[gb] Studio

I’ve been super-busy the last couple months on a lot of things in the studio: pushed a bunch of smaller projects out the door, one really big one, and continued work on some other big things that I can’t wait to share with you all.

As 2009 winds down, I’m excited for where [gb] Studio is headed. In particular, I’m looking forward to kicking off January with the fine folks at Carbonmade. For those that don’t know, Carbonmade makes it wicked-easy for designers, artists, photographers, and anyone else to put together a slick online portfolio.

The official announcement went out this morning from their end. I’ll be working on a lot of different things related to the next version of Carbonmade.

I’m looking forward to working with their team and excited to see where things go.

( ps – be sure and check out my own tricked-out Carbonmade portfolio: gb.carbonmade.com or get your own )

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I’m currently working on a book cover design for none other than my dad, Chuck Blakeman. We’ve got a few different designs we’ve narrowed it down to, and I thought I’d have some fun by throwing a couple of them out on Twitter to get some responses.

The above aren’t all of the ideas I came up with, but representative of the 4 different directions of the design choices.

I put out a couple tweets asking for opinions and started getting responses almost immediately.

So far, what has surprised me the most is the polarization between the grey covers and the more colorful covers. It’s almost a mutually-exclusive response. If you like the grey cover in the first set, you’ll like the grey cover in the second. If you like the white cover, you’ll like the blue/yellow cover.

I’m not sure what to do with that information yet, but it’s fun to see the strong pattern in responses. What would you pick?

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Last week I launched a splash page announcing the Lilly’s Table project. I’ve been working on it for some time, and part of the plan is to give you all (my 2 or 3 faithful readers) some insight into the process of designing and building a web application from the ground up.

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything…

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything from the business development side, to the product design, and of course, the actual site design & development. One of the initial design pieces I worked on was the visual brand for the project. In this first post discussing the branding process, I’ll show a bit of the work we went through to arrive at the final logo for Lilly’s Table.

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I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a while with the very talented Chef Lilly from Bella Cuisine. The project is called: Lilly’s Table and it will feature fresh and creative, seasonal, meal plans on a weekly basis, directly from Lilly herself.

I think Lilly and I first started to talk about her project toward the end of last year, so it has been in the works for a while. This fun little splash page is just the beginning. Be sure to sign up for the email list, or follow @LillysTable on Twitter so that you don’t miss anything.

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I was catching up on some design articles today, and while scrolling through Smashing Magazine’s Web Trends for 2009 I noticed one of our designs under the HUGE Typography category. The design is from the micro-store we created for The Autumn Film’s Red+White Sale.

It’s always fun when other people feature your work. I’m honored. Thanks to Smashing Magazine.

If you want, you can check out the original design and an article on the design process for it.

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So, I got in an argument today. A fun argument, but an argument nonetheless. The argument was about spec work.

If you don’t get chosen? You get nothing.

For those that don’t know, “spec” work is work done, for free, under the premise that if the client likes your work, they’ll choose you for the account and you’ll get paid. If you don’t get chosen? You get nothing.

As much as possible, I don’t want this post to devolve into a general argument for or against spec work—there is plenty of that on the net. These are my arguments. You may disagree with them, but I want to address why we don’t do it. At all.

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I got the chance yesterday to give a little presentation to a weekly group that my dad runs for business owners in south Denver. It was fun, I met a lot of great people and got to share a few thoughts on social networking and other web tidbits for the uninitiated.

Click through for the slides and some other stuff.

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It’s a simple concept: set sale prices on products you want to move and send out an email to your list promoting said products.

But this is a noisy space during the holiday season. How do you stand out? For band, The Autumn Film, we created The Red+White Sale and launched a branded single-page micro-store and accompanying email campaign.

I’ll take you through the finished design and point out some of the philosophy behind the decisions I made.

Oh, did I forget to mention we put this together in two days?

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Here’s a step-by-step review of one of our larger ground-up branding/identity efforts (time to look at pretty pictures!).

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By choice we keep our staff size pretty small—think nimble & quick, like ninja’s. But sometimes that puts us in a bind. So we’re looking to grow our List. What’s the List, you ask? It’s the group of seriously good, independent designers, front-end coders, and ruby on rails developers that we can count on to work at our level and help us fill in the gaps. Check us out our little microsite. If you would like to be considered for addition to the List, message us or drop us a note at: applyourself [at] gb-studio [dot] tv

(please don’t send huge PDF attachments or word doc resumes; in fact, we’d prefer you just e-mail us, tell us a bit about yourself, and we can tell you more about what we’re looking for; yep, that would work best…)

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It is December 1st. Somehow this date (and the holidays) snuck up on me more than usual this year. I’m still stuffed from Thanksgiving turducken and I realized today that I’ve gone a whole month without posting anything – I was going to say, “without posting anything of relevance,” but I’m not sure I ever post much that is relevant here. Life has been super-busy in the studio, and continues to be. Here’s a bit of an update…

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