A Look Back at 2010 for FortySeven Media
It’s time for the semi-regular year end post from FortySeven Media! 2010 was a nutty year filled with lots of traveling, some great client projects and some even better personal projects. Let’s get started, shall we?
Speaking, Conferencing and Traveling
While we got our first taste of web conferences back in 2009, 2010 took it to a whole other level.
LessConf
First off was LessConf in Atlanta. With speakers like Jason and David from 37 Signals, Cameron Moll, Chris Wanstrath from GitHub, Dan Martell, Clay Hebert and Peldi Guilizoni of Balsamiq we were energized and encouraged to keep making kick-awesome stuff.
EECI2010 US
Next was EECI2010 the US Edition in San Francisco. I got to speak at this one and we were reunited with a bunch of our old friends from the Leiden conference back in 2009. The city was fantastic and we even got to meet a few of our long-distance clients while we were there!
Front-End Design Conference
I really wanted to go to this years’ Front-End Design Conference in St. Petersburg, FL but a family emergency had me traveling to the other end of the country. Fortunately Nate was able to make it and reported an equally awesome time catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Oh, and learning stuff!
EECI2010 EU
Finally, we made the trek back to Leiden, The Netherlands for EECI2010 Europe. Nate and I both spoke at this one and met even more awesome new people in the EE community. As always, the city of Leiden was perfect and Robert managed to schedule the conference right before their annual 3 Oktober celebration. Dude, those people know how to party.
Client Projects
We also got to work with some amazing clients this year. Clients that let us be us and respected what we do. You can’t ask for more than that. Here are a few of our favorites:
Visual Recipes
This is one of the projects I’m most proud of, mainly because even though I didn’t nail it the first time we kept going until it was right (Read the process here). I also love that it didn’t look like anything else we’d done. Did I mention I love food?
Camden Military Academy
Ok maybe I’m the most proud of the Camden site. We took this one from image re-brand to photo shoots to restructuring to delivery. It was one of our largest jobs to date and the results have been fantastic. And as a bonus, we got to write a feature .Net Magazine about the whole process!
Foliage Design
The guys at Foliage are blazing the trail for innovative landscaping and maintenance. While I was bummed I didn’t get to go visit them in Trinidad for “client research,” the website still turned out beautifully with a super clean design and Italian architecture influences. It also turned into a fairly complicated ExpressionEngine site. If you made it to EECI in San Francisco you would have heard a lot more about it. 
Little Remedies
It’s always fun to work with a company that has their products everywhere. Little Remedies helps keep your wee ones feeling better when they’re sick. This was a super happy, kid friendly design that makes you feel good about your purchase.
FacilityDude
Besides getting a clean, friendly makeover, FacilityDude was given full control of their site via ExpressionEngine. Did we mention there’s monster illustrations? Oh yes, it was a lot of fun, dude!
SalesManage Solutions
The SMS site means a lot to me for several reasons. First, both Lance and Steve the owners have become very good friends and mentors. Second, they thought enough of us to hire us again to rethink everything we did a few years earlier. Working closely with a fantastic copywriter and many meetings later the new version of the site was born. There’s something intensely simple and readable about it, and I love the clarity of mission and purpose behind it all.
Personal Projects
Finally, 2010 marks the year that our random side project exploits actually gained some traction.
DesignersMusic
Though technically we worked on this throughout most of 2009, DM didn’t launch until early 2010. The simple idea of showcasing great music that designers listen to turned out to be something most people found really cool. Granted, you all were cheap and never bought anything through the Amazon affiliate links, but it’s still a great resource to this day. Seriously, go check it out and find some new music!
Links: http://designersmusic.com/
The Kick Awesome Show
Nate and I started this as a way to make ourselves post to the blog more, but it quickly grew into a beast of its own. A mere 3 months after the first episode we were talking about relaunching on a new domain and adding sponsors. We’re growing steadily, adding new subscribers each week. Stay tuned, we have big plans for TKAS this coming year!
Links: http://kickawesome.tv
Moving Forward
So what is 47m planning for next year? Well, we haven’t had our official planning meeting yet so I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it will involve more awesome clients, more Kick Awesome Show, more traveling and conferences, and much more silliness. And that’s the way it should be.
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