Steinruck Design Blog

What to do when you suck at blogging

2008-07-01T13:14:00-05:00

I’ve avoided this topic like the plague because, much like the bald spot on the peak of my head, I didn’t want to admit that it is true. Sure, I’m a “new media” designer. I often feel like I have something to say. Heck, I was even so bold to put out there in a previous post long ago that I was going to start posting more. So what happened? In a word...life. Over the course of the past few months I’ve been busier than ever before. From work (big changes), to home (new baby + two other kiddos), to spending time creating warm fuzzy moments with friends and family. So unfortunately the blog hasn’t felt the love that everyone else has felt. It blows my mind to see how some other designers, developers, or all around web-geeks have time to blog, tweet, flickr, stumble, and actually get work done. I give props to anyone who has found that ability to balance everything and be at the top of your game. I’d love to have some of the magic juice that you’re drinking. So what do you do when you don’t have the time to blog? Add more things to the mix, of course. The ground work for Refresh Greenville is just getting underway with my good buddy Matthew. There are also a bunch of other things that I can’t make an official announcement on quite yet, but I promise I will soon. No really! The blog will feel some love. I just can’t guarantee how much.

Circle At Seven Studio

2008-02-14T04:53:00-05:00

My friends at Circle at Seven launched their new site. Mad skills, that’s all I have to say.

The Naming Conundrum

2008-02-10T19:24:01-05:00

I’ve been tossing new company names at the wall for the past few weeks hoping that something would stick. I’m looking for a name that better typifies the goings on at Steinruck Design. A few that stuck on my wall fell flat when mentioned to other people. Then a few popular ones ended up being popular enough with other people who already snatched up the domains. Argh! It’s amazing how all consuming this naming process can be. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night thinking about it. Everything I see or think about seems to in some way make me think about names. So I’m curious, how did you come up with your company name?

Crybaby

2008-02-08T06:12:01-05:00

Some beautiful work at crybaby.

Generation Gap

2008-02-01T05:01:00-05:00

Today my three-year-old sat down at his blueberry blue iMac and started pounding away on the keyboard. He was very intent on what he was doing, so I hesitated to disturb him. After about five minutes of this I asked, “Hey buddy, watcha doing?” He responded, “Just checkin’ my email daddy. I’ve got a ton of ‘em today.” That pretty much sums up life around here.

Viget Labs is looking for a Design Director

2008-01-25T15:04:00-05:00

My good friends at Viget Labs are looking for a Design Director in lovely Falls Church, VA. If you’re in the D.C. area, or if you’re willing to move there and work for a really cool company, feel free to send me your info and I’ll pass it along to Brian at Viget. You’ll also be working with one of the best minds in web design today. The job description is below. - - - - - - - - Company: Viget Labs Job Title: Design Director Description: Viget Labs (www.viget.com) is a full-service web consulting / design / development / marketing firm founded in 1999 and based in Falls Church, VA. We build highly-effective web sites for online start-ups, non-profits, and traditional businesses. Our work has earned us a national reputation that attracts great clients. We have a growing staff of 30 in two offices (Falls Church, VA is our HQ, and Durham, NC is our first remote office, now with 5 folks). We’re seeking an exceptional Design Director to join the HQ team. She/He might be a senior designer looking to take that next big step, or an already-Director level pro looking for a new set of challenges. Specific experience isn’t as important as passion—for web standards, UX design, mentoring others, working with start-ups, growing professionally, and leading a team that does some of the best design work in the world. For the right person, we humbly believe that this is a dream opportunity to plug into a small (but not too small) company that has a ton of talent and momentum and to really have an impact. The Job Lead Mentor/manage 5-person design team Facilitate performance reviews Identify learning/training opportunities Help recruit, interview, and hire new designers Design Do web / user experience design for key clients (~50% time) Oversee design for all clients Provide input on creative direction / ux design for all clients Work within cross-function teams of developers, marketers, & strategists to create complete solutions Direct the Company Assist senior management set strategic direction Improve the Viget design process Blog actively on Viget’s blogs Identify conferences, attend, and speak You must have: Exceptional talent, demonstrated by a solid portfolio A design background, but be a web person Passion for interface, information, and experience design Have leadership experience Have BFA, MFA, or equivalent experience Have 8-10yrs professional experience Job Perks: Awesome benefits Matching 401K Paid trips to conferences (we’re all going to SXSW) Quarterly out-of-the office fun events Top-notch coworkers Free Lunch Fridays Company provided organic fruit, sodas, and the wii

