Splash!

We’ve landed a gig doing the Security Update newsletters for Linux.com – a division of OSTG. SlashDot is also a part of OSTG. Watch for our weekly contributions!

We’ve been doing some on-site work for a few realtors in the area. Buying and selling real estate as a line of work did not have much interest before but even we recognize that if you know what you are doing, and you are lucky, you can increase your net worth more quickly in real estate than just about anywhere else (except possibly Wall Street). On the plus side, it isn’t as easy to lose everything as can and does frequently happen on Wall Street. We’ll post random thoughts on real estate as they occur, it really is a fascinating line of work.

If there is anything about the freelance trade that is universally true, it probably involves pressure and time in some way. That’s why we were very interested in an offer to edit and typeset a text book on pressure vessels. For those who haven’t heard of such a thing, a pressure vessel can be anything from an accumulator in a hydraulics system to a compressed air tank to a steam boiler. They all contain a fluid under pressure. Some systems can operate at very high pressures so there is an extra emphasis on finding and correcting errors. Errors can result in equipment beiing overpressurized: the result is an increased risk of failure which could possibly killing someone.

With a 20-page sample in hand, we worked up a proposal and sent it off. It brought back the good old days for Reese when he wrote repair procedures and personally performed repairs on steam boilers and other pressure vessels when he was in the US Navy. That experience gave him the practical and technical proficiency needed for a highly technical textbook like this one.

We’ve all heard other people say it and maybe we’ve said it ourselves: jumping rope for 10 minutes gives the same health benefits as 30 minutes of jogging.

But who drives across town to the gym just to jump rope? Who wants to swing a rope around and put lamps and everything else in jeopardy? Now you don’t have to. The inventor of Bichiballs believes the problem can be solved simply and affordably. Bichiballs combine the health benefits of jumping rope with the freedom of dance. Add your favorite music and you can exercise in your own home without putting any of your furnishings at risk. You’ll save time and gas money, too.

And, speaking from experience, the best thing about them is that they don’t put as much pressure on the knees since you aren’t jumping as much. It’s more like bouncing. You don’t have to worry about tripping up either. However, you *do* have to worry about the dog — a dog which relentlessly tries to interfere no matter how many times he gets knocked in the thead.

The good news is that the balls are made of a soft material that didn’t seem to hurt the dog.

We had even more fun creating the Urban Aerobics Web site. It was easy on the knees, too!

Otok Ben-Hvar thinks so. Formerly known as Ben Garcia, Ben is one of those wonderful people who gives of himself freely. For several years he traveled to Red Square in Moscow so he could play Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. He’s ridden a riding lawnmower across the United States. There is more. The Saint Petersburg Times wrote a very nice piece about him that goes into many of the details. It provides a good introduction to him and who he is.

So what did Ben want or need from us? We had the same question. He has a very thick 3-ring notebook with pictures of a particular Maple tree, grown from a seed in soil collected from all 50 states.

The pictures show the tree in front of our nation’s state capitol buildings, there is a letter from the governor of each state, and Ben’s notes he took on the road. Ben detailed his travels and troubles (going through Customs is always an adventure) as well as the National Arbor Day Foundation and its efforts to get an Oak tree declared the nation’s national tree instead.

Ben’s goal? Get his Maple tree planted in the White House lawn and then turn his 3-ring binder into a book so the whole nation can enjoy it. More on that as it develops.

Just finishing up some work on a poster and flyers for the Ronn Guidi Foundation in the San Francisco Bay area. Here’s a little sneak preview, a thumbnail of the poster. We had fun with the flyer, an insert. We created a trifold insert for the program and mailings. For program and catalog inserts, the exterior page of the trifold asks, “Can you keep a secret?”

What a great, lapel-grabbing question!

Check back for an update. We’ll put up the whole set, as thumbnails, images, and in .PDF format. We’ll also provide more information about the photgrapher. Hannah is a student and experimental photgrapher in North Carolina. We hope to receive her bio soon.

If you study public relations and marketing, you’ll quickly learn that a lot of people recommend the use of direct sales letters. Direct sales letters have a distinctive look and feel — and for good reason. They work. Years of research has show that sales letters, absolutely chock full of information, highlighting, underlines, strategically bolded key words — all of it works. It really does work.

Yes, we know: you’ll tell us it doesn’t work on you. Are you sure? Really sure? Never mind. We’ll take your word for it. At any rate, our latest project involves the development of direct sales letter sites for a client right here in our little Greek fishing village on the Gulf coast.

As time permits, we’ll walk you through the development of these sites and show you how we used CSS to speed up the production process. CSS makes it possible to quickly produce several sites based on one template. There’s quite a bit of up front investment in the skeletal template and in creating a variety of styles from which to choose. However, once you get that out of the way, it’s just a matter of changing a line or two of code and you can change the look of one section of a site. Change several lines (instead of hundreds) and you can transform the same basic structure pretty quickly. To see what we mean, visit the CSS Zen Garden.

We worked on these a few weeks ago, but only now had time to get some thumbnails up. These are the concept roughs we created for a book about how to combine traditional and alternative health care approaches. The authors had a plethora of ideas with which to work and a large audience of supporters and fellow-travelers who’ve taken a great interest in the writing of the book. Now, they’re in the last stages and those same fans are taking great interest in the cover design.

This makes for an interesting process, to say the least. Consequently, there were an extremely wide variety of requests for cover concepts: Everything from a three-legged stool, to an iconographic representation of what I called the “power of three,” to butterflies, to winding roads and mountain vistas, and even the very conventional “color block” approach.

As you move through these samples, you can see how design can completely change the way you receive a book. They always say, “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

Yet, it’s unavoidable. We do judge books by their covers.

Give us some time. We’ll try to get a design brief up. This one is going to take some time since there were so many design briefs!

Finally, the last one! There’s more, but it’s too much for this space. Enjoy!

The Culture Lab Collective has resurrected their resource site, renaming it Culture Lab. The site got a juicy new update in the bargain: a light, retro look with a little techno/lab/science edge to it.

While we were in the concept rough stage, we kept calling it “Frosty Goodness.” It reminds you of a summertime ice cream truck, otherwise known as the “dingy man” in our neighborhood.

We’re working on a business identity package for an information security consultant. We certainly had a large canvass of ideas with which to work and came up with some (ahem) very disparate styles during the concept rough stage. Stay tuned. When we have time, we’ll get a design brief up so you can learn more.

We’re pretty pleased with the CSS rollovers on this one. We were also pretty torn. We like the splash page enough to want to maintain it throughout the entire site. We ended up going for variation and creating a slightly different interior page since we needed the extra screen real estate.