http://l1f7.com/ en kristi@liftinteractive.com Copyright 2008 2008-08-27T21:14:00-07:00 http://l1f7.com/lift/article/were-moving-today1/ Lift is “flying the coop”! We are moving on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Our phones will be temporarily out of service on this date. If you need to contact us, please send us an email and we’ll do our very best to get back to you. Barring any unforeseen complications, it should be business as usual beginning at 9 am on Thursday, August 28, 2008. Stay tuned for more news on the new space (Suite 401, 10324 – Whyte Avenue)… http://l1f7.com/lift/article/the-labour-of-love-is-almost-complete/ We’ve been renovating a new office for the past two months in a heritage building on Edmonton’s artsy Whyte Avenue. I’m no contractor, so this experience has been quite a learning experience. Although, we haven’t done most of the work ourselves, it has given me chance to try my hand at some framing, drywall, wood work, painting and lots and lots of carrying things. One of the most creatively fulfilling tasks was re-using some of the parts of the office that were left when we signed the lease. Specifically, there were five very large, solid doors that we re-purposed into some useful items. We used one of the doors to create a very large desk for myself, complete with a cord-organizing hole (where the door knob once was). With the remaining four doors, we built two “pony” walls that we put on casters for easy moving. Seth covered one side of each of the walls with some lovely, vivid wallpaper and we left the other side pure wood, so we didn’t totally lose the recycled effect. We’re all getting really excited to finish this job and move into a space that has loads of character and personal touch. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/were-getting-some-serious-internet-love/ Our site traffic increased 500% as our site has appeared on design inspiration websites across the globe. About a week ago, I posted our URL to one of the many CSS design resource sites as a bit of an experiment. Over the last few days, we’ve seen our site traffic increase 500% as our site has appeared on design inspiration sites from here to China. In the past, I’ve been reluctant to submit our work to many award sites (probably because I’m such a perfectionist that I’m never fully satisfied with a project), but with the new lift site, it was time to start getting our name out there in a broader sense. Although our site isn’t 100% complete, it looks pretty darn good and it deserves to be seen. It’s been really cool to see our site show up in some of the RSS feeds that I read everyday. Along with the the mini ego-boost and great reviews, we’ve also started getting emails from around the world with encouraging comments and referrals. Here’s a list of some of the sites that have given us a nod in the past weeks. http://cssmania.com http://webcreme.com http://thebestdesigns.com http://mostinspired.com http://websitedesignawards.com http://cssdrive.com http://cssimpress.com http://css-lounge.com http://cssmess.com http://css.chinavisual.com http://dezinspiration.com http://cssremix.com http://l1f7.com/lift/article/inspired-by-a-design-legend/ A few months ago the Alberta North chapter of the GDC hosted a talk by Stefan Sagmeister. We were there. There are few photos posted on Flickr, and a short YouTube video of a similar talk a few years ago. If you’re interested, you can watch a longer video on TED. Sagmeister’s presentation really inspired me. A large portion of it was related to a new site called Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far and how it came to be. The site is a compilation of photographs (or other media) answering these questions: What have you learned in your life so far? What is it that you are fairly sure about? What is it that you believe in by now? The weekend after the talk I happened to be going to Jasper for a little time away from the city and I was determined to come home with my own answer to the questions posed by Sagmeister’s site. Plain and simple. Here it is in all it’s glory on the website. As of today, it’s still featured on the homepage which makes me smile. I’ve only managed one so far, but there are more in the making. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/an-example-of-stunning-customer-service/ Over the years we’ve tried numerous hosting companies – Alentus, Webfaction, Joyent, Rackspace, Media Temple – looking for that one perfect host, a host we could see settling down and spending the rest of our lives with. Finally, we got ourselves some slices from the fine lads at Slicehost. Their service, performance, pricing and setup is top-notch. Absolutely no comparison to anything else we’ve tried, especially for Django projects. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks gradually migrating all of our sites over to Slicehost. It’s been a lot of work, but definitely worth the time and effort. Today, Media Temple validated my hard work. This morning I tried to SSH into our Dedicated Virtual machine, but got a weird error. After a few more attempts I logged into our Plesk panel to investigate and discovered something odd: none of our Plesk services were running. This meant I effectively had no way of doing anything to our machine to troubleshoot further. I double-checked that the sites on that machine were running, then submitted a ticket to Media Temple’s support system asking them to investigate why SSH and Plesk were not working. Satisfied that I would have an answer within a few hours (Media Temple’s normal response time), I moved onto working on other things. This was about 3 hours ago. A few minutes ago I logged into Media Temple’s ticketing system and was shocked at their reply: “I noticed that your server is out of RAM. To free up some memory, I shutdown the httpd service. After this, I was able to reach SSH and I no longer see that you have exceeded your memory limits.” Yes, you read that correctly. They completely shut down Apache without notifying us. Several of our websites were down today for roughly 3.5 hours, including a few high traffic ones. Luckily I checked the ticket when I did and immediately restarted Apache (which is why you are able to view this very post!). Now to be fair we are somewhat at fault for letting