News

Stacie Midori

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Stacie Midori's website on iPad

We have been working with jeweler Stacie Midori for almost a decade now. The first website we designed for Stacie was built in Flash, a couple years before the iPhone killed the medium. Fast forward to 2013 and Stacie still loves her website design (a testament to the timelessness of clean, modern design), but was ready to have her designs accessible on mobile devices.

We recently embarked on a project to move her website from Flash into HTML while keeping the whitespace and image focus that she has been so happy with. Besides making her site viewable on mobile, we were able to make the images of her gorgeous jewelry much larger, each with their own URL for easy sharing. We do hope you enjoy.

A week of rejection

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Rejection Therapy at New Seasons

For the past week, I embarked on a quest to move past my fear of rejection through an exercise in Rejection Therapy. The premise is fairly simple: you commit to putting yourself in a situation where you are purposefully rejected each and every day in order to get over the natural fear of rejection. (Thanks to our buddy Graeme for the inspiration.)

When I started this exercise, I was pretty sure that it would be a piece of cake. The prompts seemed fairly effortless and, I figured, I’m pretty used to rejection anyways. (I am the one, after all, who sends out all of our estimates and proposals.) A week in and I can only think that this was incredibly, undeniably naive thinking.


13: Bob Smith Talks Design on The Job

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:31:08 — 79.5MB) | Embed

Bob Smith is Portland’s favorite autodidact. He’s designed with everyone from Nike to Weiden Kennedy, he’s now with New Balance and today he shares some thoughts on inspiration, becoming a better designer, and thinking way outside the box.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.



12: Jon McNeill of Hunter Qualitative on The Job

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:20:56 — 98.9MB) | Embed

Jon McNeill is an ethnodocumentary filmmaker, and applied anthropologist, founder and researcher with Hunter Qualitative… and a father. Fascinating guy.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.



Hunter Qualitative

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Hunter Qualitative Image

We feel a kindred connection to Hunter Qualitative, we are both creative firms with a love for telling people’s stories. We both take an obsessive approach to getting to know our client and we have fun doing it! As with all of our projects, we took the time to understand their business, we analyzed the competition and made suggestions to give Hunter an edge. Their work is informative, artistic, insightful and engaging. Needmore set out to make a website worthy of the clever crew at Hunter Qualitative.

We took time getting a feel for Hunter’s personality: meeting with the founder Jon McNeil, reading Hunter’s published work, watching their documentaries and brainstorming the most creative ways to showcase their work on the website. Case in point, Jon referenced the movie Rushmore as design inspiration. That very night our designer, watched Rushmore for homework and came back in the mooring brimming with ideas to implement into the site design.

What can we say, design is serious business folks. If you are hungry for the details, please take a look at our portfolio.

11: Amy Ruppel on The Job

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:49 — 85.0MB) | Embed

Amy Ruppel combines talent and versatility like no other artist in Portland. Her whimsical style and quirky point of view has given her the ability to combine the analog with the digital, the old with the new, the modern with the historic. I sat down with Amy to talk about her upbringing on a midwest farm, her jet-setting wanderlust, and all the years in between.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.

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Think Before You Share That Screenshot

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As web designers, we work with a number of businesses that offer various types of hosting. One of them specializes in WordPress hosting, emphasizing on their website that everyone at their firm is a “WordPress specialist.”

Fair enough. If you’re going to make that claim, however, you should be careful what’s in the screenshots your support specialists share with customers. To verify that our site was back up, we were sent this screenshot:

10: Peat Bakke of Little Bird on The Job

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:56 — 103.1MB) | Embed

Peat Bakke is CTO of Portland startup Little Bird. He’s also known for travelling, speaking, and photography. On this week’s episode, we talk about all these things and more.

The Job is a talk show about design, music, business, culture, technology, the web, and Portland, and featuring interviews with interesting people. Hosted by Ray Brigleb and brought to you by Needmore Designs.

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Trello for Web Design Projects

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We’re avid fans of Trello here, so we though it would be fun to share some of our tricks. (Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards.)

Trello

Many features are better demonstrated in the tour on their website, but no doubt we have a good shortlist.

  1. The structure of cards within lists within projects is very straightforward
  2. You can pretty much control the whole thing with just your keyboard
  3. Realtime updates are visible to anyone viewing a board
  4. Amazing iPhone and iPad apps that support pretty much every feature
  5. Any card can hold any number of lists, attachments, and even a full discussion
  6. Cards can be instantly filtered by many criteria

Because Trello features any number of boards within an organization, we tend to use one for every one of our design projects. We use some for other tasks too, but we’ll focus on how we organize building a website for now.