 3 or 4 initial concepts are reviewed and then tweaked. Before we send our clients the preliminary design concepts to review, the graphic designers will send them to those staff members involved with the project for internal review.

As the key designer for a project, after about the 3rd design creativity starts to slow, ideas start to fade, and as the design problem begins to move forward to a solution, we are ready to move on to the next “problem”. Well, more often than not the request to do just one or two more designs comes through and immediate slouching of shoulders and uttering of sighs begins… for me at least. But, I know what will happen. After some time spent away from the project, stretching of legs and wrists, and hopefully some useful feedback for this “just one more” design, work begins.

And, while I haven’t been keeping record, I would bet money that the client, designer, and internal staff choose this “just one more” design. Why? While I have no proven answer, I would surmise that by the time you have worked through 3 or 4 designs you are ready to actually begin the final. Very similar to a musician tuning up before a performance or an athlete stretching before a big game. Artists are no different. Our creative mind needs to kick in, the left-side to right-side brain switch needs to occur, and we need to fall into the “zone”. Sometimes we nail the design on the first round, but I would again bet money that careful thought and planning have been going on for some time and that “careful thought and planning” is the warming up, the stretching our of creativity that moves the final design from a pile of elements to a final harmonized piece. 

The next few days will be spent totally immersed in a “rearrangement” of a current site. It seems that it may have been a bit intimidating to an average user. It was full of amazing advanced programming tricks, menus and buttons. And it had been fine-tuned down to the smallest detail, but, as it turned out, some people may have lost their way with so many options. So, in true DDA style, we are adjusting things as needed. Our goal is always to accommodate the client with the best possible outcome. Without losing the integrity of the beautiful web design or altering the video capture, the layout and custom programming have been adjusted to offer a more friendly usability. After all, you have to find your way through to reach a happy ending.

In this fast paced, always connected, and everything-happening-at-once world we live in, there are layer upon layer of trends that permeate our lives, dictate our future, and continually challenge the things that we know and understand.

Of course the big picture trends include such things as outsourcing, globalization, and connectivity. The reality is that everything and everyone is caught up in a whirlwind of ever-moving, ever-changing, ever-increasing trends. There are fashion trends, medical trends, manufacturing trends, religious trends, educational trends, the much feared economic trends, the much criticized dietary trends, and of course the sometimes frivolous and often amusing celebrity trends. In advertising, there are website design trends, video production trends, custom programming trends, animation trends, graphic design trends, copy writing style trends, and even color trends.

There is one trend that has been engaged and evolving since man first walked the Earth. Innovation! It is the granddaddy of all other trends, the foundation of all civilizations, and both the savior and perhaps ultimately the destroyer of mankind itself.

I hold the belief that modern civilization is focused on measuring the wrong things. We measure countries, wealth, gross national product, population, the number of sick, the starving, the oppressed, the free, opinions, viewers, visitors, customers, travelers, manufacturing numbers, consumer indexes, etc. We even spend a great deal of time measuring trends - where they started, where they are today, where they are going.

Perhaps we should measure innovation. Innovation determines which individuals prosper, which companies succeed, which countries grow, what groups become healthier, and ultimately, which civilizations rise and fall.

At DDA, we focus on innovation and intuitively understand that everything else follows, because everything else is just a trend.

Spring is full of new growth and fresh beginnings. I see the little baby goslings following their parents, and fat bunnies ready to give birth. The trees are profusely spreading, sending their seeds into the wind. Trees are so efficient at this, that we find the seeds in every corner of every space - even where you least expect it. And although not all end up in a place that may be conducive to growth (like in the vacuum), so many more will be able to continue the pattern of life. You just have to give them something to grow on and a little TLC. Our websites and advertising services are much the same. When properly planted and maintained, they will grow into a very large, thriving and profitable endeavor. In order to grow a successful campaign, we will start with a beautiful graphic design that can be for web or print design. Then, we can add all types of digital animation, flash animation or any number of video production, photography services and programming services. But the magic is in the maintenance to make it grow. Our Search Engine Optimization, SEO copywriting and Search Engine Marketing Services are the food for growing big in Google. Everybody needs a little TLC.

