Recently I’ve been searching for a new apartment. Partly this is because I like a change of habitat every year or so, but with rising gas prices, I’m also looking to move closer to work.

The other day, I checked out a place that is literally only 10 minutes away. It is a really nice place, in a good neighborhood, and it has relatively cheap rent. Being 10 minutes away from DDA would dramatically increase my free-time during the week - I’d save 2 hours of commute every day. On the other hand, I’d have a roommate again, something that I wasn’t too fond of in the past.

The roommate is nice enough. She is a 49-year old woman with a dog and not too much else. She doesn’t have Internet or a computer, but doesn’t mind if I bring mine so I can work on my personal portfolio of 3d animation, 2d animation, and web interactive projects, or play my video games. The apartment does seem a little small though for the two of us - while I would have my own bedroom, I don’t know how I would feel about sharing such a small living area at this point.

Sometimes we need to accept conditions we wouldn’t necessarily like, just to get by financially. It may only be a temporary thing. I am looking at other places too - there’s a place I’m checking out today that seems promising. Wherever I move, I’ll still be here at DDA doing the best video production, animation, and web design in the Philadelphia area!

I’m currently part of a group who are undertaking a large scale website update on numerous pages of a site. This task involves numerous changes on every page and can’t be done with a simple find and replace command because all this new information and alterations need to be tailored to the specific page.

On the first page I did this on, I had to actually get the changes made, and then make sure that all of the tables and everything else matched up to the example page we were provided. This was sort of working out the kinks and helped me find out what needed to be changed and in what way. This also took me a bit of time, but only so I could be sure it was all correctly done.

For the next few pages I knew what needed to be changed, but I still found myself wasting clicks. I would copy some ColdFusion link information from the old page and put it on the new page and then find that I needed that information later on another part. I would then have to go and copy and paste it again.

Finding all of these little details allowed me to create an order to do the changes. This new method made the time it takes me per page as efficient as it can be. Having a set routine also minimizes the chance that I would miss any part of the updates because each part is its own step.

Setting up a method for involved changes saves time, reduces errors, and can remove the madness from the whole process.

I picked up a new game yesterday for my Nintendo DS. It’s called “The World Ends with You.” I was initially turned on to this game by the rave reviews of the game play by the enthusiastic press. After having played the game for myself, however, I have to say that it is the design aesthetic that really hooked me.

The look is very reminiscent of Japanese anime cartoons, however, it has an edgy quality to it that I can’t quite describe. It is simultaneously stylish and gritty, like the well-thought out graffiti murals that are intentionally done on the walls of inner city parks.

I love the style of this game, and it is games like this that inspire me with my work in 2D animation. At DDA I have an incredible opportunity to work with the uniquely talented artists who excel at fusing their own creative flair with a professional style. Whether it is Carrie expertly designing a professional corporate website, Judy hand crafting an eye-catching trade show brochure, or Melissa going wild on one of her amazingly inventive and unique character designs for animation, DDA’s artists are second to none. While our inspirations and influences come from a vast number of sources, the creative talent at work here at DDA is always a joy to watch in action!

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.

This morning on the way to work, I was listening to the SETI Institute podcast. They were discussing the search for extra-terrestrial life, and what we would want to send them if we ever found life out there listening to us.

The scientist they were interviewing made the interesting observation that it is more than likely that they have been listening to us for at least the past 50 years, throughout the age of television. His opinion was that this “cacophony of humanity” was far more accurate a representation of life on Earth, especially modern life, than some Shakespearian manuscript or clip of Mozart’s music.

In the Information Age, we on this planet have become a media-centric society. We use television, the internet, and radio to gather information from around the world, almost instantaneously. Working at DDA, I have the privilege of being on the cutting edge of the newest and most innovative media and animation technologies. It’s exciting to think that what we accomplish in 3d and 2d animation, video editing, and web design may be among the things being broadcast into space to possibly be viewed by intelligent life!

We are more connected to the rest of the planet than we ever have been before. With such a small world, it is only a matter of time, I believe, before outer space begins to get smaller as well!

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!

When we make websites, we have the keen eyes of our designers make the website design and styles. They use Latin text as a placeholder on the pages. Our awesome staff of writers write the content and search engine optimization keywords for all of the pages to be. Once the design is approved and we are ready to move forward, the design and content have to be put together. We call this building out the pages and it can be a long and tedious process, depending on the size of the site, but it can be done no other way.

At DDA we have a large number of people who are capable of taking on this task, so it is an easy type of workload to manage. It is actually a useful thing to have around when workloads need to be managed because is a versatile job to be assigned that can assure that everyone is able to stay busy and productive at all times. Plus, it is essential to creating websites, so it has to be done.

May Mondays should be clear and vibrant, and we should all be recharged from a long weekend celebrating Mother’s Day, and weddings, and birthdays. But in terms of weather, this Monday is raw and the forecast is for rain nonstop. Most of us have stashed our winter clothes, so we have all the portable heaters whirling under our desks, and as l watch the wind whipping the tree branches outside my window, I think, indeed, it’s not a clear day.

Yet, right now there is a  clarity at Dynamic Digital Advertising that bodes well for the week. Only one person has reported sick, and the rest of us are going about the business at hand. The main Conference Room has been busy hour after hour with conference calls from companies interested in our many advertising and marketing services.  The Business Development team has its hands extra full for the day. After the initial calls, they now have to develop quotes for the interested parties on top of follow-up work from all the projects from last week.  The Video and Photography Studio has projects lined up to complete, plus a video shoot in New York City later this week.

Our graphic designers are equally busy with trade show graphics and web design. The copywriters and programmers are deep in thought as they wrestle with content development writing, and ColdFusion and broken code on a client’s site or “something’s wrong with my email” questions. As I write, Monday is almost half over, and again,  I realize as I do every Monday, that the DDA  staff will see clearly, and rain or shine the quality work we produce at DDA will make us all proud!  Whoever said the following was a wise person, “Most people don’t recognize opportunity because it is usually disguised as hard work.” Unknown Author  

My Intel based imac is only about a year old, is named the Pink Panther and has a 250gig HD. Less than a year from getting him I have already used 136gigs of space. I know what you’re thinking. “Big deal, 136 gigs isn’t much.” I can understand that train of thought. I personally have a TB and 500gig external HD at home with only 138mb left on the 500gig and the TB HD is being filled up pretty fast. Regardless, 136gigs for what I do at DDA is a lot. I don’t work with many 4gig file projects, like at home; mostly web design files that range from 150-200mbs and print design files that range from 200-500mbs. I think I may have a few tradeshow graphic or billboard files that are over the 1gig mark. So with only 94GB left on the Pink Panther, I am finding that now is the time to archive! Yes, the dreaded ‘A’ word, archive. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I am currently organizing all files so that any one in the future can navigate through and find what they need pretty easily. No need to thank me.

I can’t wait to see how much space I can free up as I archive and back up all my files. So far I’ve only gained back 5GB…

Everyone likes to eat food with a variety of tastes, sweetness, textures, and ingredients. For example, on Thanksgiving dinner, I like to have my turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, corn, and greenbeans together, others do not. Dynamic Digital Advertising is strutured in a similar fashion, less the whole food thing. DDA is an advertising agency with numerous services and capablilities such as copywrighting, database programming, medical animation, video production, product photography, web design, and of-course search engine optimization services.

That’s what makes DDA such a great place to work with; DDA is a one-stop-shop full service advertising company, which will aid, assist, and commit to everything clients or prospects desires or needs. DDA is like a meal, it always works out better when you eat everything together.