Portland Design Lab

Packing my backpack last night, I forgot to include shoes–so when I got to work, all I have for footwear was my Sidi bike cleats for the day. Those, for you that don’t know, are next to impossbile to walk more than a few footsteps at a time. The guys wanted to go to a restaurant for lunch, but since I had no shoes, I couldn’t go. Unless of course, I made some sandals out of cardboard and duct tape.

How much cooler are the European music awards for MTV than the American one? I don’t know yet, but we’ll be tuning in since they’ve asked us to build a Facebook voting application.

As usual with every project we get, there is a completely unreasonable timeline. Fortunately we have a double helix Flux Capacitor which we use to bend time so we can do 12 hours of work in under 3 minutes.

Rock on.

Did you know there’s a new Bond film coming out? Well there is. And we built a facebook application for MTV and Swatch that asks the question “Which Bond Villian Are You?” Take a quiz, find out which one you most closely resemble and POW! get a glimpse at the Swatch watch that was inspired by that character. Holy cow, this internet thing is great!

By now, even your grandmother has heard of Search Engine Optimization–now with the rise in popularity of social media sites (do I really need to give examples?) there is a whole new industry revolving around optimizing your brand in the social networks. Hiring companies to promote your brand on the large networks can give you over a 1400% traffic bump for less than 1/10th the cost per visit. Mostly, this activity is posting to blogs and forums and engaging in conversations online while leaving your link(s) all over as you go. As you engage, so does your (site’s) popularity.

There are pitfalls to avoid when optimizing your brand this way–you can come off as fake (at best) or (at worst) get blacklisted from posting and have your brand ruined in front of a particular audience.

SlideRocket is a pretty darn nifty PowerPoint replacement…as near as I can tell. The tour is amazing and it’s features are great, but it’s not released to the public yet. Take a look at the demo–I can’t wait to try it.

OK, this is  cool. Ponoko is a company that allows you to custom design and sell jewelry, toys, furniture…anything you can laser cut out of Plywood, MDF, Hardboard, Acrylic etc.  right from their website. You keep no inventory. You design and build a couple prototypes to make sure your design is easy to build and works, then Ponoko will build and fulfill orders for you on demand. You can be a furniture design company with your own line for sale on their site or build your own and link your shopping cart to their site for fulfillment. Fire up Illustrator and get busy.