Any need you might have, chances are that ‘there is an app a plug-in for that”.

As promised in an earlier blog entry, we have completed the sixth version of Common Goal WebManager! While I hold a certain fondness for the earlier versions, I know I speak for the whole team at Silverscape when I say that I am very excited about the new features, the new interface, and some of the technology we have brought into it to make the maintenance of site content even easier than it was in earlier versions (and our clients can speak to how easy it has always been)!

Actually, its amazing Technicolor radio paper. And after more than a decade in production, we’re finally starting to see some of the results of this ground-breaking technology.

While perusing the day’s status updates on Facebook, I came across a video parody of not only one of my favorite singers, but of one of my favorite typefaces. You can imagine my excitement in finding that someone somehow had managed to creatively combine the two.

Last night I was watching an episode of my favorite TV show and when you start the disc it begins with a commercial. What happened next is what struck me.

 Except for instances where my internet is down, I pretty much never watch tv shows on my actual television anymore; I am part of what I suppose we can call the Hulu generation. The other weekend, I went home to visit my folks and prepared to settle comfortably back into the family room routine of TV-watching from the couch. And before long, the ever-growing rift between the different two mediums became painfully obvious.

So I have my Google Wave Beta invite and have been using it a bit with about 15 friends. Unfortunately, I haven’t had any invites myself to give out, so for now I’m the only one at the office riding. So what is Wave? Google says...

In my humble opinion, Silverscape has one of the most uniquely designed offices the city of Boston. Our building is located amidst the hustle and bustle of the financial district, right above a local pub called Mr. Dooley’s.

Award season is fast approaching in the marketing, technology and design world. While pop-culture aficionados have their Emmys Grammys and Oscars, we at Silverscape have the MITX, NEDMAs and Horizons (just to name a few).

SMPS Pacific Regional Conference, The Wave, Navigating Change. Since it is a grey November day here in Boston, I've included the perfect soundtrack.

Once again it’s my time to blog and, mentally encumbered by a big personal decision, I’ve decided to write about it and hopefully bring my dilemma to an end.

Social Networking Unplugged: Part of the Professional Development Lunch Series

Handwritten type is one of those awesome design elements that I find myself always wanting to find a way to implement into a project. It’s really a powerful tool, because it can eliminate the need for photography and illustration all together.

Silverscpape is thrilled to announce DRIFIRE.COM is a MITX 14th Annual Interactive Award Finalist Finalist, Consumer Goods 2009. DRIFIRE is the leading producer of Comfortable Flame Resistant FR Apparel.

You’d think that, being a creative, I would have been planning, sketching and designing out my Halloween costume both in exquisite detail and months in advance. Alas, my weekends have been filled with afternoon naps and end-of-summer bike rides and I am totally behind the Halloween eight ball. So, for all you fellow Halloween-stumped designers, here are some costume ideas.

The topic for this blog came up from a meeting I had last week with a prospective client. Very often when our firm is sought out to create a new website or provide brand strategy for a company, we have to raise the all-to-familiar and never comfortable question: what about your logo?

One of my pet peeves about blogs from creative interactive agencies is that they are often farmed out to prolific professional writers that produce lofty witty commentary on the industry’s latest superstars. Many go to the utmost lengths to attempt to convince you that they are innovative just because they say they are.

Every morning at 9am (okay…9:20) I turn on my comp, check my email, hug every single one of my co-workers, finish all of my timesheets, and look at the day’s posts on NOTCOT.org.

Producing HTML emails is a hazardous job; those of us who do it bear the scars to prove it. The release of Outlook 2007 and the rise of Google as an email provider has severely muddle an already complicated ecosystem. Outlook’s new HTML rendering engine and Gmail’s inconsistent standard implementation are a huge setback to the hard-won achievements we’ve gained in the last few years.

Dear Adobe Elves,

I know I’m early for Christmas, but I thought I’d give you some time to work on my wishlist. Here are a few things that I really really really really want for the next generation of the creative suite.

Silverscape is aflutter about the premier of our virtual tour of the Joslin Diabetes Center. The completed presentation was unveiled Wednesday September 23rd at an event held at Patriot’s Place in Foxburough MA.

For the last several weeks one of the larger projects I’ve been working on is finishing the content entry for a consumer website that will be launching in the next month. The site is for Fabreeka International, a global company ...

