Fun and Interesting Info

I am very excited to announce that we have won a Silver ADDY Award for our work on i3 Strategies website!

ADDY Awards are given out yearly by the Mid-Michigan Creative Alliance as a way to recognize local designers and companies teams that are fueling the creative revolution in Michigan. There are a number of award categories for print, interactive, and audio/visual media, as well as a category for student work. This was GreenLite's very first ADDY - not bad for our second year in business!

This year's event was held at the Old Town Temple Club in Lansing, which is a really cool venue where IgniteLansing 2.0 was recently held. Jeff and Steve were in attendance along with our client, Julielyn Gibbons of i3 Strategies. We would like to extend a special thanks to Julielyn for allowing us to experiment creatively with her original vision. And let's not forget Chris, our lead developer who transformed the design into a live website at http://i3strategies.com.

We hope to see you at next year's event!

You know as a web designer nothing is more disheartening then working on a website that has a truly horrible logo and accompanying outdated marketing materials. Usually it’s a bad hand drawn of artwork or something that looks like it was rushed out by a highschool kid with his first PC. It’s not just that it makes designing so much more difficult to work around that sore spot but you get so frustrated because you know that small business or organization is doing some great things and their visual identity quite frankly says the opposite. Often the client is like “well we’ve had that logo for 30 years, it’s what people know us for, but we want a website that really shows us as leaders” Do you see the disconnect? They want a great website that really reflects their amazing organization but they never looked at a root problem, their brand and more specifically the anchor that is their visual identity. They almost feel personally attached to it and it’s human nature to oppose change even for the better.

Listen, it’s time to let that 70’s disco inspired abstract symbol with the courier font to go to pasture. It’s not what your company is…it may have been what your company was when everyone in your office was in leisure suits smoking cigarettes and drove without seat belts but this isn’t who you are any more nor how you want to be portrayed. Your competition is utilizing social media, is taking fresh approaches in how they market themselves and you continue to trudge along in the trenches not realizing your getting passed by everyone else. It’s time to set yourself apart and take your branding to the next level.

Your brand needs to have a strong visual identity that not only can reach out to your existing customers and potential new customers but your own employees as well. It solidifies your direction and connects the points in the intangibles ways about  describing your business, it’s energy, it’s advantages. It helps create brand loyalty among your customers. Just remember you need a great business/product or the logo is just lying. the new brand has to be truthful and open just like your business has to be.

Since I’ve been doing logo design in tangent with developing an online presence, I’ve seen clients renewed and energized about their business again. They love being involved with the creative process of creating a logo and more importantly clearly laying out what their business is about and how it should be represented. My job as a designer is just to focus that and make it easily communicated visually. I’m not saying every business needs a logo redesign but I think a lot of companies could use a brand makeover. It might not be redesigning their logo but sometimes an evaluation of a business goals and direction can unmask some unforeseen problems in their visual identity that can be tweaked. Even if its font usage, colors or simple thematics around it which can better support their logo both in their print materials and the web. In the end a company or business that is excited about what they’re doing makes the world a little better in my opinion. I’m glad I can try to help in that.

Last week Chris challenged me to try out a new web browser for a week. The browser is called Flock and it's available as a free download for Mac or PC.

Based on the popular Firefox browser, Flock takes the next step with keeping users constantly connected to their favorite social media. Whether you're into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, MySpace (for real?), or any other social networking site, Flock has a way to keep it in your face at all times. To get started you just open Flock and enter your various usernames and passwords for sites you want to stay connected to. Flock adds these to a sidebar that displays updates from all of your friends, recently added pictures and video, or even just links to news stories. You'll also get a home page with a more detailed view of all this info (see the screenshot below).

There are a couple of things I really liked about Flock: it was really easy to connect to my various networks, eveyone's updates are aggregated into the same feed, and grabbing an RSS feed or media stream from a page was simple and quick. On the other side though, all of this constantly-updating information is a huge distraction. I'd log on to check my email and spend 30 minutes on Facebook, or I'd start to check my bank account only to find 10 new stories about a soon-to-be-released video game. While I wasn't particularly productive while on Flock, I always knew what everyone else was up to.

The one thing that really bugged me was that the default search was set to Yahoo. Now, I don't want to get into a "religious" discussion here, but let's just say that I generally prefer Google 100% of the time. However, a quick search (on Google) revealed that Flock is endorsed by Yahoo.

Long story short, Flock is great if you love social media. Why don't you take the challenge: try out Flock for a week and let me know what you think!

We recently got a new client, the Potter Park Zoo here in Lansing! I have a young child at home and I've been very excited to start this particular project. I think the zoo is cool, I really like their conservation mission, and I think the local zoo does a great job with the resources they have available. I've visited zoo's around the world, and I've certainly seen bigger and fancier zoo's, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a zoo that is more accessible or affordable for families and young people (for example, zoo admission is free right now!). The animals seem happy and engaged, and it's obvious the people who work at the zoo care about their charges. Oh, and they have lemurs, arctic foxes and otters which are all super-cute!