our RAM usage climb, but why couldn’t they just answer my original question? I’d way rather have SSH and Plesk not responding than have to explain to clients why their website isn’t working. Even restarting would have been a better option. At the very least they could have notified us after shutting Apache. It’s too bad Media Temple hasn’t worked out for us (we’ve also had performance and platform compatibility issues), as they’re definitely the “coolest” hosting company around. Perhaps their technical department doesn’t work as hard as their marketing department. If websites could be hosted on logos we’d probably stick with (mt). Until then, we’ll continue to use Slicehost. What about you? Do you have a hosting horror-story? Who do you recommend? http://l1f7.com/lift/article/what-do-you-see/ I have a confession to make, I really like home decor. Micah and I have even talked (sort of joking) about doing interior design together. I’ll also admit I watch way to much HGTV. I just recently bought a vinyl cutter, which I have been using to decorate our walls (my wife says I’ve reached my quota for the living room). For more examples of what I’m talking about see: thisnext. I’ve always been turned off by cookie cutter homes and lifestyles and love finding ways to take what I have and make it more interesting and visually appealing. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/the-typefaces-of-a-new-lift/ During our design of our new logo, we went through several type styles. Because our previous type was very rigid and cold, our main goal was to make the letters feel warmer, have more interesting lines, and have a traditional component. Some hand drawn scripts and other custom typefaces came close, but they never quite held up in all applications. I had been playing with a few versions using Archer by Hoefler Frere-Jones, which seemed to be closer. Finally, we tried the Italic Bold version and it just seemed right. As I compared our name in Archer Italic Bold and Georgia Italic, I felt like the Archer version was missing some of the extra character that the extra finials and long descenders provided. To compensate, we customized each letter, making finials consistent and adding a long descender to the “f”. The result is a very custom looking wordmark, that flows smoothly from letter to letter, giving a sense of lightness and “lift”. After finishing the design of our new logo, we began to lay out our website and print materials. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to use a heading font that gave a bit more character and “history”. Georgia Italic has been popping up here and there lately looking gorgeous (especially in large sizes). We also felt that it was a good compliment to Archer. Later in the design process of our website, we felt like there was a little too much Georgia going on in the design. I also really wanted a bit of a more hand-written, natural feel to be incorporated. To accomplish this, we looked for a hand-written script and ended up settling on Handsome Light. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/colour-me-happy/ I have this print hanging in my office of a spark-plug advertisement by modern art master, Lucian Bernhard. I really like this picture – it actually makes me happy when I see it. Partly because I bought it on my first visit to New York as a souvenir from the Museum of Modern Art, partly because my dad used to call me the sparkplug of the family engine‚ (so it’s a bit of a nostalgic thing), but mostly, I think I like it because it’s orange (my favorite colour)‚ which makes me think about colour and how we respond to it. Why are our favorite colours our favorite? Why do certain colours make us feel the way they do or behave a certain way? Most of us, at some time or another have probably learned about the characteristics of colour, but I still find it interesting, so here‚Äôs a little overview of the colours and the qualities with which they‚Äôre associated (in North American culture). White – truthfulness, purity, clean, devotion, mild, and contemporary. Black – elegance, boldness, power, authority, seductive, evil, sophistication and classic. Red – strength, sex, excitement, passion, speed, danger, aggressiveness, and demands attention. Blue – security, trust, reliability, coolness, faithfulness, belonging, and dignity. Green – abundance, health, fertility, freedom, healing, nature, growth, jealously, and peace. Brown – effectiveness, politeness, richness, and helpfulness. Brown is the color of earth, and is abundant in nature. Gray – earnestness, authority, and practicality. Pink – softness, sweet, femininity, well-being, innocence, and nurture. Purple – dignity, spirituality, royal, luxury, wealth, authority, mournfulness, and sophistication. Orange – playfulness, pleasure, cool, warmth, cheer, vibrant, strength, endurance, and ambition. Yellow – sunshine, warmth, cheer, happiness, cowardice, and jealousy. Gold – expensive, and prestige. Silver – cold, scientific, and prestige. Choosing colour goes way beyond picking the perfect paint colour for the walls in our home – it plays a major part in the business world and how we brand ourselves. People respond more to non-verbal cues than verbal ones, so in creating your visual identity, it’s important to choose the corresponding colours for the emotional trigger you’re looking for from your audience. Think about the current emotion of your potential customer and the message you want to send. Then choose your colours. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/experimental-hdr-photography/ All of us at lift enjoy our photography (see our most recent pics here). Recently I have been experimenting with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. Here are a few of the results… A parking stall at sunset. Downtown Edmonton. Mountains in Canmore AB. Near the Spray Lake reservoir. Intersection of Fairmount & Clark in Montreal. From an apartment rooftop. http://l1f7.com/lift/article/big-ideas-dont-get-any/ This is probably the most amazing “remix” ever. “Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album – “In Rainbows” This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. …Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.” ~ James Houston Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.