NetNewsWire

2008-01-22T14:22:00-05:00

NetNews Wire 3.1 is now free. Yippee!

Lessons of a small biz owner

2008-01-22T01:03:00-05:00

In January 2005, I started on the adventure of a lifetime and opened my own web design studio. Most people who do this generally have a few contacts, a few bucks as a cushion, and a lot of prayers. For me, the decision was made easier by signing a long term contract with a company that would allow me to pay the bills even if I was without any other work. This client has been my bread-and-butter for two years, but on December 31, 2007 the gravy train came to an end. I’ll be honest, the initial shock of this situation was, well, shocking. I can’t even begin to explain the emotional roller coaster that my family has been on over the past two months. But I can say that I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I thought that someone somewhere might be able to benefit from these lessons. 1. Build a Network Because I had a hefty contract to lean on just starting out, I wasn’t concerned about my lack of industry contacts. I knew a few people that I had worked with in the past, but I had no clue how I was going to tap them for work. Slowly but surely over the past two years I have made connections with some fantastically talented people at great companies. I’ve established great working relationships with companies in Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Richmond, VA, and most recently right here in Greenville, SC. On average, 90% of my work is done for, or through, someone in my network. 2. Get Organized My face is a little red on this one as I’m still learning learning as I go, but it is oh-so-important. Generating processes, questionnaires, templates, charts, and inventories wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities when I really didn’t need to bring in a lot of work. Silly, silly, me. I would have greatly benefited from getting these things in order when life was more comfortable. My documentation is a continuously evolving to accommodate the changes in the industry, and each time it gets a little better. 3. Have a backup plan No, I don’t mean a job. Have a plan to backup your computer(s) and be unrelenting when putting it into action. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way. One morning I found my Mac needing a refresh of the operating system. I started using SuperDuper! shortly after I started my company, but never once did I actually read the manual or check that my backup was working (mistakes #1 and #2). On that fateful day I also learned that reinstalling the system with a corruption big enough to cause the installation process to fail will cost you a lot of time and money if you don’t have a good backup. Two days of time wasted, one hard drive extracted and sent to DriveSavers (who, by the way, I can’t say enough good things about), and $1,800 later I got a mish-mash of my files back. I still use SuperDuper!, but I check my backups weekly. I also have a multi-tiered backup plan that takes into account even the worse case scenario of my office burning down. Every morning at 2am my computer backs up to a network drive. At 4am another backup is made to a partitioned 500GB Firewire MyBook. Finally at 6am all new files are remotely backed up to my Amazon S3 account using JungleDisk. Overkill, you say? For someone who shelled out $1,800, this backup plan actually feels a bit weak, but it works for now. I plan on buying a 1TB RAID configuration dual harddrive system where the drives mirror each other. Don’t take this lightly and learn from my mistake. 4. Take some “me” time Let’s be realistic, as a small business you will not work 40 billable hours a week on average. You might work a total of 60 in any given week, but about half of those hours will be billable. The other half of that time will be hunting down billable work, writing proposals, filling out paperwork, and doing all of the business development stuff that you can’t actually charge to do. Some of these things include reading blogs, surfing the web, reading magazines, blogging, and building your company identity. Learn to relax and be okay with taking the time to do all of that. If you don’t, then enjoy the cubicle that you’re destined to return to in the near future. 5. Don’t stop thinkin’ about tomorrow I’m always baffled when I see a new and brilliant idea that makes me say, “Why didn’t I think of that...dang it?!”. Not only are these great sources of recurring income for someone who is relying on a less than steady source of income, but they further our industry as a whole. For me, trying to just dream up one of these ideas hasn’t work. If you look at any of the aforementioned links, they all fill what was probably a personal need for the people involved. I’ve finally had my “ah-ha” moment...I think. If all goes well, you’ll find out what it is later this year. That’s all I have to say about that. These five things only touch the tip of the iceberg with lessons that I’ve learned. I could have mentioned things like find a great bookkeeper, listen to good advice, get wise counsel for difficult decisions, keep purchases to a minimum, make good use of your resources, don’t get comfortable in the moment, guard your personal time, try to pull as few all-nighters as possible, send everyone in your network a Christmas card (oops!), keep an orderly workspace, be willing to grow and contract work out, set reasonable but challenging goals, and so many others. There’s a lot more to learn.

