• Art Director
• Senior Web Designer
• Project Manager

Job descriptions are listed in Careers.

If you’re interested please contact Laura Mindorff at laura@76design.com.

Got talent? We want it.

Thornley Fallis and 76design is a bold, innovative, marketing agency that helps clients reach, connect with, and build and sustain positive relationships with their communities through the integrated use of on-line and off-line tactics.

We design the creative, build the innovative, and manage the complicated.

Every member of our firm believes in the power of digital engagement. Everything we do is designed to foster that. We engender mutual respect and trust between our clients and their respective stakeholders and audiences. Our clients are a mix of high-profile corporate brands, bleeding-edge startups, government and associations. For these clients, we go beyond. We don’t leave it at working for and representing them; we believe in them, we brag about them.

Our shop is dynamic, open-minded, eclectic and centrally located. Our style is fresh, friendly, professional and invigorating.

The common thread in all of our efforts is a big idea of what the conversation economy can do for our clients to solve real business challenges and create new business opportunities. If you are part of this fabric, and looking for a great ride as an Art Director, we want to hear from you.

If we celebrate this much for 8000, I can’t imagine what we will do when we reach 10,000.  Let the countdown begin!

Well we wondered. We decided to take the first step towards answering that question with the first ever 76design Aural Design Poster showdown.

here is a snippet of the original project brief

“Take a Song, Listen to it, Design!…” “…Pitcher of booze for non-delivery is standard penalty.”

But where to begin? What song would provide suitable poster fodder? Well, according to one Steve Lounsbury, Brain of J by Pearl Jam would do the trick. And by golly – I dare say he was right. Well done Steve old chum.

Sure, its a “design” project…but this project was not meant for designers alone. No, this project was for all. Designers, developers, account managers, and project managers alike. With only a few abstaining from participation (and 1 poor sap that failed to meet the 2 week deadline) it was a full team endeavour. Fun? Probably. The results? You be the judge.

[View with PicLens]

And 2 of our developers took the opportunity to create their submissions in processing – 1 of whom also decided to give us a glimpse at “the making of”. Enjoy.

You get it the drift. Today is Super Sunday, average joes across the Americas and elsewhere, will don their “colours”, slaughter 100’s of buffaloes for their magical wings, drink a lake’s worth of beer, take a nap, skip bathroom breaks to watch commercials, and then experience some the most over-hyped mediocre (correction:electrifying) football ever. Yes friends, Superbowl XLIII will showcase the Steelers of Pittsburgh and the Cardinals of Arizona. Both teams have a deep heritage in the league, all the way back when the Superbowl was a naive single roman numeral.

If you have haven’t reached your Superbowl ingestion limit yet, the New York Times had a few prominent designers take a couple snaps at re-doing the logo. It is interesting to note that a common graphic element was common in a few of the logos. See if you can notice. It gives an insight into this wacky creative world; just because you came up with an idea, doesn’t mean that it is that original.

Anyhoo, check out the logos, stuff your faces, enjoy the game and ‘Go (inserts team name)!, Kill the loser (insert team name)!’.

What does a retired General, a former Olympian and a man they call “Dog” have in common? If you said they’re all speakers available through the National Speakers Bureau, you’d win the big stuffed narwhal.

For over 35 years, the National Speakers Bureau has garnered a reputation as the source for event speakers. They are the sole agents for over 100 speakers, and they work with over a thousand others in North America and abroad.

They came to 76design with a request, upgrade their brand. This included a new logo and revamping their site. During our analysis of their brand, we felt that their existing website didn’t accurately reflect the class of speakers they had, nor did it “speak” (so punny!) to their great customer service.

76 updated their corporate logo, created a brand new site with a focus on bringing their speakers to the forefront, improving the speakers search functions, and we also created a new interactive module on the homepage. Overall, our goal was to facilitate the user experience, but also motivate potential clients to call one of their reps to assist them through the booking process. The new National Speakers Bureau site launched January, 2009.

