Author Archives: admin

I-SITE welcomes UK Creative Firms to Philadelphia

Recently Ian and Kara entertained a group of British creative firms who took a day out of a week in New York to travel to Philly to see what the city has to offer UK firms with an eye to expanding into the USA. As Director of Marketing Communications for the British American Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and Chair of the Creative Economy Committee for Mayor Nutter’s Cultural Advisory Council, Ian had been working on the idea of the visit with  UK Trade & Investment for over a year. Locally we teamed up with Select Greater Philadelphia to program the day of “Philly 101” that included the Science Center, Comcast Center, Digitas Health and Indy Hall. One highlight was the round table hosted by Digitas Health where the delegates had a chance to ask ‘Why Philadelphia?’ and hear from a panel that included Ian, Jane Rosenberg of the BABC, Anne Nevins of PIDC, Matt McNally of Digitas Health, Deborah Paredes of GPCC and Brian James Kirk of Technically Philly.

The passion we all have for Philadelphia and what a great place it is to start and grow a creative firm really hit home with the UK firms during this session. Of course being America’s best beer city and having the successful Philadelphia Union on our doorstep doesn’t hurt! Overall, can files be recovered on a ssd this article proved to be an invaluable resource for me, as it not only empowered me to recover deleted files from my folders effortlessly but also educated me on the importance of taking precautionary measures to safeguard my data.

Mayor Nutter welcoming the group during the mixer at National Mechanics, after being introduced by Fiona MacLeod of UKTI.

The group then moved onto Indy Hall in Old City where Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi told the story of their innovative coworking space and how their model presents another option to foreign startups looking to set up. Councilman Bill Green, who previously ran a tech firm, also stopped by to lend his support of Indy hall and the Philadelphia’s thriving creative community.

The day was capped off over a few beers with leaders from the business community and City including Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer for Philadelphia and Mayor Nutter. Unfortunately the Brits had to head back to New York that evening despite efforts to get them to ‘sleep over’. But we are confident that some of them will be back to do business along with UKTI. (blogs.20minutos.es) It’s just a matter of time!

 


 

Kidding Around: I-SITE Teams up with Sprout!

We’ve been having a blast recently working with PBS Kids Sprout on a variety of microsites and promos. Sprout is a U.S. digital cable television channel, video-on-demand service, and website providing PBS Kids shows and original programming for preschoolers and their families.

First out of the gate was a 15-second sponsored promo that aired during the summer.   The spot sponsored by GLAD features a team of ants marching over green hills to a picnic. The goal was to come up with something fresh and fun that would captivate all generations!

It’s the holidays so we also recently created a promo spot for Lego featuring some of I-SITE’s favorite feathered friends and are currently wrapping up two microsites that will be launching soon on the Sprout website. Stay tuned into Sprout TV and iTube for the latest!

Dana Pavlichko Exposed

Skills:

Interactive Design (web, mobile, iPhone/iPad apps), Branding & Identity Design, Illustration, Front-end development, Tetris.

Tools of the Trade:
Photoshop, Illustrator, big cup ‘o coffee, pen & pathfinder tools, rulers & exactos, and NPR or music on my headphones.

Project most proud of:
The project I’m most proud of is the work I did for The Trestle Inn which is owned by our own Ian Cross . This is my most recent project, which included a logo, branding, website, and other identity print pieces. It was interesting to be involved in the evolution of an entire bar environment from its beginning.

Most of my work recently has been interactive; and while interactive design is my favorite, it was great to mix things up and design print material, such as posters, postcards, and menus. It gave me a chance to think differently about how different marketing collateral, while maintaining the same style and brand, needs different considerations based on its context and audience. It was a change of pace to think in Pantone colors & inches instead of hex codes & pixels. Instead of only thinking about how the website would work, I had the chance to contribute to the identity of The Trestle Inn in Philadelphia.

For the Trestle’s website, the team experimented with different technology (parallax scrolling), which because of its new way of approaching transitions between content, gave us a different perspective on a 1-page website. Parallax was a fresh way to approach using layered content and giving the design more spatial depth. It is something I would like to explore further in the future.

What is your design process:
I ask as many questions as possible, to get the most details on what the client wants and needs. I write a creative brief based on dialogues between the team and client. This is where we make decisions on the tone, audience, and sometimes even what colors need to be used. After this I do research and explore as much as I can about the idea/product/company. This is usually where the concept for the design pops up. Sometimes you can take a little fact about the subject and make a connection that can shape the whole identity of the design.