Big News: the FCC announced that it would prevent broadband carriers from limiting your access to high speed Internet for things like Internet-based voice calls (VoIP), video streaming, and legal file sharing - things they would love to make you pay extra for, or even block. What's more, is that the FCC is looking to extend these rules to cellular networks with the rise of smartphones and 3G equipped netbooks.

WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association? Sounds official -- it is! Check out what sets Walbridge apart in this review of their win for "Outstanding Website" in this year's judging.

A couple weeks ago my friend, Yoshi, came back from Japan to visit. He and I attended MassArt together, both majoring in Graphic Design. And other than making him say all the swears he could think of in Japanese, I was really interested in the stuff he was designing in Japan.

Silverscape has just launched the new corporate website for LifeYield, LLC, a leading retirement income software solutions innovator based in Boston. (In laymen’s terms, they develop software tools to help brokers maximize retirement income for clients.)

For several years now I've heard web agencies say (usually pretty adamantly) that there's no Content Management System (CMS) for Flash and that all updates are going to have to be done by a programmer. This may be a nice tactic for attracting clients to place money in your outstretched, open palm, but as someone interested in the technology at hand, I beg to differ...

Hue-Saturation-Lightness (HSL) is a newly supported color specification in CSS3. Like RGB, HSL is a numerical representation of color with the use of three distinct values, Hue, Saturation and Lightness.

One of our favorite clients, Ned Taft of Alden Lab has passed away at the young age of 59. Ned was a gracious advisor to Silverscape. I’ll never forget how pleased he was and how hard he laughed when I told him I accidentally messed up my fish tank pump and I had a flow problem. His enthusiastic imaginiative ideas and infectious laugh will be missed.

Last Thursday, a friend of mine and I were driving when one of her dashboard lights lit up. Immediately she started freaking out because she explained the light was of an exclamation point enclosed in parenthesis ( ! ). Now, I don’t know about you, but exclamation point to me says “Danger / Check Engine Now / Tuck and Roll out of the car before it explodes.”

This morning, we learned Silverscape has been named number 17 of the Largest Web Design firms in the North East by the Boston Business Journal. If you don't know us, this is our TENTH year in business. (That’s like a million internet years right?)

If you live in or around the Boston area, chances are you’ve heard of the Joslin Diabetes Center. If you are someone with Diabetes, like myself (let me hear it from my type 1’s!) than chances are you know about Joslin Diabetes Center. For those of you who are thinking, “what is she talking about,” allow me to drop some knowledge on ya.

When IKEA announced that they were scrapping their beloved “IKEA Sans” (a customized version of Futura) for Verdana, the design community exploded - on the internet, at least. The reason behind the swap, according to an interview in Cap & Design magazine, is that Verdana allows Ikea to establish a consistent branding both internationally and across web and print.

Silverscape is teaming up with Arnold to create the new website for The Walden Woods Project - an organization whose mission is to preserve the land, literature and legacy of Henry David Thoreau to foster an ethic of environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

We are exposed to endless logos, icons and symbols from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Of course we all know this, but when we take an extra second to actually take in all of the branding that is around us, it can almost be overwhelming.

As promised in my last post I will be discussing the new additions to CSS3 that will not only allow us to manipulate Opacity and Alpha.

Originally a Carolina girl, I moved up to Boston from Charlotte when I started working with Silverscape. The move definitely shed some light on some interesting differences in northern and southern culture (some of which proved to be opposite the stereotypes too I might add!) and although I don’t find the people up here much different, apparently they don’t think the same of me.

(or don't because it annoys the people around you). Here at Silverscape we have a pretty diverse taste in music and some big music fanatics. You'll see our Last.FM playlist Top 40, to real eclectic and underground stuff. But when that's not cutting it, we all have our iPods/iPhones/iRivers(if you're Jake). Finding the right tune to match what you're working on along with your mood, for me personally can mean a difference in productivity.

Riiiing! Today we launched www.ascendentsystems.com! A division of our client RIM (the driving force behind BlackBerry™), Ascendent Systems allows users to automatically extend the identity and functionality of their business desk phone to any other device. Neato, right? As a collectively smartphone-obsessed company, this was a super fun project for us and we’re looking forward to more exciting engagements with RIM.

