G R A P H I C D E S I G N W E B S I T E D E S I G N V I D E O C H A R L O T T E S V I L L E
A Major Search Engine Test
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a black art. All practitioners of this are charlatans, con-men, and soothsayers. That’s my stance, and yet there must be some way to game the system, some way to buy a little rank.
Maybe, maybe not.
Here’s my test. Optipop does graphic design, web design, and video. The new predictive search function in Google makes guesses as you type. Each letter getting you closer to the truth, uh, your search result. What if those letters occur with spaces, as if you were spelling them? Let’s see what happens, given the title of this post. I’ll post a graph later if the results over time seem interesting.
Civil Rights Database
We’ve done lots of work with the Project for Lived Theology in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Virginia. We are currently designing a Civil Rights Database of Charles Marsh’s research materials in collusion with SHANTI. The project is almost ready to launch and it includes a wide range of features useful to scholars in this field. We will update this page when it is complete. You may also sign-up for updates on our Contact page.
Hemosonics Website
Hemosonics is doing interesting things with blood. That doesn’t sound right does it?
Mary’s expertise came in handy in the construction of this site. She has experience in biology, healthcare, and engineering.
Stonefire Station/Stonefire Kitchen
We did huge amounts of work for Tori and Carl when they were running Festive Fare (the website, rack card, price list, product catalog, product photography, and more). When they opened Stonefire Station we were quite pleased to be asked to design the materials for it as well.
We designed the site as well as brand materials, logos, location and food photography, and a host of other pieces. The newly added Stonefire Kitchen is rocking and is getting wonderful reviews(1)(2). Stop by for a sandwich or a picnic when in Barboursville.
The site is built on a WordPress foundation. We helped them with social media set-up as well.
Diffusion Pharmaceuticals
Diffusion is a drug development company working in the cardiovascular treatment space. We designed a very spare, very open site to reflect the efficiency and clarity of their science. It is a pleasant opportunity to work with such a small palette of elements. And, it is a challenge to keep the elements to a small set; this site is definitely about editing and removing, simplifying the composition.
Footage: The New Anachronism
I shot several hours of video last night. Only I got no footage – not a single foot. My camera records images in the form of data to memory cards. The card is significantly smaller than a foot (even a baby foot). Imagining there is some transistor version of a fractal coastline inside the card, the length would still be tiny.
Footage is a unit of measure from celluloid film. The original frame size was 35mm tall, rolling through the camera (or projector) at 24 frames per second – about 12 frames per foot. When 16mm film was introduced, the amount of data for 35mm of celluloid was essentially doubled, that is there were now approximately 24 images in a foot of film (though if you’re counting particles of silver as the unit of measure within a frame, this notion of increase is incorrect. The increase in film quality and processing, lenses, lighting, and other factors all combine to increase the data within the frame; thus given the same stock, 35mm has 4x the area of 16mm).
So footage is gone. What other measures are meaningless, but still in use? Horsepower obviously. The Page is on the way out, perhaps replaced by a portmanteau of related screens and link density, the Scrinkle (a hypertext measure I just coined). Maybe density of links is not as relative as information density—how relevant and vital the link is to the story we are reading (story can also be a unit of measure). In the near future will Google swap out the links in our text to increase the accuracy of meaning, auto-tagging 4 syllable words for us? Then will Google swap out the words in our text to increase the accuracy of meaning? Will they/it swap out the meaning in our text to increase the accuracy of the meaning? Read more…