Research and design usually overlap for me. I make sketches to nail down a concept. This is something I always need to convince myself to do more of, in order not to get stuck in the details of an idea that isn’t working. Then all the technical stuff comes in such as grids, color schemes, type, buttons, and I begin fussing over each pixel, collaborate for feedback and a few rounds of changes until BOOM! it all comes together.

Where do you generate the most inspiration from:
An idea can come from anywhere, so I try to keep my mind open. Books, art/illustration, design blogs, dreams, a sip of whiskey… anywhere if you’re looking for it! Another place I get inspiration is from my old mistakes, or re-thinking previous solutions.

Dream Project:
My dream project would be a hybrid of illustration, iPhone/iPad apps, music, and some intense claymation!

Future design prediction:
I’m excited about where the web is going with typography. The internet has been around for so long and only over the past few years has typography really been taken into consideration beyond standard universal system fonts. I started using HTML about 10 years ago, and it is delightful to be able to use tools like Typekit to bring more typographic depth to the internet. It would be fantastic to learn more about typography; specifically, how to make fonts. Some day I would love to work on a pixel-perfect kerned font (designed for print & web).

TEDx Philly Red Letter Day!

We just shed a tear as the beloved T-E-D-x letters were picked up by our mate and NEXTFab Studio head David Clayton earlier today in preparation for the big event at the Temple Performing Arts Center next Tuesday November 8th.

We’ve been happy to give the letters a good home since the inaugural event last year. They’ve been spending quality time playing with our toys and since August the wee ‘x’ has been getting around town. In true Philly spirit the P-H-I-L-L-Y  letters hung out down the street at Indy Hall so it will be nice to see the family back together on Tuesday.

So what happens to the rubrics after the event? Not sure yet. But if you think you can provide them with a good home let us know!

In meantime see you next Tuesday. We’re psyched to be sponsoring again this year and are looking forward to a great day. Still time to register if you haven’t got tix yet.

 


 

Work S.M.A.R.Ter not harder.

Have you ever has trouble figuring out what good user experience is when starting a project? Did a client ask you to create a “good user experience”? Do they want something just because they heard it was cool to have? Are you adding features but you don’t really know why or how to track the impact these changes have on the project and the overall business goals? Down the line you will have people questioning why something was done. Some will not be happy with their “user experience” because no one could agree on the goals. Before you know it the project is a mess and no one is happy.

So before you implement anything you need to know what those business goals are. This will help document content and feature requirements and essentially reduce scope. The problem is a lot of requests are not specific, measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable – S.M.A.R.T and they should be. If you follow this you will have a lower risk of the project getting out of hand and you will actually come up with that “Good User Experience” your client and the customer is looking for.

Specific

The first term stresses the need for a specific goal over and against a more general one. This means the goal is clear. To make goals specific, you must tell a team exactly what is expected, why is it important, who’s involved, where is it going to happen and which attributes are important.

A specific goal will usually answer the five “W” questions:

What: What do I want to accomplish?
Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.
Who: Who is involved?
Where: Identify a location.
Which: Identify requirements and constraints.

Measurable

The second term stresses the need for concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of the goal. The thought behind this is that if a goal is not measurable, it is not possible to know whether a team is making progress toward successful completion. Measuring progress is supposed to help a team stay on track, reach its target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs it on to continued effort required to reach the ultimate goal.

A measurable goal will usually answer questions such as:

How much?
How many?
How will I know when it is accomplished?

Attainable

The third term stresses the importance of goals that are realistic and attainable. While an attainable goal may stretch a team in order to achieve it, the goal is not extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance, as these may be considered meaningless. When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. The theory states that an attainable goal may cause goal-setters to identify previously overlooked opportunities to bring themselves closer to the achievement of their goals.

An attainable goal will usually answer the question:

How: How can the goal be accomplished?

Relevant

The fourth term stresses the importance of making goals relevant. A relevant goal must represent an objective that the goal-setter is willing and able to work towards. This does not mean the goal cannot be high. A goal is probably relevant if the goal-setter believes that it can be accomplished. If the goal-setter has accomplished anything similar in the past they may have identified a relevant goal.

A relevant goal will usually answer the question:

Does this seem worthwhile?

While I-SITE did not come up with this philosophy as it’s been around since the early 1980’s we do our best to follow this and the magical triangle to keep all projects on target. Following these make for a happier client and a happier project team.