The Little Friends of Printmaking. I simply want to tell you how really, really, REALLY cool they are.

Part of my role at Silverscape has allowed me to interface as our “print buyer.” This aspect of my job has made me realize something I never thought I’d say, I love paper, and for that matter, I love printing! Not big corporate printers who only operate online, but smaller local shops. The ones you can visit on press and know how your job is going from start to finish. When I first started, there wasn’t a week that went by were I wasn’t calling up Lindenmeyer for paper samples, talking varnishes and bleeds with the designers and crossing my fingers as I sent files out to press. Recent economical troubles have caused people to either move away from print or, gasp, they have been forced to seek bargain-basement print pricing. This past month, I’ve seen a glimmer of hope for our print pipeline. Is it a sign of an improved economy or a realization that a beautifully done print piece can return a lasting impact on prospective or current clients?

 If you want to know more about how to understand who is actually on your website, and you are responsible for the forward momentum of your firm at any level, you must become a Google Analytics GEEK. This is not the IT guy’s job. This is not the Webmaster’s job. This is Marketing’s Magic 8 Ball and most of you are not using it on a daily basis

Don’t get me wrong, I love design inspiration websites. In fact, I have a whole bookmark folder chock-full of them (favorites being designbombs, dezinspiration, ilovetypography’s ‘Week in Type’ series). These gems aside, many design inspiration sites seem to be steadily veering away from a presenting a collection of hand-picked favorites and more towards becoming indiscriminate mass-aggregators riddled with generic templates and tired web 2.0 tricks. So, here’s what I’ve been looking at instead...

It’s a necessary evil in the business and marketing world to either cold call prospects or to at least send cold emails to people who’ve never spoke with you before. Over the last couple of years I’ve finally learned a few tricks that have made my cold-contacts more successful.

The completion of the next implementation of ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, CSS3, by the World Wide Web Consortium is something I, and many people in our field are eagerly looking forward to.

PC Mag released their yearly Top 100 Website list of 2009 (I guess the other five months left in the year don't count), though they aren't ranked in any particular order. But first few entries are really indicitive of some growing trends on the web.

My favorite web application to come out of Silverscape is our content management system, Common Goal Web Manager. I am somewhat biased in my preference for it since I played a major role in the development of our current version and its always a pleasure knowing that many clients are using something I wrote lots of code for to update their web sites every day.
 

With this code e9bfwpmugv a dub thee, Silverscape, a member of the Technorati Blogosphere!

The traditional Frequently Asked Questions page just doesn't do it for me. Let's reconsider why these pages exist, how they tie into an overall web presence, how they can be more useful to site visitors and what type of return these pages can offer the companies that build them (build them well, that is).

It’s my time to blog and I couldn’t resist a stab at the recent Snickers ad campaigns – or so I thought. Every time I see one of the outdoor ads I cringe at the thought that a viable agency actually put these out as creative (TV ads aside – I will admit that the Patrick Chewing commercial is pretty funny.)

In early 2010 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plans to expand the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) or everything after dot in a website’s URL. At the moment generic top-level domains range from “.com”, “.org”, “.edu”, “.biz”, etc… to country-specific such as “.us”, “.uk”, “.jp” and so on.

One of the things that I love most about being a designer is that I’m constantly learning – both inside and outside of my own industry. At Silverscape, we’re lucky enough to have a broad client base and it’s allowed me to get knee-deep in the science behind fire-retardant performance garments, what separates artisan chocolate from your run-of-the-mill Hershey Bar, the technology that propels secure data protection and control, and even the details of safety and environmental compliance within the construction industry. Getting to really know a client once they’ve come on board is an exciting process, but beginning an engagement with a client whose services are already close to your heart is even more rewarding.

The web is becoming bendable and mashable. Some of the most popular social sites on the web are opening up letting developers consume all sorts of data and information. It’s the very same information that makes those sites wildly successful.

Some people love good food, others love custom cars, comfy clothes or their morning coffee. Some people love video games, and some really love beer. Football season, naps on a Sunday afternoon, sewing, coffee, great chocolate and the new iphone – all things that people love.

I’m nervous. I’ve been asked by the Society of Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) to give their July webinar. I’m speaking about business development at the C-suite level and measure the results.

Two or three years ago, Flash was our go-to technology whenever we needed to achieve really cool or advanced interactivity. More recently, we've really taken a liking to using Ajax to accomplish many of the same tasks.

