oak: Blog

Happy holidays

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:00:00 GMT

There’s nothing like a roaring fire to make the season bright.

This season we transformed our studio into a cozy wonderland, complete with festive yuletide log and IdeaPaint mantle (thanks to Mike and Alonzo for the whiteboard handiwork).

Since it’s the season of giving, we’re delighted to pass this experience on to you. Gather around your laptop, play in fullscreen, and feel the warmth. You'll swear you're sitting by the fire at Studiomates.

Our fireplace “mantle” also made for a perfect place to “hang” our stockings from last year. Huge thanks to Tattly magician and studiomate Bekka for making stockings for the new studiomates this year, including our very own Mike Fortress, Alonzo Felix, and Larry Fox (intern Sawyer Hollenshead was excited to make his own).

Watch or download the full HD video on Vimeo, or see a looping fullscreen version at http://oak.is/festive.

Happy holidays from your friends at Oak.

See you in 2012!

BetaFriender

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Last week we attended Brooklyn Beta, a small web conference put on by our good friends at Fictive Kin and Analog.

280 of the friendliest, smartest, and most passionate people in the web community came together with the mantra “make something you love.” For those lucky enough to attend (or those interesting in following the Brooklyn Beta crew), we built a little app called BetaFriender.

BetaFriender helps you connect with people might have met at the conference by comparing your recent Twitter followers with the Brooklyn Beta attendee list, and gives you the option to follow them back. Now you can recreate the magic and conversation of Brooklyn Beta in your Twitter feed all year long.

The app was built using Python (and the Twitter API) on Google App Engine, over the course of one afternoon.

Try it out at http://www.betafriender.com.

Seeking intern

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:00:00 GMT

We are looking for a talented intern person to join our Brooklyn-based studio.

At Oak, we develop web apps (like Dropmark and Siteleaf), publish weblogs (idsgn.org), and build projects for clients like NASDAQ, Apple, 37signals, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

We are primarily looking for someone to help out on front-end code on both our products and client projects. You’ll have the opportunity to learn, hone your skills, and contribute valuable work to real projects—not go on coffee runs (unless that’s something you’re passionate about).

Do you <live> and <breathe> HTML? Take an odd pleasure in outsmarting Internet Explorer? Can’t imagine life without CoffeeScript? Prepping an HTML6 laundry list to submit to the W3C? Love to experiment, learn, hack, and make things? If so, let’s talk.

Our studio has breathtaking views of Brooklyn Bridge park where you’ll also get to hang out with some of the best creatives in the city and unwind with some Rock Band and Beer Friday action.

You should have:

A strong portfolio with emphasis on web design/development
Impressive front-end web development skills (HTML5/CSS3)
Self-motivated, problem-crushing attitude
Willingness to learn new things
Strong writing and communication skills

…and if you have experience wtih (and/or willingness to learn) any of the following you may just blow our minds:

Responsive web design and media queries
Stylus/SASS
CoffeeScript
Programming languages (PHP/Rails)
Version control (Git)
Content management systems
Design and typography
Contributions to open-source projects
Rock Band®
Sense of humor

If this sounds like you, let's talk.

This is a paid internship (commitment is flexible), with the opportunity to grow into a full-time position. Interested? Send an e-mail to jobs+intern@oakmade.com and introduce yourself.

Note: we are looking for someone to work from our studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Rackspace Startup Program

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Rackspace hosts pretty much everything we make here at Oak, from our web apps (like Dropmark) to this site right here. We can’t say enough good things about them or their fanatical support.

Earlier this year, Rackspace launched the Rackspace Startup Program, which aims to help startups launch new products and ideas through a combination of hosting and mentorship.

…we were just like you in 1998. Since those early days we've been committed to helping entrepreneurs drive the next generation of businesses with our hosting and Fanatical Support. Now, with the Rackspace Startup Program, we're providing cloud hosting and coaching to selected startups so they can rocket to success as well.

—Rackspace Startup Program

We’re extremely thrilled to announce that Oak has been accepted into this program. Over the next year, we’ll be working closely with the Rackspace team to launch and grow our products. This is great news for us and our users.

Thanks Rackspace!

With compliments to OpenSRS

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:00:00 GMT

GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar by far, with around 32% marketshare (or around 40,212,493 domain names), according to the website WebHosting.Info.

At Oak, we’ve registered more than a few domain names through GoDaddy—cringing each time Danica Patrick stares us down. But, as the largest registrar, they have the lowest prices, and for the most part, things ‘just work.’ Recent events, however, made us question where our money is going.

In April, we decided to try out OpenSRS as a way to manage our growing repertoire in bulk. Despite the fun branding by illlustrator John Martz, OpenSRS seemed to fall short with their clunky, dated UI (a new version appears to be under development). For the most part, I forgot about it.

Then last week, an unassuming box showed up at the studio:

I recognized the OpenSRS logo, but couldn’t figure out what they would be sending us…

Inside we found an OpenSRS-branded care package complete with a Field Notes-style notebook, pre-sharpened pencil, buttons, and icing-on-the-cake, a vinyl toy recreation of OpenSRS “service guy” mascot. Not your average tchotchkies.

No explanation, no salesy ‘upsell,’ just a box full of fun stuff.

Nice work OpenSRS. You definitely have our attention again.

Tattly is here

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks our team had the pleasure of working with Tina Roth Eisenberg (better known as swissmiss) on a project that can only be described as badass (if only temporarily badass).

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Tattly.

Tattly is line of temporary tattoos by designers for designers and design-minded kids. The idea came to Tina after applying several embarrassing “clip art” tattoos on her daughter (seriously, who makes this stuff?).

