Today’s my last day at the Erm – I’m headed off to college at San Jose State. So bittersweet!

I’m going to miss this place a lot, as well as all of our clients. It’s been a pleasure working with all of you. I’ve learned a lot through building (and breaking) all of your websites, and a lot of other things. Like, don’t make eye contact with the crazy-looking bums downtown. Don’t try to go to Starbucks at 3 in the afternoon, when all the state workers are trying to avoid actually doing any work. Also, don’t drive down here. Not ever. And stay out of Old Sac after dark.

I sincerely hope you’ve all enjoyed the ride as much as I have.

You’ll be in capable hands with our new web developer, Sam Gammon, who should be along to introduce himself shortly.

See y’all at the apocalypse.

	Here’s what I saw when i came into work on Monday morning.  Someone threw a pocket knife through our street level entrance, which is a glass door.  Some of our clients joked that we must have made one of our other clients angry, but it was not that dramatic, just a random act of urban entropy.  Blarg.

Not that long ago someone threw a meat cleaver through our second floor window.  I’m not sure what the allure of throwing sharp objects at our shop is but it seems to be catching on.  God dammit.  :[

Outside-the-box
Synergy
ROI
Paradigm shift
Make it pop
Break through the clutter
Take it to the next level
Low-hanging fruit
At the end of the day
Solution
Thinking outside the box
Metrics
Take it offline
Win-win
Value-added
Get on the same page
Core competency
Crowdsourcing
Freemium
Recessionista
Sustainability
Clicks and mortar
Web 2.0
The Cloud

Since Matthew is being a poopy head and leaving for academia after the summer is over, we need to hire a new web coder/developer to start in late July/early August.  If after reading the details you’re still interested (and qualified) please drop us a line!

What will do you here?

Create large & small websites using WordPress
Translate static mock ups into living WordPress websites
Assist in scoping projects and requests involving WordPress
Code & update HTML/CSS  for assigned projects
DOM scripting to build interactive but accessible interfaces
Daily maintenance/updates to existing sites
Interact with our clients & their staff

Who are you?

You have an excellent understanding of WordPress
You are experienced with creating WordPress plugins & themes
You have the ability to leverage WordPress by creating new plugins
You are comfortable working in a Linux/Windows environment
You have the ability to do scripting with JavaScript & JQuery
You are experienced working with PHP, MySQL
You have the ability to write standards based HTML & CSS layouts
You understand best practice coding standards, cross-browser issues
You understand and can help us create efficient user-experiences
You aren’t afraid to experiment, while being mindful of project due dates
You are a self-motivated, analytical thinker, with an eye for design
You want to work in a fun shop that has great clients
You have excellent written and oral communication skills
You have a strong portfolio & resume

Use the form below to let us know if you’re interested!  Thanks!

We’ve been working with a client for months now, developing a strategy on where their brand is heading and how to tell that story over the next 5 years.  They’ve changed their business model and so they needed a new pitch.

That’s an exciting time for us to come on board – there’s a feeling that anything is possible, and everything should be considered.

So we took a few months, and considered.  Everything all the way down to the name of the company.

The client loves what we’ve ended up developing, and I’m positive it will be a successful campaign for them, with a shelf-life of at least 2 years.  Go us.

As a storyteller I’m completely happy with this campaign work; as a designer though, I’m a bit frustrated.  The overall look & concept of the campaign is so simple that it’s completely transparent.  The story and tone is doing the selling in this case, not the design.  It’s kind of rooted in the 1st generation approach to advertising – content and copy is king.

Usually I’m the guy jumping up and down on my drafting table like a monkey & doing weird design shit while real world limitations like budgets and time rope in my ideas… this time it was Stephen trying to push me for a less transparent/more designy angle for this campaign, but we ended up taking a very quiet approach.

Ultimately the client and their audience has to come first, even before my need to make wanky design stuff.  C’est la vie.

Apparently, EMRL got to the party really early. Now all these other people are showing up, all like “Oh wow, look, balloons!”, but we already moved on to the cocktails.

Here’s what I’m talking about (bear with me, this is a little nerdy)- there’s a really bizarre swarm of hype building up around the release of WordPress 3.0, because it has new features built in allowing developers to use it “more like a content management system”, meaning WordPress won’t be “just for blogs”.