Take a spin on NSB.com, and book yourself a speaker or two. On a personal note, I am awaiting the confirmation that Strombo is coming to my Super Bowl party. Fingers Crossed!

So after no longer being able to cope with Yammer’s pitfalls anymore, Thornley Fallis and 76design’s CEO Joe Thornley had the insight to give present.ly a try, and actively encouraged both organizations to become part of this community. Here are my thoughts and feedback after our first week of use.

Ease of use

A handful of us are already avid twitter users, so the learning curve was next to none.  Many were newly introduced to Twitter lingo, but after a few tries, it was smooth sailing.

Luckily for all us there are also some great additional features in presently that we got to know :

• Groups are a marvel;
• “Highlighting” when people ask questions (?) or say something urgent (!!!) is quite useful;
• Built-in media sharing.

The web interface is really straightforward, and logical.  In addition to this, present.ly also has a desktop AIR app and an iPhone-friendly interface.

However, things tend to behave just a little differently than they do on twitter, which can lead to some frustrating moments.  The behaviors aren’t bad, but I like my conventions!

• No “delete” option: seriously, we all make typos;
• Unlike Twitter’s web interface, the return key will send a message instead of doing a line break (This seems minor, but without a delete button, it’s a total pain.)
• Another often mentioned issue is that of the confusion on how the “Groups” feature works.  If two users are members of a group, but do not “follow” one another, they don’t receive all the updates destined for that group.  This could lead to people missing out on part of the conversation. And also forces a user to follow pretty much everyone;
• Multiple email activity notifications that are impossible to turn off.

None of these issues are significant enough to stop me from doing what I want to do with present.ly.  But to the folks at present.ly, if you’re listening – hear me out!

Is it all worth it?

After the first day on present.ly, many of us, myself included, questioned if this tool was worthwhile.  The entire day on present.ly had been spent sending silly messages and testing out the features.  It felt like a productivity killer.

I’d say that for the remainder of the week, a good lot of us realized the potential of present.ly and made a conscious effort to make it useful.  A few examples of things we’ve used it for:

• Tracking any internal technical issues with hashtags;
• Sharing news / ideas about development in our devSquad group;
• Sharing business successes;
• Status updates (what you’re working on, where you are, etc.);
• Giving out bonuses (if you’re Joe)!

Overview

All in all, I think Present.ly is a great app, and it seems to have really “hit the nail on the head” in terms of what we needed as a inter-office communication tool.  I also envision it being useful on any “Enterprise” level, as it is reasonable secure and stable.  But as with any collaborative tool or app, we must always keep the ball rolling and choose to make it useful…

What do you think?  I’d love to hear feedback on some solutions that have worked for you, and have allowed you to communicate better at work.

1. When your browser requests a file, Apache may report that the file hasn’t changed. You can see this with a tool like firebug, any files that come back with a “304 Not Modified” header will not be re-downloaded by your browser.

2. When you first requested the file sometime in the past, Apache may have sent an expires header with the file. This means that until a specified date, your browser will never re-download the file. Unlike the #1 above, it doesn’t even ask Apache if it should re-download the file.

Note: I’m sure I missed a few ways a file can find it’s way into the cache, but that’s not the point of this post.

All this caching is great for the performance of your website, but it sucks when you actually want your users to download the new version of the file. Putting up “our site has changed, please clear your browser cache” is obviously out of the question. So, what can we do?

When your browser encounters a file that it hasn’t seen before it will always go ask Apache for the file. So, one option is to add a version number to the filename and update your source to point at the new file. This works, but adds a maintenance overhead because you have to make sure you maintain the version number of the file and deploy it with the proper filename. So, style.css could become style-20090109.css.

