Although I’ve practiced my Oscar acceptance speech in the bathroom mirror a thousand times (”I can’t believe I’m the first one on stage to thank the Weinsteins”) I am fairly certain that this blog entry is as close as I’ll ever come to actually delivering that kind of speech to an audience.

For geeks like us, the Webby Awards are our version of the Academy Awards. This week texturemedia was honored to have two of the websites we produced win People’s Voice awards for the Webbys. Pentax Photo Gallery won in the Best Use of Photography category and King Tut won in the Events category. A third website, Politics West was an Honoree in the Politics category.

We are delighted to have clients like Pentax, AEG and the Denver Post that give us the opportunity to do really exciting work.

And in the case of Pentax Photo Gallery, we are also delighted to have an enthusiastic community of Pentax photographers who have contributed their art to make the site so visually rich.

It has taken hundreds of hours of work done by dozens of people to create these sites. I am certainly honored to be working among a group of hooligans as talented and dedicated as the bunch here at texturemedia.

I can hear the music playing. I think they’re pulling me offstage.

I’ll see you at the Vanity Fair party.

Dan Fox

The Olympic torch reached the top of the world Thursday in the hands of a Chinese mountaineering team. Political controversy aside, what’s really impressive is the investment by China’s state broadcaster CCTV, who apparently built a television studio at basecamp, then several relay locations throughout the ascent. All in the effort to broadcast it live. A live broadcast is cool, but a live interactive broadcast via the internet would have been even cooler. After all, it’s a global event, right?

Here’s the full article.

David Schell

If you’ve ever spent time with an interactive agency defining a digital experience (website, integrated campaign, web application, etc), you’ve most likely seen the results of several developed personae - fictitious representations that encapsulate targeted, prioritized user types. Historically, personae have been touted as a key deliverable when developing any user-centered product. At texturemedia, we certainly subscribe to this belief and have found them effective in allowing clients and project team members to “think like an end-user.” [ more… ]

Meeting expectations on all client projects is difficult. Issues come up. Communication breaks down. Deadlines get missed at times. Costs escalate. Bugs are found. Servers go down. Sometimes the complexity of a great idea is underestimated.

These seemingly perpetual issues make client management challenging.

To address these challenges we have several options we can employ. We can bury issues. We can solve them before the client finds out. We can address them indirectly by getting some unrelated quick wins, building credits elsewhere. We can even deflect and make excuses. To us, these approaches are tired and they only push out risk. In the end they do a disservice to the client and agency relationship.

How about trying something new?

Be a good partner for your client. Be honest with your client. Even if it means the relationship may hit rock bottom.

Hitting rock bottom with a client means that all issues and potential issues have been flushed out, documented, discussed and understood. It’s big bang with nuance. And while it may seem risky and unattractive to disclose unknown issues to clients, the reward of proactive transparency is significant. It builds trust, credibility and partnership on both sides.

After hitting rock bottom the only way to go is upwards.

Ivan Perez-Armendariz

If you’re anything like me you probably spent a good portion of your childhood forever burning the images from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into your brain. Well there’s no doubt in my mind that Christopher Lee definitely did. He’s a young buck working for Buck in LA and he’s bringing back that Dudley Do-Right vibe with a vengeance and I’m stoked. There’s plenty of retro styled illustration in there as well as some killer stuff that’s totally his own steez. It gets me feeling all warm and fuzzy clicking through it. I just hope Snidely Whiplash isn’t behind all this or I’m going to have to tie his top-hat wearing ass to the train tracks.

www.thebeastisback.com

Matt Schreiber, Creative

As I wrote in an earlier review of Google’s “iGoogle” home page feed aggregator, my biggest issue with the tool was its limited design options (”themes”). For those that remember the earlier days of iGoogle, a max of about 10 themes existed, all of which were rather campy and poorly designed. While I’ve always admired Google for its ability to show restraint in design (and therefore promote simplicity and ease of use), I feared that these new themes were sending a signal: Google was headed in the direction of AOL, or, design for the masses. [ more… ]

In the face of stiff competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX, Adobe’s Flash technology seems to be making all the right moves.
Adobe has given us the tools to make Flash dance (I haven’t used those two words together since the eighties) in new and interesting ways.

