Archive for February, 2008

Life on the internet moves fast. Very Fast. In a couple years businesses can go from boom to bust and obscure technologies like AJAX can become the industry standard seemingly overnight. Keeping up with the wealth of new information has become a challenge for people, but syndicated feeds like ATOM and RSS can help reduce the clutter by only focusing on new or updated information and avoiding the rest. Even subscribing to 15-20 blogs can become a problem and the constant stream of unread items can become overwhelming.

The base problem is the large number of posts per day from first-movers. TechCrunch(~5/day), Engadget(~25/day), Lifehacker(~15/day), Mashable(~30/day). These Blogs and Websites are usually the first to break news in the blogosphere - which you don’t want to miss - but tend to post way too many items daily - which you can do without. Just Over the course of one week they would have published between 300-600 posts just between the 4 of them.
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Jumping into a design can be a daunting task. From the initial project download, there are many steps involved before i actually get my mouse wet. For time’s sake I’m only going to address one of these steps: the moodboard. Imagine a clothing designer’s studio…its walls are probably covered in magazine clippings, fabric swatches, sketches and other bits of inspiration. As a web designer, I use the same process but i do it digitally. I’m definitely not the first to admit that my ideas are maybe 10% original. Lucky for us designers, usability is huge in web design and creating a unique and original design that no one knows how to navigate is useless. I am not saying that I frown upon originality, I’m just saying you must be careful where you execute it, it could make or break your site.

Anyway, back to the moodboard. Whether I’m designing a logo, splash page, site or anything really, I create a moodboard. Anything that pertains to the mood I’m trying to convey gets thrown in(without the use of scissors and elmer’s). With a logo design for example, I would include other logos, colors, photos, words, shapes and anything else that associates with the mood I’m trying to create. As the board grows the mood begins unfolding and ideas start oozing. It’s like cooking, a little bit of this…some of that…maybe a little this, and all of a sudden you’re getting some where. From here you can begin to move away from the moodboard and get that mouse wet. However, never forget where you came from. Check back in with your moodboard as the design progresses to make sure you haven’t strayed too far from your original vision.

• Install the firefox ad-on screen grab
• Give yourself a nice big photoshop canvas
• Use a background color
• Use sticky notes if there’s something specific you liked about a certain image that you might forget later
• Be messy. You can count pixels later
• Revisit early and often, keep it going
• Have fun!

The academy has voted and the results are in! dt has been chosen, in the small business category, as one of the Best Places to Work in San Diego! wOOt! Last night a few of us attended the San Diego Business Journal’s ceremony representing dt as a 2008 Nominee only to leave the event with an award in hand! It was quite an honor to be a part of the celebration and I want to thank the San Diego Business Journal for taking the time to recognize the people/businesses who truly make a difference in the community.

Thanks to our internal team of super ninjas, fabulous clients, loving framily (no that’s not a misspelling) and supportive community for being the foundation for our success. Now let’s turn up the music, pour a few rounds and celebrate already!…after all we are one of the best places to work in San Diego

Like most geeks, we have been watching the mobile space for a while. As we continue to build web apps big and small we constantly get excited about being able to take those apps mobile and about creating purely mobile apps as well. Yep, sure 2006 was supposed to be the year of mobile and then 2007 and now it’s 2008. But, we agree with the vast majority of the geeks that believe that 2008 will be the year that we’ll start to really see mobile explode.

That’s why we are especially excited that we have created a strategic development and marketing partnership with GoLife Mobile, a Portland company (Hillsboro to be exact) that has come up with a revolutionary way to deliver apps on mobile phones. Okay, so it’s nothing necessarily different to be delivering mobile apps to the likes of iPhones and the fanciest new smart phones on the market. But, the reality is that the vast majority of people don’t have smart phones (less than 20% at last count). And, it’s no different these days to be delivering mobile apps that tell you where a restaurant or dry cleaner is near your house or how your stock is doing. But, GoLife Mobile goes beyond and we are looking forward to working with the GoLife team because:

• The GoLife team is passionate, talented and has a true vision for enabling a mobile lifestyle
• The GoLife technology can run on smart phones, dumb phones and most phones in between
• The GoLife team is lead by a strong and experienced management team, including James Whitley (CEO), a true thought leader in the mobile space
• The company is entrepreneurial and has a vision of what is possible with mobile as well as the resources to execute on that vision
• We build a lot of apps for businesses and entrepreneurs and believe that nobody building web apps can continue to ignore the mobile space
• GoLife will build a lot of mobile apps and we believe the best entrepreneurs and businesspeople will blend and blur mobile with web

The GoLife partnership will enable digital-telepathy and REBEL, our thinkubator, to be able to better serve our clients and partners as well as the web community in which we operate.

As you have probably either heard of, been to or seen; dt is starting to host a number of events and workshops on a monthly basis. We’ve hosted Lunch 2.0, Refresh and today hosted our first (and successful) workshop! Our first workshop was titled: Public Relations 2.0: New Web, New Tools, New Opportunities. Attendees included PR, marketing and business professionals from all over San Diego. The morning consisted of some light networking, coffee and Einsteins bagels (yumz), and a casual presentation about the tools PR professionals can use to get a grasp in the 2.0 space.

The feedback was very positive about the workshop and we’ll definitely be hosting more to come. Keep checking back at our events page to get the most up to date information. Thanks again to all who attended and we look forward to seeing the amazing PR 2.0 campaigns you launch (even if you have to blend an iPhone)!

To access our presentation click here:

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