Note - I was going to have this all be one article, but it was too big and I don't want to bore you. So! Part Uno will focus on the design and stragegy while Part Dos will focus on the dirty technical details - from HTML5 & CSS3 to Responsive layouts and ExpressionEngine programming. Part Uno begins now:
Have you ever climbed to the top of a mountain, cooked a whole pound of bacon, ate it, hiked back down and built a mansion with your bare hands? That's what it felt like redesigning the FortySeven Media site.
Version 1 of fortysevenmedia.com was super gray and boring (seriously, it was gray). We were afraid to be ourselves and thought that in order to make it as a design studio we needed to be stuffy, businessy and impersonal.
2007 - So much grey. Why oh why?
Next year we sat down and decided that if we were going to have our own company we should darn well act like it. With version 2 we overhauled the identity, made snarky pages like “Don't Hire Us,” created a blog and before we knew it, we were getting business from all over the place.
2008 - The retro was strong with this one.
We had stumbled onto something, and quite frankly re-designing that kind of success is scary, especially when it provides for your family. The Lizard Brain was in full effect. We got talked about quite a bit when we launched the old site and we didn't want miss that magic this time around. Every time I sat down to work on it I just got overwhelmed. Could we make something nearly as iconic as the first go around? Turns out it didn't matter, because after waiting 4 years we were becoming obsolete. Don't get me wrong, the business was doing better than ever, but the jobs coming through the contact form were less interesting than they were a few years ago.
We're very excited to announce today that we're becoming part of the Fusion Ads Network! So many of our heroes are part of this network that it would be foolish to start trying to name one or two. Seriously, just go check out the list. To say we're humbled and honored is an understatement.
We love the ethos behind Fusion - that only ad per page is allowed and that they encourage you to make it fit the style of your site. Plus the products and services they're showing are razor focused towards you guys. Ads that are actually useful! Imagine that.
So, hey! If you see something over there that catches your eye it's ok to click. It helps us keep writing more posts, tutorials and deep (sometimes) thoughts. Thanks for reading!
I didn't think Ok Go's videos could get any crazier, but good grief. Watch this thing. How long did this take to setup? They basically drive by hundreds of chimes, guitars, pianos and makeshift drums banging on them to make music. It's rad.
You silly, nutty ok going guys. Just keep on blowing our minds with your video awesomeness.
Sometimes you just have to draw a dog wearing a bowtie. It was a good excuse to set up mydrawing tablet a bit better as I'm still new to this whole pen table thing.
They're not juicy fruit, but they're still pretty cool.
Pears is a great idea from the Simplebits and Dribbble mastermind Dan Cedarholm - Create common UI patterns with the HTML and corresponding CSS for basic styling for a quick reference too. I think we all do this to an extent with snippets in our code editors, but this goes a bit further “pearing” them together (see what I did there?).
Even more interesting, it's also an open source Wordpress theme so you can use the framework to make your own pears.
