Speaking of Express, we’re on the hunt for web-savvy sales professionals to represent AWP while working with clients through our Express development process. Design or coding experience is not required, although a familiarity with web design in general is necessary. If you or anyone you know are interested in learning more about this exciting new opportunity please contact us.

Just for fun, here are some of the things we’re talking about this week (follow us on twitter to keep up with the latest). Every link is amazing, so you won’t be disappointed!

• From Tyler: Deep sidewalk art, Oregon Trail
• From Bryan: Calling All Fans of Near Disaster
• From Katy: I LEGO N.Y.
• From Chip: Coding Standards for CakePHP (amazing if you’re a developer)
  
• From Molly: Tilt-shifted photo from Molly’s trip Barcelona – Oh, and on a dare Molly devoured 15 consecutive cloves of garlic in a single sitting last week, and then proceeded to play drums with the AWP band. Woah!

• Versions – Mac Subversion Client (SVN) – discovered by Tyler
• Apple’s New Keyboardless Laptop
  – for real?
• TwitBin – twitter your browser – Molly loves it.
• IMDb | Watch Full-Length Movies, TV Shows, and More — Free! – some great old TV shows up there!
• Katy is checking out Dropbox while Bryan is checking out ZumoDrive.
• Bryan enlightened us to: Biggest rock wusses of all time, Best Photoshop tutorials for beginners, Most beautiful icon sets of 2008, Worst places to get caught having sex, and the Best Christmas light shows.
• Something I never knew.
• One of our favorite local restaurants opened in Milwaukee.
• I’ve started a company Twitter account.
• And Tyler’s Sursly.com has been getting a lot of traffic!

I’m happy to share my first video-based post. Here is an excerpt from the description I wrote on Vimeo:

One day in December of 2007 while riding to work on the bus I snagged my MP3 player (at the time a Palm Zire) on my bag, unplugging my headphones just the slightest bit. I was listening to “Faust Arp” at that precise moment, and Thom’s vocals completely cut out but the music (though now MONO) remained.

I experimented with more of the album for the rest of my bus ride (and work day, subsequent journey’s, etc.). I had difficulty replicating it on my computer, but no problem with my iPod.

So I consider this an alternative way to dig into Radiohead’s best album ever: In Rainbows.

In In Rainbows: Instrumental “Easter Eggs” from tyler on Vimeo.

Today, we sent out a message to everyone on our email list (yes, we use MailDart ourselves) introducing the new service. A copy of that message is available right here. Here are the highlights:

Top 5 Reasons MailDart Rocks:

1. It gets results! (We know because we use it!)
2. It’s a pay-as-you-go system. There are no monthly fees.
3. No stock templates necessary. We create an email template that looks like YOU.
4. MailDart is fantastically easy to use.
5. Advanced reporting features give you the information you need to fine-tune your campaigns based on viewer feedback.

“MailDart is a great product. The reports allow me to make smart decisions about what I send my customers and the interface is easy to learn and use.” – Derek Cabrera, ThinkWorks

So head on over here for more information, or over here to contact us!

When I saw the list of activities planned for this week, I admit I got pretty excited when I found out one of them was a Hot Dog Eating Competition!! Now, anyone who plays Ithaca Ultimate Frisbee and Soccer with me, knows I am pretty competitive. Perhaps another lesser known fact is that I like to eat, and I always eat quickly. A perfect opportunity to combine both skills? Let’s put it this way, having never done this before, I couldn’t resist! (Insert a plethora of ‘gross’ & ‘yucks’ from friends who I told this to).

Knowing this competition was only going to be 2 minutes, I wasn’t going to go all out. Training for something like the famous Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition takes months of stomach stretching and technique-building. Think about it, 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes! Yea…

But if you are competitive, you want to win, so I trained (for 2 days). My diet for these 2 days existed solely of the cheapest hot dogs you can find, with a complement of water-soaked hot dog buns, and my friend (thanks Jesse!) worked with me on my technique. It certainly paid off….

Yesterday it was time for the competition! Dowtown office workers gathered around to see this spectacle. 18 competitors. I was happy that I was able to tie my training record at 4 hot dogs! I was beat only by a guy from Collegetown Bagels, who got 5 down and my friend who managed to get down 6 1/2 hot dogs in that time. He was a good trainer!

I felt I had pretty good showing at 3rd place. Plus it was free publicity (not to mention a free lunch!) I am getting quite a few strange looks walking around the Commons and “aren’t you the girl that ate 4 hot dogs in 2 minutes?” Why yes, that is me. Could I be the top female competitive eater in Ithaca? Maybe!

If you want to see more, The Ithaca Journal did a front-page article about the heated competition and if you watch the video (credit News 10 Now) you will see AWP and me represented in a, err, less than flattering way. But, it sure was fun! Go AWP!

This post might already be a little outdated, but somehow in the transition to our new everything, one of the coolest pieces was left unmentioned: our super-awesome huge hall sign!

Swing by the office and check it out. It’ll make you smile. It makes us smile.

We’ve been all about One Page Love since stumbling upon its existence, and now we’re proud to say that a site we designed is featured there!

