New site launched: Knork ecommerce

The Knork was born in a pizza parlor, the brainchild of a high-school kid named Mike Miller with pepperoni to be sliced and not a workable tool in sight. The basic idea of the Knork permutated through multiple mockups made of auto putty until, a patent in hand, Mike gave the world an eating tool for the ages. For all ages, young or old, right or left-handed, even those with limited physical strength or movement.

We have to admit it, -we’re indoctrinated. Knorks have become the way we eat dinner. We have plastic Knorks in our office for lunch. One of our print reps was so intrigued we finally gave them a sample to try. We spread the word, because it’s simply a good product. It’s easy to market products that are just… better.

Which brings about an interesting point. If Knork is better, why isn’t everyone already using one? That was the question we started this project with. Why? Maybe it’s a novelty, maybe it’s a gimmick. Like the Spork before it, maybe it’s destined for the pop-culture archive. But if you try it once, you’ll know better. It won’t cure cancer, and it won’t quiet the middle east, but it is actually a better way to eat. Something that we all do 2-3 times a day.

Like a comfortable office chair, or the perfect pen, they just make your day better. They’re inconsequential, but you use them all the time.

In an hour or two, when your stomach starts to rumble, think about utensils for once. Designed things just feel good. If we didn’t believe it was worth thinking about, and spending money on, we wouldn’t be in the business we’re in.

See it online

In our portfolio here here and here

Where design bumps into art.

Some designers blur the edge between design and art. They force us to redefine our industry, and our role with clients. It’s apparent when watching designers like Sagmeister, that he skirts the edge of what we typically characterize as graphic design.

Check out the new video by Hilman Curtis profiling Sagmeister here
via swiss miss

Glimpses of Genius, Beauty, and Novelty – Standards.

• Art’s not so hard… – Elephant self portrait
• The end of privacy – A good thing?
• Keep them readable – People read URL’s
• Nerdy influences – Comic books inspire web design
• email – on borrowed time
• What is your web developer reading? – Web standards

Twitter explained

If you ever wondered what the fuss was all about with all of the social apps around these days, -this video sums up Twitter quite nicely.

Photoshop Express for web edits

Photoshop Express launched today. Express borrows the most essential pieces of the full Photoshop, and offers them as a web based service. You won’t see us giving up on the desktop version of Photoshop pro anytime soon, but it instantly struck us how useful it could be for our clients.

It’s a constant struggle to get clients set up so that they can maintain their own website content. Text is no problem, -but images often derail. Here are the usual hurdles:

• Resizing. Although our CMS systems do most of the resizing for you, -good luck trying to squeeze a megapixel photo up a modem connection. Usually you have to scale pics down a bit to start with.
• Cropping. Whether it’s for artistic or practical reasons, even cropping can be difficult on a PC.
• Color correcting. Most people don’t bother, but it can make or break a site.
• Formats. Although most cameras these days deal in web ready jpg’s -we’ve seen more than one CMYK tiff try to sneak into a site.

Luckily Photoshop Express solves all of these in a fairly intuitive way. It’s the kind of program where no manual is required. Best of all, it’s free for up to 2GB of storage. For all but the most prolific web editors it should be more than enough. It sure beats $100 for LE, -and beats the pants off the $700 for the full Photoshop.

We’ll have to experiment with it more, but it very well may become the main editor we recommend for simple updates. The biggest question is how well the upload manager will work on low network speeds. If Adobe gets that part right, it will be an easy program to recommend.

Hopefully in the future Adobe will offer an API or an embedded version. It would be ideal to include this inside of an admin.

https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html
(There’s a demo area if you don’t want to sign up for a full account)

Here’s another option if you want to root for the under-dog.
http://www.picnik.com/