We just couldn’t resist sharing a sneak peak at the new site for our friends at Firm 151 in Portland, OR.  Launching this Fall, the site is built on Expression Engine’s CMS, features a lot of white space, and super slick navigation that lets the work speak for itself. And trust me, these guys can architect the hell out of a building.

Creative Director: Alan
Designer: Dave
Developer: Brian

This year’s Symposium in NYC was filled with creativity, inspiration, ideas, and karaoke.

Alan flew in from Los Angeles, while Matt came in all the way from Bordeaux. The Symposium featured a recap of all the work we’ve accomplished in the past 2.5 years (which is crazy to see all together), discussions on our current projects (sign up for our newsletter for updates), future client projects, company expansion and new co-op members, plus (most excitingly) what’s in store for our newest Incubator Project.  Here are a few random Incubator ideas that leave you guessing:

+ Homeless sign redesign
+ Sockagawea
+ High school presidential race campaign
+ Yarn bombing the White House (sure to be flagged by the NSA on this one)

For the annual meetup we each created a poster in 30 minutes or less:

Then we donated the posters to the New York Street Art Fund:

The rest of the week we also met with some new clients, ate great food, spoke on typography, got to take a behind-the-scenes tour of MoMa’s design department from our friend August Heffner, and checked out General Assembly’s new digs in Union Square, courtesy of Mimi Chun.

Overall, a completely successful, wonderful Symposium that made me very proud to be working with such a talented and lovely crew and humbled me in the ever-growing canvas of NYC… we’ve already started discussing location for next year (St. Petersburg anyone?). Thank you to all that were involved or sent love from around the world.

Check out all the week’s photos on Facebook or Flickr.

I had a very important decision to make: what phone number do we print on our business cards?

Seems like a simple question, but for a company that exists as a network, scattered across 5 countries on 3 continents, the answer is anything but. Luckily, technology has offered a few solutions to our need for a telephone number, but our want to keep on the move.

1. Google Voice - free number that forwards only to any other U.S. number
2. Vonage - paid service with U.S. number, but you have to lug around a modem
3. Skype - you can buy a phone number and forward anywhere, but you pay for the call.

In the end, I chose Skype. So we got a number (718.303.2262, if you want to say hi) and it forwards to one of us—anywhere in the world we might be. It ain’t perfect, by any means, mainly because of bugs in their system, but we’re still in business.

The interesting part was how I thought about the choice: consciously, I said to myself that I’m investing in a company—with my use. I knew that Skype was just OK at the time, but had faith that Skype would get better in the future. If I saw how it could be better, they must as well, right?

Needless to say, they let me down. With little improvement in their software for a couple years, they make a big splash with Skype 5, here’s what their customers think:

Speaking as a customer, that’s sad. The new Skype is terribly unintuitive, buggy, and to get technical, it does stuff I don’t want it to.

Speaking as a designer/strategist this is embarrassing. How can you be the number one Voice Over IP service, have over 650 million users, and have an approval rating of roughly 0%?  The User Interface is awful and over-sized, the updates have been slow coming, and they’re just not listening to their users. Do a better job.

And then there’s the $8.5 billion. With Microsoft buying Skype I’m seriously rethinking calling it quits now. Stay tuned for new business cards.

Sometimes you just have to go old school.  We’ve received lots of love on our diy business cards, so thanks to the guys at Uno for teaching us the way and letting us use all the great old presses.

Well, here it is. The moment you’ve all been waiting for… our Little Baby Hip-Hop Holiday Card. Please enjoy the video, but best seen here.

A very happy and healthy year to you and all of yours.