Design In Process
by nathan on April 2, 2012
The last 20 months have been incredibly busy, but insanely awesome. I have been working my ass off developing relationships with some very cool clients and doing a lot of really great work for them that I’m extremely proud of. So far, it has been quite a rewarding adventure. However, during this time, I have had little time to spend on several vital aspects of not only the business but also in my own personal life.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of advantages to working for yourself, by yourself and at your own home. Limitations to this setup become apparent rather quickly though. Instant feedback is pretty much nonexistent. Other than clients, there is no one to challenge you or bounce ideas off of. This was a drastic change from the agency life where I had previously worked.
Late last year I began thinking seriously about bringing on another full time designer. I wanted to bring someone on who could really hit the ground running. Unfortunately, I was not at a point where I was financially comfortable with hiring the senior level designer that I knew I needed. The person I really wanted to bring on was currently employed and worth a lot more than I could afford to pay him. The only way I could persuade him to join my efforts was to offer a partnership in the company.
Enter, Keith Haun.
Keith and I met in June of 2005 when we both started working for a design agency in Mason, Ohio. He and I quickly became good friends. He was one of the main reasons I ended up moving to Cincinnati (from Dayton) a few years later. I met a lot of my current friends through him. I’m proud as hell to have him join Building 13 as my business partner.
Keith is a 2005 graduate from the University of Dayton’s Visual Communication program. He brings with him a wealth of knowledge about web design and branding. I’m excited for Keith and I to show the world what the two of us together are capable of.
As I mentioned, my focus on developing the business side kept me from prioritizing other key areas of the business, namely marketing. The web presence of Building 13 is abysmal. When I first launched Building 13 I set up a Cargo Collective portfolio and have since have had only minimal updates. At a point last year I did have some short lived downtime and designed a new site and sent it off to be developed into a WordPress site. It got about 85% finished. I wanted to make several changes before launch and simply never got around to implementing them. It sits on a development domain and collects cob webs.
Now, with the added capacity, Keith and are able spend some time on promoting ourselves and our work. This post is the start of that promotion.
Updated Logo
We simplified the logo a bit. We won’t hold ourselves to just 1 color for our logo, but for now, we really dig yellow.
New Site (teaser)
We are hard at work designing and developing a portfolio website. Here is a quick teaser of how it’s coming along.
A Good Design Philosophy
by nathan on March 30, 2012
Pinterest’s Founding Designer Shares His Dead-Simple Design Philosophy
Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole. Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it. And that means that everyone within a company plays a role in the design process. And thatmeans that everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy. It’s a hard task.
This is a concept that we can’t stress enough to our clients. As more companies with strong design sense (Apple, Pintrest) become wildly successful, this concept becomes easier to justify.
A Brief History of Title Design
by nathan on April 3, 2011
Love this:
Plexus – First Test
by nathan on February 27, 2011
I downloaded a new plugin from AE Scripts called Plexus. It’s a very cool 3D particle system. It’s really easy to use and has incredible possibilities. See more examples using Plexus.
After about 20 minutes I had the gist of it. Here is my first trial run of the plugin:
Moved Upstairs
by nathan on February 16, 2011
With one of the roommates (manmates) moved out, I decided to take the additional rent on and move my office into a bedroom. Some furniture from Ikea and some sweat (Taylor’s, Clayton’s and mine) and voila, office.
See larger at flickr.