Check out Needmore’s newest design — Cultivated Gardens is a small specialty nursery based in Washington, DC run by a passionate garden enthusiast. We designed a minimal, spacious website that focuses on stunning images of pristinely presented topiary and garden pots.
Read more or visit Cultivated Gardens.
Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
- Joe Sparano
We recently attended our very first online conference via Think Vitamin (we’re loving our membership so far). While I’m usually opposed to such methods — conferences are all about the conversations, right? — Paul Boag’s talk, Winning Business in Tough Times was incredibly inspiring and reaffirming in that Paul’s take on marketing is quite similar to ours. And, his message is strong enough that is all gave us a kick in the pants to keep it up.
Traditional, outdated marketing is (even taken to a new online media in the form of AdWords and others) is still just us talking at people. Unfortunately, this sort of marketing is not actually likely to result in new work and can be massively demoralizing – the competition is high, there’s a huge number of people clamoring to be heard, and the medium pushes down the value of projects.
What brings value to a project? Relationships and personality. People buy from people, not from brands. How do you get your personality out there? By being completely transparent and differentiating yourself from the crowd. Podcast, blog, tweet, make some friends on Facebook – show them a person they want to work with. In order to show your personality, you’ve got to be open and transparent (assuming here that you are somebody people would want to work with). Nobody else is you! Nobody else has your personality, your character, your way of doing things. Let people see behind the business.
And, if your marketing has worked, keep at it. You market yourself now for results a year down the line. So, while you may be so busy now that you don’t have time to market, that’s going to catch up with you. Don’t let marketing get pushed out when you are busy. And, when it is slow, hit it like mad. Well said, Paul, well said.
If you’re in Seattle this Saturday, August 21st, come on by Velocity Art & Design for my opening from 6-9pm! I’ll have a wall full of paintings, a tiny town of cedar houses, the new Washington State print, and the new moth strings of paper and wax. I will be there to say hello! BLIK will be sponsoring, and we’ll be giving away some of my wall decals! See you there!
Amy is a friend of Needmore, and her art is drop-dead beautiful. Several pieces adorn our HQ. If you’re in Seattle, we recommend you check out the show.
[Jonathan] Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”
[Jonathan] Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”
I am presently infatuated with the typeface Futura. It conjures up a lot of memories for me… for example, I’m pretty sure that every school I’ve ever attended used this typeface on the building. Every Wes Anderson movie too. And of course, some favoritedesigners.
It’s a popular font, and because it is simple and has been around a long time, there are countless variations produced by a large number of type foundries. This inspires a lot of discussion about the best version to use. Spoiler alert: there probably is a best and most authentic version out there, but it’s going to cost you quite a bit for the whole family.
Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927, and if I do a “get info” on the typeface in FontBook on my Mac, I even get a bio.
Paul Renner (1878-1956) was a painter, typographer, typeface designer and teacher. Between 1908 and 1917 he designed thousands of books for Munich publishers in a refined traditional style. In the early 1920s he began to support the modern styles of architecture and typography, becoming a leading proponent of the New Typography. Renner is best known for designing the typeface Futura, which became a standard tool for the New Typography, and remains a popular typeface today. Futura does give a restful, almost bland impression, which accords with Renner’s objectives. Futura seems classical, not only due to the form of its capitals, but also to the open, wide forms of the geometrical small letters. The typeface relies on notions of classical, yet contemporary form, – harmony and evenness of texture. Thanks to the modern digital technology Futura lives on in a greater variety than ever, offering a wide choice of typographic solutions for contemporary design in the new millennium.
One drawback to the Futura included with the Mac is its limited weights. For example,the delightful bold weight is not included. Combine that with the fact that it’s not common at all on PCs, and you have to come to the conclusion that it’s not ready to be used on the web. Which is kind of a shame, because it’s such a useful, attractive, and common typeface. It would be handy.
Therefore I was very excited yesterday to hear that Adobe has licensed some of their typefaces to be used in Typekit. I figured that their (far from perfect, but pretty good) Futura was bound to be included, but alas, it was not to be so. No foundry on Typekit offers Futura yet, so we’re still stuck using Gill Sans for now.
Interesting tidbit about Futura: it originally included a “Black” weight that bore little resemblance to the rest of the type weights, but definitely reminds one of the time and place in which it was designed – Germany, in the late 1920′s, during the Bauhaus movement.
Another interesting tidbit: Futura is on the moon!
Finally getting our window replaced following last week’s break-in. This has been a real pain. I hope we’re through dealing with it soon.
This delightful video reminder of how much goes into running your own creative business: curiosity, confidence, business sense, communication skills, a love of your art, and so on.
We hear the book is just as engaging and features our dear friend Amy Ruppel, who is the hardest working artists we know.
So our business was broken into last week. Not at all a pleasant experience. They took a ton of stuff. Yet it turns out we technically didn’t lose a thing. Here’s why.
Backups
We use the following tools to help us keep current backups:
So it turns out I didn’t lose a single piece of data. Pretty remarkable, if you think about it. But it requires constant attention. You have to do more than just set up one service to do backups. You have to test it, and you have to assume that one service might not work for you. When is the last time you tested your backups? If your backup service suddenly vanishes, where do your backups go? Believe me, it happens.
In our case, we keep three types of backups. And that feels just about right to me. One way or another, I was going to get my data back.
Insurance
We also have pretty good insurance. They’re in the process of reimbursing us for the equipment that was lost or damaged. But as emphasized above, you can’t replace your data. So it bears mentioning, go overboard with the backups. Trust me.
I’m certainly not going to recommend a specific insurance provider, but I would strongly recommend two things with regards to insurance. First, keep your serial numbers. Store them somewhere handy. You’ll want them. The other is that, starting the minute you find out about the break-in, you want to keep track of everything said and done. We use Highrise for this, and it’s really handy, but whatever works for you.
Mac Madness
Another thing I wanted to mention is how many Macs are getting stolen in Portland lately. Beware. I think thieves have finally figured out that the average Mac is bound to be worth more than the average PC. I don’t know. But if you have a nice computer, now might be a good time to lay low. Keep it out of the window for a month or two. Hopefully, they’ll catch these people, and we can go back to leaving our laptops in the office once in a while.