Last night I watched part of a movie, “What A Way To Go.” The subject matter was serious, very well documented, and the presentation was poetic.

My friend asked, “Do you think that movie was done artistically?” I said, emphatically, “Yes.”

The movie, which consists of a collage of images and interviews, has a consistent background ambience created by music and old movie clips.

However, I mentioned that it looked low budget, and that perhaps it was taken with someone’s home camera. This doesn’t matter to me at all, and did not take away from my enjoyment of the movie or how artistic I think it is, but my friend, who also thinks highly of the movie, felt I was being insulting.

I tried to explain that I was just making a observation, based on seeing many movies, that if the producer created more movies and had better equipment, it would appear more technically “slick.”

Technical skills are very important at DDA, and DDA’s writers, graphic designers, web designers, and videographers pay close attention to them. Although technical skills may be grasped intuitively by some people, if not, it’s no problem, because they can always be learned.

From my work illustrating academic textbooks before I was hired by DDA, I learned many technical copywriting details, like what is the proper minus sign to use in an equation, to add a space before and after an equal sign, and to use straight instead of curly quotation marks for measurements.

DDA’s writers know the rules of grammer, but what makes their writing interesting is their creativity. Likewise, as a designer, I must be aware of rules about typography, what font size to use on websites, how to photomanipulate an image, and what colors are best for certain markets. But all of these rules would be useless if they weren’t fueled by creativity.

Here at DDA, we are all driven by a desire to create interesting and quality work, and that provides great motivation to learn the technical details!

I’ve been having all sorts of fun times with this sketchbook. Yesterday I began dissecting the sample flip book file in flash. I’m not used to Flash, and I’m even less familiar with the new flip book! The old flip book, which you can view in our Print Brochures portfolio, was pretty easy to work with. All you needed to do was place the desired images into a folder and make sure that the flash files were linked properly. This one is a little more complicated, and for good reason. You can have transparent or tear away pages! It also seems to run pretty fast. I remember finding a flash flip book that had transparent pages for a past print brochure Judy designed. It looked nice but it took a while to load and seemed to have a small lag. Hopefully this flip book, once uploaded, will still be fast. After talking to our lead designer, Carrie, I had a better grasp on what we are going to be doing with this project. Basically there will be one large DDA Sketchbook that you can view from a main page. The sketchbook will have spreads containing the client approved design as well as a few designs that the were shown to the client, but not chosen. As for now it seems that all DDA projects will be contained within this one sketchbook. It could change in the future though. Now you might be asking, “What if I only want to look at a particular project?” If you are interested in a particular project, we will have a link from the project in the DDA portfolio to the corresponding page in the sketchbook. If you’ve seen our portfolio recently, you’ve noticed the ‘Related Projects’ links. The DDA Sketchbook links will be similarly attached to the portfolio.

My boys were on a mini vacation at their grandparents this weekend. I was really looking forward to having time to catch up on the things that are difficult to do with two very active, curious boys around. I suddenly discovered when the house was quiet and there was no one around to make a mess to clean up and no breakfasts or lunches to prepare, that I started to miss the little guys. My husband was at work and it was just me left to do as I please, and I had no idea what to do.

I have been so accustomed to having my boys around and keeping my eye on the clock, making sure that we stay on schedule… breakfast at 8, nap for the youngest at 9, take the 3-year old to the potty every hour or so, lunch at noon, naps for both at 1. Without my schedule and craziness, I felt a little off and wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Quickly, I put a plan together and I felt secure again. I went grocery shopping.

Similarly, I always prepare a plan of my day and week at DDA. I know what projects need my attention and which ones can wait until the following week. Website design concepts - for a returning client that we created (4)  trade show graphic panels for - are due in about 2 hours.  Then, two other projects that were being reviewed have been approved and interior magazine layouts for a flipbook project need to be tackled along with an interior website page design for a kitchen cabinet company.  So, I have my plan, my schedule, and know exactly what to do with myself.