Word of Mouth

2008-01-13T21:27:00-05:00

About a year ago my family moved to Greenville, SC. Aside from being in a place much different than my stomping grounds of Northern Virginia, I suddenly found myself without many of the things that were so familiar and comfortable. I was starting over, and that’s not an easy thing to do. One of my first priorities was to find a place to service our cars. In Virginia I was burned several times by opening the Yellow Pages and picking the places that had well designed ads (designer error). I finally asked a few friends who they used, and they unanimously raved about the same auto shop. I trusted their recommendation and it paid off. Everyday we ask people things like, “What’s your favorite fill in the blank?” Even if you have a subscription to Consumer Reports, there’s a good chance that you’ll trust what a real person tells you over what a magazine or Google search says. There’s a level of trust that comes along with the opinion of a real person. This phenomenon, which has really been around as long as things have been bought and sold, is called Word of Mouth Marketing. There are more companies including local Greenvillians Brains on Fire who make brilliant use of this concept, and work to create movements driven by the people who embrace a product or cause. Seems ridiculously simple and intuitive, doesn’t it? Today, quite by accident, I was struck by the fact that something that I do almost daily falls into the Word of Mouth category. I’ve been working to firm up my creative brief that I use. Rather than defaulting to a Google search, I logged in to my del.icio.us account and searched for “creative brief”. In an interweb millisecond, 718 results ranked by their relevance to my search were displayed. While Google would do much the same thing, there were some distinct differences about the results that I received from del.icio.us. For those who don’t know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can save and share your bookmarks rather than using the bookmarks feature in your browser. Because I use del.ico.us, I know first hand that the results are generated by real people. I don’t really know these people, but I do know that they’re not a Google generated algorithm. The people who bookmarked these sites did so because the content was something that they considered to be worthwhile and relevant to them. No one paid money to appear at the top of the list, and nothing but the actual relevance of my search controlled the results. I tend to trust these results over what a computer algorithm decides I might be searching for because I know that real people just like me are building the content on del.ico.us. There are two great features that allow me to get an even better sense of the legitimacy of my search results. Directly under each result is a highlighted link that says saved by 2093 people. So there’s not only one person who thinks that a particular link is worthwhile remembering, but 2093 people have latched on to it and spreading it to their friends like wildfire. But wait, it gets better! Clicking on that highlighted link will display brief notes that people wote about the links. When I bookmark sites in my own list, there’s an option for me to share the link I found with people in my network. I’ll often create these notes for them to get a better idea about the link that I’m sending to them. It’s real, personal, and pure gold when I’m looking for something quick and relevant without sifting through a lot of sites that may not be of much value to me. While this may be an indirect form of Word of Mouth Marketing, it still qualifies. The web is a haven for spreading this phenomenon through social networking and online communities. How do you directly or indirectly engaged in spreading information by word of mouth on the web?

Design Bookmarklet

2008-01-09T15:42:00-05:00

Design is a fantastic javascript bookmarklet. Via Pop Stalin.