The site is Camp Roseland, for the NYC-based media production company of the same name. We designed the one-page site to highlight multiple demo reels of their work in an uncluttered, no-nonsense style. And word ’round the office is that we’re going to be adding some new material to this site in the very near future.

Thanks One Page Love!

This isn’t a review of Wall-e, if you want one, Google it. But this is to point out something I noticed today while enjoying one of the best animated films of ever. Wall-e is an old school robot on our very polluted Earth. He’s been around for a while and is still kicking because he is solar powered. Soooo, early on in the film we see him running out of juice. He stumbles outside to soak up the sun with his panels and when he is all charged up, we hear: the Mac OS startup sound.

If it is possible to go from loving to hating something in .02 seconds, it was this little audio “easter egg.” If you’re not familiar with the sound, check out this video (it’s the last one).  Who knows how many people will pick up on the cue (it clearly says something about the folks at Pixar) but seriously. I own a Mac, I’m on one all day at work, and I cringed the third (or fourth) time I heard the sound.

Other than that, I loved it. You will too, go check it out… Robot love is for everyone.

The site is by/for designer Steve Rura: http://www.letters-numbers.com

Layout/design-wise it relatively solid, but technically/conceptually this is spot on…The smooth scrolling vertically and horizontally was something I had planned on using for a previous client project but couldn’t, although the implementation here is perfect (and appropriate).

And the projects here are simply fantastic. Well done. Via: onepagelove.

Back To Basics

So almost one year ago (after all new staff settled – myself included) we got busy with our marketing materials, replaced our 4 year-old website and pushed the old brand as far as possible – seen here at right. Chip and Bryan had been working (very successfully might I add) with the frog/red combo for years, and our new flash-heavy website (last year, mind you) was a necessary and huge improvement over it’s predecessor. It felt fresh, got a great response from clients/friends/family/competition and propelled us through the rest of 2007.

A few months ago we found ourselves in a curious position. With a permanent staff of 6 and new content management system we realized a few things:

1) We had evolved/outgrown from our existing brand and wanted something new to represent our current culture and future path.

2) We loved WebTree so much that we wanted it to power our own site

3) We deserved (and felt it necessary) to run ourselves through our own branding/website design process as we would with a client.

The big hurdle in beginning this process, or at least coming to the above realizations, was that we were very much aware of how little time we had to devote to ourselves. We take pride in how much time and effort we invest our client’s work, but that often leaves us with only a few minutes here or an hour there to design or conceptualize internal projects. So our first step was to reserve time to make this all happen, because it needed to happen…

So Now What

With hours to work with we started with two Discovery meetings (as we do with our clients) to assess our needs and creative goals. We laid out our issues with the current brand/website/marketing materials and addressed what the fresh designs should accomplish. We also talked about our feelings and other mushy stuff because as much as this was going to be a visual and technical endeavor, it ultimately would become an extension of the shop personality.

But we couldn’t let that weigh us down. We’re not heavy people. If you’ve come into our shop or talked to us at an outreach event you’ll notice that we’re a fun, easy-going group. And that was something we wanted our brand to communicate.

So the frog was to stay, but what kind of frog. We all agreed that a simpler, more iconic and personable frog was ideal. I sketched for days and days during my daily commute (don’t worry, I ride the TCAT bus). It wasn’t long until these ideas made their way into vector format where we thoroughly dissected out frog (har har har) until we settled on a “top 10″ list of sorts (variations on similar logo treatments). It then took us a week and a half to finalize every detail (from eye shape to color) but we came out satisfied and convinced that we had something representative of the shop and very very lovable. It was during this time that we also realized that as much as we identify with Ancient Wisdom Productions, we had been referring to the shop (internally and externally) as AWP for a long time. It felt very natural to transition the primary usage of our name to the shortened version, using the full Ancient Wisdom Productions as necessary.

Time for Fun

I wish we could say that we labored over the rest of the materials, but the new identity and momentum from the creative process were so strong that our work soon felt very natural (thus, easy). New business cards and marketing materials were necessary and quick to produce, but the website became a bit more involved.

As mentioned above, the real excitement in a new website was the fact that it could be powered by WebTree. Not that we can’t wrangle our own code, but when time is limited a Content Management System (CMS for short) is key. We also knew that using our system on a day-to-day basis would keep us striving to improve our already powerful engine.

Visually we wanted something that we hadn’t seen before. There are obvious design trends that we intentionally steered away from and since we snap photos in our office every day we really wanted to make images a large part of the design. Technically we wanted to move away from Flash completely – not that we don’t love it, but so much can be accomplished with Javascript – and make our content more accessible. With that criteria in place we designed what you’re currently looking at! There was a bit of back and forth initially but the fundamental layout and structure was achieved on the first attempt. Luckily each member of the team brought their own unique perspective to the design process, and the end result (for everything really) couldn’t have been accomplished without the entire team.

I’m going to dive into further details about the new site by the end of the month but we’re incredibly excited about all the new changes that have taken place and appreciate all the kind feedback we’ve received so far. Feel free to comment if you have specific questions or comments regarding the transition here at AWP.

Anna (left) & Katy (right) at Showcase Tompkins 2008