I first came across the Matterial paper line during an open studio party, over the course of the night a good portion of the crew at Matter was hard at work, printing and packaging up some of their goods for the Matterial line, there were samples of each offering displayed. The entire range of products are designed, printed, and packaged in-house at the Matter studio. The line uses recycled paper, packaging, along with reused/repurposed elements. Other adornments are also done in-house, such as letterpress and the silk screening. It’s a pretty wild and energetic set-up, the products being produced as a result of it, are just as inspiring to draw in as they are to look at.

Outside of helping to organize your week, or simply helping you squeeze out that little burst of creative joy, Matterial also helps to draw the connection that we all share, in the products we consume and their direct impact on the local environment & economy. With these products the Matter studio has cranked out a body of work that is aesthetically pleasing & engaging, along the process of creating they have also managed in a small and unique way to do their part in contributing a solution to some of the larger issues we face today.

Check out the Matterial website for their line of consciously created tablets, drawing pads, composition books, and an assorted collection of other creative driven oddities & blunt objects!

Created by designers, for designers and other thinking persons.

Josh Wills, Creative

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