Time-Bound

The fifth term stresses the importance of grounding goals within a time frame; giving them a target date. A commitment to a deadline helps a team focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. This part of the S.M.A.R.T goal criteria is intended to prevent goals from being overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization. A time-bound goal is intended to establish a sense of urgency.

A time-bound goal will usually answer the question:

When?
What can I do 6 months from now?
What can I do 6 weeks from now?
What can I do today?

At I-SITE we like to follow this, the magic triangle and our own I-QUO® philosophies to get project done. It works for us so maybe it will work for you. Nothing makes a client and team happier then all being on the same page.

Chris Ell Exposed

 

Skills: Programming, Front-End Development, Being the office youngster.

Tools of the Trade: All the standard software: xCode, Eclipse, BBEdit, Flash Builder/ Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator. As for the heavy lifting in my code, I’m still looking and learning for good frameworks as I need them. Some great ones I’ve used so far though are: ASIHTTPRequest, ShareKit, and Tweet from SeaOfClouds for my web twitter feeds. My new favorite tool though is Cinder, an amazing library for C++ for creating interactive/artistic experiments.

Project most proud of: This might have to be a tie between my college capstone and my first iPhone app. My college capstone used and Arduino and LEDs mounted on a motor that displayed “emotions” from a live Twitter feed via different colors of lights.  Green represented happy, blue sad and red happy. I wrote a parser in Processing to analyze the tweets and figure out what the most prevalent feeling was, and used an RF transmitter/receiver to send the information wirelessly to the Arduino. The whole device spun quickly and created an interesting visualization to help understand the trends that appeared.

Check out a video

And of course my first iPhone app that I’ve worked on, Downtown NYC, was a great project and awesome learning experience. Working in iOS definitely made me realize that I wanted this to be a primary focus of mine.

Favorite App: I have a few favorite apps, some for their entertainment value and some for sheer interest in how they were developed. I find the Xfinity app great in that I can control my TV and browse everything straight from my iPad or iPhone and the interface is extremely refined. Bebot is an awesome synthesizer/Theremin type app, but you’ll most likely drive those around you crazy. And my guilty pleasure app would be StumbleUpon, I’m just grateful they didn’t add a counter to it that tells you how many times you’ve stumbled.

Dream Project: I’d love to work on an iOS game. I have a fascination with physics and particle engines and would love to get a chance to focus on these topics and come up with an addicting game experience.

What games are you playing lately: For PC, I’ve been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 lately, trying to get better. On my iPad, I just recently finished World of Goo and Pulse, both really great games. And on consoles, I haven’t played much at all recently. Got about ½ way through LA Noire and just lost interest. However, the insane line up of games coming out may bring me back to the consoles: Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Uncharted 3, Batman: Arkham City, Bioshock Infinite, Rage, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, just an insane line up.

Future mobile technology prediction: I’m thinking that more and more things are going to be integrated into our mobile devices as we move forward. I actually feel that it’s not mobile technology that’s really going to change, but other technologies that will adapt to allow mobile integration. Controlling every aspect of your home isn’t really reliant on the mobile device; it requires that everything else be able to accept control from the device. Of course developing applications and software to facilitate this is going to be a challenge, but I still feel that all the tools already exist to pull it off.

 

Ready to Swallow the Tablet?

It’s amazing how fast things change in our industry. For the last three years we’ve been popping the pills and gearing up for the types of projects we anticipated our clients would both ask for and need. What types of projects you ask? Everything and anything tablet, mobile and application based.

We’ve always been geeks, but when you see every Tom, Dick and Harriet with an iPad on their lap you know that tablets and smartphones have truly arrived. Lets face it who wants to be tied down these days. We’re all on the move, working and playing from anywhere. Yes some of us at I-SITE – no names mentioned – still lug around the heavy metal but increasingly employees and Joe Public are promoting, publicizing, playing and presenting through mobile devices.

We consciously decided that our first app was going to be cause based. Yes it’s not all about driving profits although we’re happy to discuss that with you as well. iGorilla was born out of a passion to help the mountain gorilla and a visionary team on the ground in Congo that recognized what the smartphone could do for outreach and fundraising. We learned a little from that project. The app is feeding live updates from rangers to gorilla lovers around the globe as we speak – but in hindsight we may have done things a little differently. iGorilla is an iPhone app so what about Android you say? Good question. This is one of the challenges we face especially with public facing apps.

