Last night I watched Top Chef, a cooking competition show in which I’ve recently developed an unhealthy addiction. During each episode the chefs compete in challenges with hopes of impressing the judges, winning immunity, and passing through to the next round, inching one step closer to the grand prize. The reason I enjoy the show so much, and reserve an hour of TV watching every Wednesday, is because I love the creativity. The challenges are universal to all participants, but the way each chef approaches their meal varies drastically. Even more, the end results are always quite impressive given the amount of time they have to finalize their dish. There may be moments of panic, but inevitably the chefs find their inspiration and work vigorously to meet there specified deadline.

This atmosphere of creativity is not unlike the environment here at DDA. The graphic designers, creative and online copywriters, corporate and medical video production specialists, and programmers all have to work under a certain conceptual umbrella determined by the client’s needs. However, each individual has their own approach and style, imprinting their signature on the end product.  

This is what makes our staff here at DDA so great. If we only produced cookie cutter websites, brochures, and corporate and medical training programs, our business would not be thriving as it is now. Clients turn to us for our creativity and tendency to reach for the innovative. And with a staff comprised of creative individuals possessing various strengths, exciting websites, graphic designs, custom programming, and exceptional video development are guaranteed.

Spring is definitely my favorite time of year. My new office is great because I have really nice windows. A row of them to my left and a couple behind. The first time I saw the office, I was concerned because the windows, throughout the building, are high up and not really a direct view outside. Turns out that, whether seated or standing, the view through every window is one of trees from their mid point on up. Breathtaking!

It occurs to me that during spring the trees are in transition. Early on the seemingly dry branches and twigs blossom with life, color, and attitude. Later in spring the blossoms fall, coloring the ground, and the now very much alive branches and twigs become adorned with leaves of complex shapes in limitless shades of green.

What is most compelling and interesting is the way the windows frame the trees as if to feature each grouping as a picture frame would. Each window becomes a work-of-art, combining the best qualities of renaissance, impressionism, and realism. Rich, beautiful, and alive.

At DDA, we believe advertising and marketing is similar.  It is our goal to provide glimpses of reality that feature and highlight the best qualities of our client’s products, services, staff, and capabilities. Framing each with the proper information, aesthetic, and presentation to provide the viewer with a perspective that helps our client’s organization radiate the aura of quality and success.

Websites, photography, videos, 2D animation,  3D animation, CD-ROMS, DVDs, programming applications, illustrations, brochures, sell sheets, catalogs, training portals, copy writing, virtual spins, and virtual worlds… each and every one is a little window shining light in, but also reflecting all the best that our clients have to offer.

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, Flash is a big part of our website design philosophy.

When I first started working at DDA, I knew I was going to have to take on responsibilities that were not covered in my training at school.  I never thought, however, that I would ever be tackling web design at all. In this web 2.0 world, Flash website design and coding skills are a must for any business trying to compete in the Internet marketing space. That’s why when I was asked to do Flash sites, I was more than happy to learn.

Now I’ve helped put together over a half-dozen flash pieces for the web. That’s not bad for  someone who had no web experience coming into the job. If it wasn’t for DDA, I probably wouldn’t even know my AS 3 from my ActionScript 2!

We take pride in our ability to create dynamic web 2.0 applications for your company or small business. Let me and the rest of the DDA video department put together your next Flash site, and rest assured that you will have a professional, innovative website that stands tall in the crowded 21st century web marketplace.

Today, I will complain. My first complaint is that 15 minutes into my drive to work I realized I forgot something very important and had to turn back to pick it up, and by doing so I woke up my 3-year old. Second, in my efforts to stop using plastic water bottles, the reusable water container I filled up and placed in my car fell and spilled all over the back seat. Third, as I was stopped at a traffic light, the gentlemen in the car next to me rolled down his window to tell me that something was hanging off of my front suspension. Great. So, I pulled over and deemed it non-life threatening and off to work I went.

Now, finally at work with my morning coffee, I decide to read a brief article about the use of type for HTML websites. This should have cheered me up since I’m such a font fanatic. It turns out that the article was one long complaint regarding designing accessible websites and the font choices designers are forced to use. How appropriate for today. I quite enjoyed reading this article as I have often struggled with wanting each DDA-designed website to look stunning, sexy, and load quickly with lots of searchable HTML text, but knowing that we are restricted to a handful of fonts that will show correctly on different browsers and multiple platforms. The writer of the article pointed out that great advances in technology for web typography have not surfaced for 12 years. Well, that is definitely a valid complaint. These restrictions can definitely pose a problem, but fortunately DDA’s degreed and experienced graphic designers work hard to find a balance between beautiful, user-friendly designs that can also be search engine optimized to perform well on search engines like Google.

So, Arial, Courier, Georgia, Times, Verdana, Tahoma and Trebuchet, the spotlight will still shine on you as for the time being (and hopefully not for another 12 years) you will be the font of choice for HTML-based websites.