At the same time, I’m also coming across a huge contingent of naysayers who think that WordPress somehow isn’t useful as a “professional CMS”, or it’s only good if you need a “budget” solution, or “WordPress sites are too ‘bloggy’ (whatever that means)”, and a bunch of other criticism like that.

And I’m sitting here, looking at some of our sites, almost all of them powered by WordPress, thinking to myself, “what’s all the fuss about?”.

We’ve been using WordPress to build whole websites for years. It’s why I started learning the platform in the first place- it’s free, it’s easy to use, and you can use it to empower your clients to manage their own content. Our clients are able to update text, customize things, change out pictures, and all the little things that would normally consume so much time we could be using to make them even cooler stuff.

Our clients are especially happy with it because the architecture of WordPress makes it easy for us to deliver custom features, tailored specifically for their businesses. It also helps that it’s free software– that means we avoid a lot of overhead, and ensure that our client’s websites are future-proof.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re making WordPress powered sites, but you don’t think it’s good enough to run a whole website, it’s time to step your game up.

I’ve been super stuck on this presentation folder design for a client, so I went into work early today to get an early start on it.

I found this on our doorstep, written on the back of a presentation folder.

I especially like the quasi-Pi and infinity symbols on the last line.  I can’t help wondering if some universal sentience is trying to tell help me find inspiration or something.

Thanks, randomness!

Yesterday I came into work, and our red doorway had been tagged with some graffiti.  I think it was supposed to be a caricature of some gang-banger’s penis, but I”m not positive as it wasn’t really very well executed.

It was kind kind of exciting to see some random tagging on our entryway though, and I was planning on adding some modifications to it of my own.  Something like this:

EMRL doesn’t have much for street signage (just a discreetly-sized name in our window), so I figured incorporating our name into the graffiti would be fun.  By the end of the day though, the graffiti was gone – I guess some anti-graffiti trolls from the city had come and washed it away.

Maybe I’ll graffiti our name on the doorway anyhow, just to see what happens.

Generally speaking, meetings drive me nuts.  I know they are my Duty Now for the Future client, but even so I frequently annoy everyone by whining and bitching about them. I’d rather be getting actual work done, instead of talking about getting work done.  Or talking about maybe getting hired, to later get paid to talk about getting work done.  Grr.

Once I get in the meetings though, I’m okay and well… anyway the point.  We had a meeting last week with a potential new client.  This meeting was the dreaded “interview” – the meeting in which a business who may or may not hire us wants to learn enough about our shop to help them decide if we are the right fit for their company, project, campaign, whatever.

We got there a bit early, so a receptionist had us wait in the lobby.  The receptionist entertained us with enough funny conversation that she probably warrants her own post (maybe later on.)

A few minutes pass – a couple of guys from one of the companies being considered for this work came out of the conference room with cables and projectors and a bunch of media-looking stuff.  We said our polite hellos because that’s what you do, and I started thinking about our lack of projector screens and PowerPoint presentations.

Our presentation consisted a funky proposal thing I hand made of paper, melamine, and balsa wood, a handful of past work examples, and our brains.

We dumped all the stuff out on a conference table and then just talked.  Everyone in the room was very engaged – it was quite cool.  I’m in no way sure we’ll get the work – the project is a huge endeavor and I think our approach came off as a little avant garde.  They may want to error on the side of hiring an agency with a more conservative approach, but I still consider the meeting a success.  It’s always really tough to tell your own story…  and I think we did a good job this time.

For our next meeting I think we definitely need a corporate anthem though.

I haven’t written much lately.  Not on our site anyhow.  It’s been flipping crazy busy here.  For the most part, it’s a good busy, busy busy is he dizzy. I think he is, I think he is, juniper juniper oh my gee whiz.  We just finished an insanely quick-turn micro-campaign for Regional Transit (with a public relations component too, quite different for us) and are in the process of completely re-branding multiple clients…  and have so much ongoing work it’s hard to keep it all straight.  It’s good though, lots of cool designs coming down the pipeline.  I’ve been having fun with the work we’ve been doing for Loftworks and we’ve finally started working a on a new site for blankblank, which will be great to see completed.

Anyhow there’s alot going on – my workspace is feeling a little worse for wear.