So after a slow start in 2009 we have recently seen a huge surge of requests from our clients to create unique, custom, flexible and fun applications that can be used anywhere at any time. You probably have a bunch of ideas in your head right! Business needs change quickly and we love anticipating this. Within that last six months we have created a network sales training game, a tourism application for Lower Manhattan, a bird education app for the iPhone and Android platforms and an iPad sales aid used by a sales team to educate medical professionals. All of these are custom and unique to our clients and each have their own challenges. Web tools are now in the palm of your hand with tablet and phone apps and we don’t see an end in sight.

So here are some things to think about.

  • Is your app for internal company use or will it be public? Apple now offers an iOS Enterprise solution.
  • How can I create both an iOS [Apple] and Android [Google app] without breaking the bank. Or do I have to break it?
  • I have some great data that I’m publishing to my website. How can I take it mobile?
  • I can just outsource my mobile development to Asia or South America right?

Some of these questions may have a familiar ring to them. Probably because we were answering similar questions back in 1996 when people started talking home pages. Same principals apply in 2011 – plan well, partner with talent, test and optimize and have faith.

Here at I-SITE we’re getting our kicks out of helping our clients get the most out of smartphones and tablets. And of course now we’re thinking about what they’ll need and ask for in three years. Of course that’s a whole other discussion for another day unless you want to come over right now, have a beer and play some I-SITE United foosball!

 

 

Where in the World was Steve?

As some of you may have noticed, our Director of Development Steven Mangione was abroad for the month of July. Just where did he go? The answer is England! Here he is to tell you all about it:

I caught a direct flight from Philadelphia to Manchester, leaving on July 2nd and arriving on July 3rd. I was going to stay with an old friend from the USA who now lives in Chester, England. Upon arrival, my first order of business was to learn my way around town and make preparations to celebrate the 4th of July like a true Yankee. On the 4th, we met up with a group of friends and drank American Whiskey while discussing at great lengths the cultural differences that I would be experiencing for the next 3 weeks. Everyone I met was very welcoming to this American, but it probably helped that I was respectful and didn’t set off any fireworks.

Yours Truly in front of Chester Cathedral

Yours Truly in front of Chester Cathedral

Back to Chester, what a beautiful city to visit! Originally founded as a Roman fort named “Deva” in 79 AD, Chester boasts the most complete set of Roman walls still standing around the center of town. They’ve undergone many structural improvements over the centuries, and now the tops of the walls serve as a pedestrian walkway around downtown. As I walked the walls and took in the sights, it was amazing to think I was standing on a structure originally patrolled by Roman sentries. There’s no shortage of history to be seen all about town, from the black-and-white Tudor Revival architecture all around town, to the Roman ampitheatre and the historic River Dee.

The hustle and bustle of downtown Chester

The hustle and bustle of downtown Chester

Chester sits right on the border between England and Wales, so Wales was my next stop. Being an avid bicyclist back home, I was excited to borrow a “push bike” and ride along a bike path following the canal into Wales. Rolling green fields and sheep surrounded me as I cruised through the Welsh countryside. A few days later we made our way up to Moel Famau, a beautiful hillside with a commanding view of the surrounding counties and on a clear day as far as the coast. We hiked up to Jubilee Tower at the peak and enjoyed the view before a storm rolled in to chase us away.

The view from Moel Famau

The view from Moel Famau

After Chester and Wales, my next stop was Liverpool. Only an hour away by train, I was able to go up and spend a day walking along the historic waterfront of the Mersey River. Being the big nerd that I am, I made sure to visit the Maritime Museum and learn about everything from the history of the docks to Liverpool’s role in the American Civil War. I also stopped by Matthew Street, where the Beatles got their start, and had a pint in the Cavern Pub.

Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool

Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool

Another great British rock’n’roll moment was seeing Judas Priest live in Manchester. Even though these guys are all pushing 60, they rock as hard as ever. Here at I-SITE we have a Friday tradition playing “Breaking the Law” at the end of the week while enjoying some beers, and it was great to see it done live!

Next I traveled south to see some more of the country. After visiting some friends down in Chichester I made my way back up to London and spent a day walking around. Even though I only saw a tiny portion of what the great city of London has to offer, I did make it to the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the House of Parliament, Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace. I finished my day in London with a relaxing stroll through several of the gorgeous parks located in the middle of the city.

Big Ben is really BIG

Big Ben is really BIG

Before I knew it, it was time to head back home! It’s amazing how quickly time can fly when you’re exploring another country. I met lots of great people, drank lots of delicious ale (bitters). My head was still spinning the flight home with all the amazing things I saw, and I can’t wait to make my way back there again someday!

Cheers,
Steve