When I was in college, I struggled to find my niche with regard to a career. I started as an accounting major and then filtered my way through marketing, psychology, sociology, and secondary education to end up with a rare degree in Professional Writing. My hobbies as a child ran the gamut from photography, violin, and sewing to softball, poetry, and singing. I tried almost everything at least once, and for the most part I loved it all. I even liked ballet, although I pirouetted into the wall in a dance recital and rollerblading, although I fell and scarred myself for life.

Today, as an advertising copywriter for DDA, I’m able to enjoy the many different aspects of the career options and hobbies that held my interest when I was younger. I can express my creativity as I did in photography, poetry, and sewing through copywriting services for brochures and websites. I can utilize what I learned in psychology and sociology classes to maintain a good repore with clients, and the organizational skills gained through accounting for overseeing projects from start to finish. For that which I did not necessarily succeed, I’ve learned to pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on to the next venture.

The lessons learned in school and fun as a child I carry with me every day and try to build upon them with practical application. It sometimes amazes me to step back and think about how one’s experiences truly do shape the ethics and capabilities displayed in the workplace.

I was adding a few examples of my 360 degree rotating jewelry videos to the DDA portfolio the other day and I just realized how massive it is. There are 10 different categories to the portfolio and each category has 4 or 5 sub categories. Everything from websites, cd-rom/dvd, digital photography, print, illustration, large format graphics, video, 3-d, animation and virtual reality. Each project has a description, picture and video or link. With all the options and examples available, it is an easy way for someone to get an idea of exactly what they are looking for. There are even some things that I did not even know we offered! It is plain to see that the work speaks for itself. Since the portfolio is growing each day, the user always has up to date examples of what we have been up to!

While DDA has offered hand drawn illustrations of the DDA Staff at the “Meet DDA” link on our website for quite some time, it is only recently that we established a blog for each member of the team.

The early results are in…while we have five professional, degreed, full-time copywriters on staff who write beautiful and engaging content for websites, manuals and brochures, and scripts for educational and medical training video productions, content for CD-ROMs, DVDs, CMEs, intranets and portals of all kinds, sales copy for products and services, and of course poetry and prose for the love of the written word, we also have seventeen others who CAN WRITE.

In this day-and-age when barely half of all teens across America graduate high school, it is great to know that the DDA team is not only great at what they do, but literate as well. For years we have had a sign on a wall that says, “No Average People Work Here.” Of course the usual jokes and mental gymnastics took place that rearranged the thought into sayings such as: No People Work Here, Average People Work Here, No People Here, etc.

We are proud to say that when Elizabeth and I hire the wrong people, and we have had our share of mis-hires over the years, they don’t stay. More often than not they cannot keep up and they know it.

Most of this is self-explanatory.  All one needs to do is read the blogs for yourself. The programmers, video production crew,  graphic designers, search engine marketers, website developers, animators, IT staff ,and copywriters have not only obviously mastered their chosen field, they have also mastered the English language.

It’s amazing what you learn to appreciate. Before I became gung-ho about creating aesthetically pleasing and functional websites for my personal work, I didn’t really pay attention to how a site was built. Why should I have if it weren’t an interesting topic to me, right? I could differentiate the sites I liked from the sites that I didn’t, but not technically. It was more of a ‘feeling’.

I tried my best at a few designs, but they were always obviously grid based. I was more concerned with learning how to code than to really focus on the design of the site. I learned quickly that building in frames is bad news, no matter how ‘easy’ it was supposed to make things in the long run. Through many painstaking weeks I learned to search online for what you wanted to use, grab the code and work backwards to try and figure out how it functioned. It wasn’t until I started working with templates in Photoshop that I started to really put the two sides, design and coding, together. It was possible to create any design and, through the use of many tables and proper coding, make it a cohesive, functioning site.

I now have three sites for my personal work, soon to be four, when I finally decide on my layout and functionality. Very like me, I will learn new techniques with this upcoming web project. It calls for Flash, which is something I always meant to learn, but never sat myself down to work through it. I can already tell that this site will require me to extend web building skill further than I have ever done. I can’t wait.

Regardless of the profession or skill level, the ability to write well is a necessity. Whether you realize it or not, people make judgment calls based on writing skills, not only in grammar and spelling, but in your ability to use words correctly and to effectively get your point across.

It never ceases to amaze me how many well-educated people pay so little attention to their writing. In a world of e-mail and digital technology, a lot of times it’s the written words that are making the first impression for you. A misspelled word may not seem like a big deal, because you are confident in your overall ability, but consider the fact that this person has never met you, and that misspelled word is the only thing they have to go on.

For many corporations and medical institutions,  it’s the website that introduces potential customers or patients to them.

If your website is full of poorly written content that is either difficult for the reader to interpret or is riddled with grammatical errors, you are making a statement to the visitor. Regardless of how well-known or accredited your business or practice may be, you lose professional ground and credibility.
At  DDA, the five full-time writers are well-versed at writing copy for all types of fields within the corporate and medical industries, and for a wide range of audiences. We know what it takes, whether it’s for a marketing or advertising campaign, or simply to disseminate information, to effectively engage visitors, while maintaining a professional tone that is appropriate to your audience.