In particular, Flex 3 and ActionScript 3 have made it possible for we programming geeks to create visually rich internet applications using a strongly typed, object oriented programming language and a decent markup language. And the AIR runtime engine has enabled us to extend these type of applications to the desktop using the same programming languages and skill sets.

Now that Flex 3 is open sourced I expect we’ll see even more progress in terms of documentation and API’s in Flex 4 (code named Gumbo).

But this isn’t meant to be cheerleading camp. So here’s my hint of the day for flex developers wanting to create RIA applications. Both Cairngorm and PureMVC are strong frameworks for creating Model/View/Controller applications in Flex and Actionscript. But if you are creating something relatively simple, both of these frameworks can add unnecessary complexity and overhead to your application.

For a simpler application, I highly recommend Tom Bray’s EasyMVC recipe (unfortunately you have to log into Adobe to view his screencast). Just to keep you confused, there is a second actionscript framework calling itself EasyMVC written by Simeon Bateman. I prefer Tom Bray’s explanation and approach. He refers to his EasyMVC as a recipe. There are no source code files to download, only a explained methodology for how to structure a well organized application. It’s also a nice primer for Cairngorm development for anyone interested in learning more about that framework.

- Dan Fox, VP of Technology

We’re all familiar with the ideas of backwards compatibility and graceful degradation. Now it’s time to embrace the idea of progressive enhancement.

Like backwards compatibility and graceful degradation, progressive enhancement is not a new idea. At its simplest, progressive enhancement means that a system will provide a base level of performance, with higher performance provided for clients which can handle it. But the base level of performance must be such that it provides everything necessary to achieve the goals of the system.

For the web, progressive enhancement means providing a basic level of content for everyone, even the most primitive browsers, and then adding in more content (like multimedia) and capabilities (like fancy Flash navigation or form auto-complete) for those who want it and have the resources for it.

Progressive enhancement is surprisingly easy to apply to web projects. The industry best practices of semantic markup and separation of presentation from content provide a great foundation, and from there you can apply some simple techniques to progressively enhance that base. AJAX techniques, for example, are excellent choices for progressive enhancement, though it’s very important not to rely on AJAX as the sole provider of necessary function.

The biggest myth about progressive enhancement is that it severely constrains design and creativity, requiring a sort of “least common denominator” approach to producing websites. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. With a solid foundation of semantic markup and standards compliance, it’s easy to use progressive enhancement to create amazing websites with rich interaction and multimedia capabilities.

The benefits of progressive enhancement come directly from the basic level of content it provides, which is aimed at everyone. Progressive enhancement assures that even simple user agents can access your content and parse it correctly, which assures accurate search engine placement as well as a basic level of accessibility. And you’re still providing a top-notch interactive experience for the majority of users who have modern browsers and the resources to handle it.

- Jon Reid, Interface Development

The limited edition, artist series sneaker seems to be growing even more popular than sport-specific shoes. To take advantage of this trend, Adidas Originals partnered up with 180 LA to create a web based series called “The Left-Right Project”, that will be rolling out this Spring and Summer. Using car-sized shoes, and artists to represent the respective American coastlines, West coast artist Sam Flores is painting the Left shoe, while New York based Surface to Air is making the Right shoe.

So why is this relevant to interactive? Well, it’s spectacularly relevant web-based content that has been lighting up the blogosphere. The site provides videos, and photos, etc, but that content spills out onto YouTube and other Social channels, but more importantly, all the right blogs have picked it up to make it a pretty intense EPR campaign. I want one to paint!

David Schell, Creative

The traditional teodice problem goes like this: ”If God is good and almighty, then why is there evil in the world?” That’s a very good question that has been debated by smarter people than me for centuries. Now, I don’t know if I want to blame God for the issue I will discuss here, even though I do think that bad communication is definitely in part responsible for the bad things that go on in this world. Instead I will rewrite the problem statement to be:

“Now that we have all these wonderful media to help us communicate,
how come it is still so hard?”

[ more… ]