Implementing & Measuring Social Media Marketing for A/E/C Firms
July 28, 2009 at 2 PM EDT, 1 PM CDT, 12 PM MDT, 11 AM PDT

If your firm is considering adding social media components to your existing marketing mix or you’ve begun to dabble with social media, you may be wondering what’s next and how to measure the results of your efforts.
 

What up, MTV; welcome to our crib. We’ve done some drastic redecorating, so ditch your shoes and start exploring our new Social-Media-powered digs.

Each year the Silverscape team is lucky enough to have a fancy night out at the New England Direct Marketing Awards (NEDMA). While the glitz, gold and open bar are great, the awards represent a little something more then pretty pieces of plastic to this studio coordinator.

"To create a profitable business in which our love and talents manifest" is lovingly tiled at the top of the large Merlin brewing kettle. It's a sentiment that I can't stop thinking about. Owning a marketing strategy, technology and design firm, Silverscape in Boston means trying to find the balance between the art of design, technological solutions and profitability.

I guess I’m just going to preface my entry with, GO SEE THE MOVIE UP, and do it right now. Pixar’s storytelling just keeps getting better and better with each new film, and UP is absolutely no exception.

When you care about your work as much as we do here at Silverscape it always feels great to get some kind words from a client about the job we’ve done. Check out what Jen from Walbridge had to say about their new site.

Flame Resistant Clothing Firm, DRIFIRE, Launches New Website To Better Serve Customers

06/03/2009 COLUMBUS, GA – Leading flame resistant clothing developer and manufacturer, DRIFIRE®, recently launched a newly re-designed, user-friendly website created by Silverscape. To better serve customers, the website http://www.drifire.com has been completely overhauled, providing an even wider selection of high quality comfortable FR apparel. In addition to the expanded product line, the fresh, new design includes powerful action photos of various situations where DRIFIRE clothing was used, including firefighting, electrical work and military applications.

The design observer had an AWESOME blog entry (as most of them are) on May 23rd. It was about turn-of-the-century travel posters, which I too, Eric Baker, am also a sucker for.

Silverscape is thrilled to announce the launch of the new corporate website for Norwood, MA - based Advanced Instruments, Inc. (AI) and its subsidiaries. AI is the world's foremost authority for the application of freezing-point depression (FPD) technology. Over the course of the last half-decade, through development and acquisition of emerging technologies, the of AI family of companies has become a leading supplier of diagnostic testing systems serving medical and industrial laboratories around the globe.

We all know that times are tough. Everyone is working hard to get through this downturn to the brighter days that lay ahead. But, at Silverscape, we're proud to say that we're keeping busy with some of our most interesting projects yet! We were thrilled this month to launch the new website and e-commerce store for Taza Chocolate, and organic, bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturer, and the only chocolate maker in the US that produces 100% stone ground organic chocolate. Yum!

Silverscape honored with 5 New England Direct Marketing Associates (NEDMA) Awards
 

Using LinkedIn to build your career network.

On April 6 at noon, join the BSA Career Resources Network for a free training session led by Caitlin Jewell, Principal and Creative Director of Silverscape, on how to use LinkedIn to expand your job-search network.
 

An emerging buzzword in marketing is Business to Individual Marketing or B to I. This is hardly a new concept, rather a new punditry packaging of Direct Marketing or Direct Response Marketing. Recently, I've been a target. I was very impressed with an expensive print direct mail piece I received from Sony launching the Sony Vaio P series machine. The envelope was an excellent representation of a clutch purse and out slides an actual size card of the Vaio.

Silverscape is excited to announce the launch of Walbridge's new website.

Caitlin Jewell presents at SMPS Northeast Regional Conference: Smart Marketing Planning for the Rebound If you want the strategies and the tools to make your firm stronger, you need to attend this year's Northeast Regional Conference at The Beechwood Hotel in Worcester, Massachusetts!

Silverscape has been selected by Fabreeka International, Inc. to design and develop their new corporate website. Fabreeka has been a worldwide leader in Isolation Technology since the development of their revolutionary Fabreeka® Pad in 1936 and has international offices throughout North America, Europe and China. The upcoming website will be developed on Silverscape's Common Goal content management platform and will support English, German and Chinese language