As I started to talk to colleagues and friends from Lansing about the zoo I was surprised by local perceptions of the zoo. I heard a lot of people say, "the zoo sucks", and "it's not as nice as the Detroit zoo". Admittedly, I'm still new to Lansing, but I don't understand these perspectives. I feel that it's not "the zoo", it's "our zoo". If it really sucks, let's pitch-in and help make it the zoo we all deserve and want for our community. If on the other hand, what I'm hearing is just plain negativity, I'd say we all need an attitude adjustment.

We all make our reality every day with how we think and talk about our community and the assets it has. How would our communities be different if most of the people we met in Lansing were talking about everything that this area has to offer; the great zoo, lugnut park, MSU, LCC, the restaurants on the Michigan ave corridor, the social organizations, the outdoor recreation possibilities... Let's stop trashing what we have and let's start nurturing and treasuring what we've got instead. Nothing should be swept under the rug, there are real issues and they need to be dealt with, but I say either pitch in to help, or cheer on the people who are trying to help. Let's remake the "reality" of Lansing and make it a sunnier, more positive, more supportive reality.

Whitehouse.gov is now running a version of Drupal, the popular open-source content management system. This is not only exciting news for Open Source advocates, but also for myself and everyone here at GreenLite. As you may know, every website we ship is built on Drupal. Having the White House move its website to Drupal validates something that GreenLite already knew - Drupal rocks.

Visitors to the White House site may not notice the change - the look and feel remain the same. But news outlets and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert have confirmed that the site is running Drupal.

So what's the big deal? Open Source software is developed by people all over the world, usually for free. Because it's free, this software sometimes gets negatively portrayed as being cheap or shoddy. While this may be true of some Open Source projects, a vast majority are just as polished as commercial applications that do the same thing. Drupal falls into this category. Thousands of developers, myself included, have contributed features and bug fixes to improve Drupal. To have a site as visible as whitehouse.gov running Drupal is a big indication that the Drupal community is doing something right.

Check out other high-profile sites running Drupal.

We are pleased to announce that the Michigan Primary Care Consortium (MPCC) has been awarded a free GreenLite website for winning our "Win a Free Website" contest.

Of our three contest finalists, we believe that the MPCC has the potential to provide the greatest positive benefit to Michigan's economy with their clear and focused mission of helping Michigan residents and small businesses get affordable health care. The MPCC indicated in their contest entry that their mix of volunteer and paid staff will be cut short later this year when their state funding will be reduced due to Michigan's poor economic climate. They need thier website to encourage volunteers and showcase achievements while quickly delivering information - something that their current website "falls short of what is needed in this challenging time."

We're looking forward to working with the MPCC to improve their web presence, allowing them to carry their mission through troubled economic times to a better future for Michigan.

Thank you to everyone who voted and commented during our "Win a Free Website" contest. You can view the MPCC's original contest entry here: Michigan Primary Care Consortium contest entry.

We recently launched a new website for the Association of Medical Marijuana Caregivers (AoMMC) that is built to help authorized patients find the resources they need to obtain medical marijuana.

The AoMMC's mission is to help patients with chronic pain and illnesses find marijuana, which has been legalized in some states as a medicinal option for certain medical conditions. In order to get medical marijuana, a patient needs a physician who is willing to provide a medical marijuana recommendation (it can't be legally prescribed yet) and a caregiver who will provide the marijuana to them (since it can't be legally purchased from a pharmacy).

According to our client, the problem is that many medical marijuana-eligible patients face is that they can't get a recommendation. Even with a recommendation, where can a patient - often someone who is sick, elderly, or both - find a trusted local caregiver to get marijuana from?

When AoMMC first approached us about building a website to help connect medical marijuana patients with physicians and caregivers, we were understandably hesitant - after all, this is a pretty hot issue! We had something of a debate in the office: would it be legal? Ethical? Would we end up with ardent supporters or sign-bearing protestors?

In the end, we decided to help the AoMMC build the website. We believe that everybody has the right to free speech, and that's what the website is really all about. In keeping with that belief, we're inviting you to tell us your opinion about medical marijuana and the various issues surrounding it.

While surfing the Internets today, I stumbled upon a fairly new website called Revocery.gov that's intended to show the American public how stimulus money from the economic stimulus bill is being used.

After browsing through the website for a few minutes, I noticed some interesting similarities between Recovery.gov and some of the website that we make here at GreenLite. I did some digging and found out that Recovery.gov is built with Drupal - the same Content Management System that we use to build websites for our clients!

I thought it was really cool that the Obama administration chose Drupal for this site. After all, that must mean that its features for security, usability, and accessibility provided the best options (and believe me, there are hundreds of CMSs to choose from)!

I'll be keeping an eye on the site to see how it develops over the next couple of weeks.