Tattly started out of my frustration that temporary children tattoos are often hideous looking. Think clip art gone Tattoo. I was ready to put designy, cool, typographic tattoos on my daughter’s arm. Tattly was born.

—Tina Roth Eisenberg

The first group of Tattlys were created by a diverse group of designers including James Victore, Frank Chimero, Jessica Hische, and Jason Santa Maria. You can satisfy your inner (type) nerd with cursors, color wheels, robots, and more (or just buy them all). New Tattly designs will be announced on an ongoing basis.

If you’re not lucky enough to have a Tattly vending machine in your office (it tops our list of perks), you can buy ’em online at http://tatt.ly, built by yours truly.

The shop runs on Shopify, which was almost as painless to set up as applying a Tattly to your bicep. Shopify also has some useful add-on apps like PixelPrinter, which makes it a snap to print shipping labels and receipts, and Chimpified, which syncs customer information with MailChimp.

The entire shop follows responsive design principles, meaning you’ll have no problems ordering a Tattly from your iPhone (because you never know when you’ll need a Tattly on the go).

So, what are you waiting for?

How to disable drop shadows in OS X screenshots

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:00:00 GMT

In putting together our new website, we started to collect screenshots of some of the work we’ve created over the years. Thankfully, Apple makes it pretty easy to capture a single window in OS X. I’m talking about the ol’ command+shift+4, spacebar, click.

After years of taking screenshots this way, the bizarre keyboard shortcut combo doesn’t even phase me.

However, I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that OS X adds a drop shadow around the screenshot. It can sometimes be useful, but for the most part it just gets in the way. It also creates awkward spacing around the image, and adds to the file size. In other words, good for nuthin’.

A typical screenshot may look something like this:

“Put a drop shadow on it.”
—Steve Jobs*

Paparazzi is a great alternative for taking full-length website screenshots, but sometimes you want to include the browser chrome (or take a screenshot of something else).

After a recent attempt to Photoshop out a drop shadow, I thought there had to be a better way. And there is.

Drop shadows, can be disabled in Mac OS X’s screen captures using a sneaky Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Once applied, restart your computer’s UI server for the change to take effect:

killall SystemUIServer

That’s all there is to it. You should now get something like this:

Want your drop shadows back? Repeat the same steps, this time using false instead of true:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

killall SystemUIServer

Thanks to Macgasm for the tip.

*We cannot confirm Steve Jobs actually said this.

Newswordy just got more colorful

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 04:00:00 GMT

If you follow Newswordy on Twitter, you might’ve noticed something different today (and if you’re not following Newswordy on Twitter, you should).

Newswordy is a collection of news media buzzwords, built by Oak and curated by Josh Smith. Each day, a new word is posted along with a definition, a quote of its use (or misuse) in the media, and a news and Twitter feed on the subject. If that’s not already enough to win you over, the site algorithmically generates a unique background color for each word, based on the characters in the word itself.

Expatriate is blue, Hacktivist is orange, Grifter is yellow, and so on. Each day, a colorful surprise awaits.

We love the variety colors so much, it felt a bit dull when we had to settle on yellow for the site’s favicon. Well, not anymore. With a little help from GD, we made it possible for the favicon to automatically assume the word of the day’s color. Call it a chameleon favicon (chamelecon?) if you will.

Here we are in a cool shade of expatriate, favicon to match:

The colorful icons also carry over to your favorite Apple touch device. Add Newswordy.com to your home screen and the color will update everyday when you launch the app:

And finally, for the trifecta, we also automatically push the color of the day to the @Newswordy Twitter profile (today’s color is lovely shade of certitude).

This is made possible thanks to the Twitter API, which we are using to update the profile image, background color, and sidebar colors. Lucky for us, it seems Twitter is much happier when changing profile images through the API vs. the website (which seems to be broken at least 50% of the time).

Since the profile image now correlates with the word of the day, it’s easy spot and recognize in your Twitter feed:

This is our way of injecting a little bit of color into your day. We hope you enjoy it with certitude.

In an upcoming post, we’ll talk more about the algorithmic process we use to convert words into colors. Subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.

.net questions our sanity

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:00:00 GMT

.net Magazine posted an article today about our one week redesign project. Written by Craig Grannell, the article discusses some of the challenges we faced during the week, and also questions our sanity.

Ask any agency about the website update that's slipped most from its original deadline and it'll be its own. Studios are notorious for letting their own sites languish. And in the case of New York-based Oak, there was never a 'proper' site in the first place.

"We wanted to make one, but it's just never been a priority," says founder Skylar Challand, adding that the company had been getting by with a tiny splash page. "Although it had won us some praise, it was clear a real website needed to happen - we make these things for a living after all, and we wanted a place to share our ideas and work with the world."

…He adds that working under such time constraints forced efficiency and teamwork, and that the project was fun, although an admission that the team ended up dressing in fake red beards at one point perhaps suggests sanity wasn't always part of the equation. And while Challand says he "doesn't think we have a need to do another public countdown any time soon", he reckons the process was worthwhile: "We'll definitely take everything we learned and apply this renewed energy to whatever comes next."

Read the full article over at .net Magazine:
http://www.netmagazine.com/news/ny-studio-designs-its-site-week

Our new website

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:00:00 GMT

It’s finally here. You are looking at it.

This week our team took a week off from our regular work schedule, and challenged ourselves to make a new website for ourselves in one week. Everything from the planning, content, design, and development was to happen within this week.

First thing Monday morning we set up a public countdown (to keep us honest), and got to work with one goal in mind: launch something Friday at 5pm.

Despite a small a small delay (our official launch time was 5:37pm), we all feel pretty happy with what we accomplished this week.

And yes, there is more to come. Let’s call this our public beta. We will be pushing updates over the next few days, and have some really fun stuff up our sleeves.

More to follow…