As Good Morning rounds out its first calendar year in existence, we feel obliged to thank everyone who has helped us to get up and running in 2009. We’re also pleased to say we have a few really exciting projects cooking at the moment that we can’t wait to share with you in the next few months. Here’s to a new year of continued discovery and growth.
Cheers!
With a tremendous sigh of relief, we’ve just recently migrated the website from Joomla to ExpressionEngine, a highly customizable, SEO-friendly (plays nice with Google) content management system which we’ve found to be a much cleaner, more flexible alternative for our purposes here. You might notice we’ve also taken this as an opportunity to make a few graphic changes. Feel free to poke around and send any suggestions you might have our way - we’re always thirsty for more feedback!
In light of the response to our old bookmark-sized flyers, we’ve decided to launch another series. You can look for these in coffee shops all around Seattle. Collect them all and impress your friends! (We’ll be impressed anyway.)
This past weekend, we decided at the last minute to attend InfoCamp 2009 - Seattle’s burgeoning annual “unconference” for the information community - and we’re glad we did! This year they packed in a few hundred people, from librarians and information managers to web and software developers to interaction / user experience designers. We loved the come-as-you-are attitude (allowing anyone who felt compelled to start up their own discussion session) and enthusiasm for generating some exchange between these disciplines. The opening speakers were also great - with Axel Roesler on the shifting roles of designers and some welcome advice on the challenges we face both internally and in collaboration, followed by Vanessa Fox with an illuminating and surprisingly entertaining look at search engine optimization (SEO). The whole thing was really well-coordinated and just open-ended enough to keep it from feeling too stifling. A big thanks to everyone we met for your insight and inspiration!
If you couldn’t make it out, be sure to follow @infocamp on Twitter for updates on next year’s event - we’ll see you there!
It looks like there is no shortage of thrifty things to do this weekend in Seattle. Between the free (or otherwise affordable) performances and exhibitions at the Decibel Festival and free access to national parks, this Saturday Smithsonian is sponsoring a day of free admission to museums and galleries across the country, with a load of participating venues around here (we even noticed a few that we’d never seen before). Drop by their venue finder to see what’s in your area.
Tomorrow marks the first day of Decibel 09 - an annual electronic music festival here in Seattle. We made it out for the first time last year and were really impressed by most of the talent we saw. It’s been growing steadily every year and we can’t wait to hear / see this new lineup of artists (some really exciting additions) and a stellar handful of familiar acts. Check out www.dbfestival.com for more info.
User interface for personal productivity tool by Harlova, Inc. Click here for more info.
Good Morning Studio is heading down to San Diego for the 2009 Creative Freelancer Conference, August 26-28. The event is aimed at solo design professionals and small business owners looking to exchange advice in running their own practice. It’s shaping up to be an exciting few days of schmoozing and inspiration and we can’t wait to get into the mix! If you’re heading to the conference, give us a buzz - we’d love to meet up with you. For those of you who can’t make it, be sure to check back for highlights of the event.
Wedding invitation design for Bay Area couple to be married in September 2009.
For more info: please follow this link.
Today while I was retrieving my old site bookmarks, I rediscovered this great article that was written by Cameron Moll back in 2005, titled “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.”
In short, the article is suggesting that rather than putting your full energy into work on a trendy makeover (redesign, which is primarily aesthetics-driven), designers ought to scrutinize the existing design, find out what’s working and what isn’t, then “realign” (purpose-driven design, which still may or may not include a complete graphic overhaul). It’s exactly the sort of common-sense advice not to “throw the baby out with the bath water” that for some reason still bears repeating.
Whether you’re using an RSS reader on your computer at home or checking your smartphone on the go, make sure to follow our feed, Facebook Fan Page, and Twitter.
After our first launch in June, we have gotten a lot of feedback from all of you and fostered some new ideas ourselves. We’re now pleased to announce that the new Good Morning Studio is online and alive.
GMS Blog: Our most exciting new addition, this design-oriented blog will focus primarily on the latest trends in graphic design, web, product design, and architecture. In addition to all the artsy / techy stuff that’s most familiar to us, we also plan to feature business plugs, upcoming events and anything else that’s going down in Seattle. One promise we intend to keep - we will treat this blog seriously and will do everything we can to keep it interesting and relevant to you, so don’t hesitate to toss any criticism / suggestions our way.
Back to basics: For the time being, we have decided to drop Flash in favor of standard HTML, making the site 1) easier to navigate and search; 2) faster to load; 3) iPhone / BlackBerry / Smartphone friendly (we will launch a mobile version in future, but for now, this site works in perfectly in most phone browsers). Of course, the world of Flash/Actionscript remains near and dear to us, so let it be known that we have every intention of launching a flashier companion site in the coming months as well.
By all means, if you have any suggestions on the new design or are just having trouble viewing/navigating the site, do let us know by leaving a comment below.
Enjoy!