The problem with the above is that you have to maintain the file version in two places, once in your source html and again when you update the css file. We can get around this using htaccess by pointing all reguests to style*.css to style.css. So, when a request is made for style-20090109.css you get the updated contents of style.css and since the filename is unique you get around the cache issues. Yes, you still have to maintain the reference to the stylesheet in your html source, but you don’t have to worry about how to name the file. Anyway, here’s how you go about doing this.

Create a .htaccess file in the directory where your style.css file lives. In it put the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^style(.*).css$ style.css [QSA,L]

Now, when you request style-20090109.css or style-monkey.css you’ll always get the contents of style.css. There are other solutions, but I find that this works best for us. Hope someone will find it useful.

Our first stab at it was a home grown script. This was done in a few hours one afternoon and was setup on a cron job. It would ping a set of sites every five minutes, check the http response header and make sure we were getting a “200 ok”. This worked for the most part, but didn’t save any history and it would continue to pester us until the site was back up.

After our needs outgrew the homegrown script, we looked for something a little more sophisticated. There are several open source options. One being Nagios. It lets you monitor any server for standard services like HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc. Also, there are several plugins available that let you monitor load, database activity, etc. It produces pretty “management friendly” graphs and has a very flexible system for notifying you when something goes wrong. This is all great, but you have to set it up and maintain it yourself. I don’t have the time to do that.

Finally, I came across pingdom.com. Pingdom is a distributed monitoring service that does one job and does it well. You can monitor all the standard services, setup notifications over email and sms, see those “management friendly” graphs and even check for certain strings on the site you are monitoring. This makes it easy to write an endpoint that checks crucial services (db, filesystem space, etc) and produces an “OK” or “BAD” message. This way, pingdom can not only let you know if your site is up and responding, but if your database is up and running too. Overall, Pingdom is exactly what we need and best of all, I don’t need to do anything to maintain it.

I’ll leave you with an example of one of those pretty graphs:

[steve@76design ~]$ svnlook info /svn -r 1
steve
2007-08-23 18:23:03 -0400 (Thu, 23 Aug 2007)
23
Created folder remotely

And svnlook youngest gives me this:

[steve@76design ~]$ svnlook youngest /svn
6567

In a year we have over 6500 commits and many projects contained in that (now not so little) repository. Given that there are so many commits going on, we thought it would be useful to have a feed of commits happening in real time. If we had that, we could get a good feel for the activity in the office over the day. One obvious choice for a feed is RSS, and we have that too, but we thought it could be fun to have a twitter stream of our commits.

I did some quick googling and came across a Google code project called twitvn. Unfortunately, due to hosting restrictions, I was unable to get it installed on our svn server. So, like any developer would do, I wrote my own ;)

SVN provides you with some interesting ways to interact with it pre and post commit. I wanted to hook in on post-commit and fire off a twitter message with some details about the commit. Turns out it’s fairly simple to do.

After every commit, if a script is available at [svn path]/hooks/post-commit, SVN will run that script. Two arguments are provided, the svn path and the revision number of the commit. Using these two pieces of info, you can then pull out whatever details you want about that particular commit and choose to do what you want with it. Knowing that, here is the approach I took:

1. Get the particulars about the commit using ’svnlook info’
2. Get the modified files using ’svnlook changed’
3. Determine the author and the project that was being committed
4. Create a twitter message and send it using Curl

I decided to write it using PHP, mostly because it’s what I know and I wanted to get it done quickly. In order to determine the project, I assumed that the top level folder of the first modified file is the project (this will depend on your repository layout so your mileage may vary here).

The final script is called tweeter.php, grab it here.

In order to run it, drop your twitter account details into CMD_CURL_TWITTER and add this line to your post-commit file:

[path-to-php5-cli] [path-to-tweeter.php] “${REPOS}” “${REV}”

Let me know if you get some use out of it!

Thats right, we’re growing mustaches for Mustaches for Kids. This is the 4th year we have participated and it is shaping up to be the best year ever. Thank you if you have contributed and thank you in advance if you still plan on donating to M4K.

This year’s brave growers: