kbignell / June 17, 2009, 1:56 pm
I started working at Blenderbox a couple months ago. Yet, it is only recently that people have started to ask me, “What is the best thing about your new job?” This seems rather ironic to me, as I knew the answer before I even began at Blenderbox.
I moved across the country to work here. I had never lived in the New York area before, and had no idea if I wanted to live in Brooklyn, Manhattan or somewhere in the neighboring New Jersey cities. Before I had even met anyone at Blenderbox, they were sending me apartment listing with descriptions of the neighborhoods, and writing to me what it was like in their neighborhood. It is the people I work with and company culture that are best parts.
Heather / June 10, 2009, 10:57 am
Blenderbox is thrilled to announce our recent selection as one of the Interactive Media Awards’ Top 10 Agencies of 2008.
The IMA Top 10 Agencies represent organizations that consistently uphold the highest standards of excellence in web design and development, and of the 500 agencies that submitted their best work to the IMAs in 2008, the ten agencies with the highest scoring evaluations were selected for this honor.
To see the full list of recognized agencies, visit the Interactive Media Awards website.
Caleb / June 2, 2009, 10:21 am
Empire magazine is celebrating their 20th anniversary with a pretty cool flash based application. I have seen similar things like this before, but this in particular is very well executed. Try to find all 50 movies hidden within this painting
Cryptic Canvas
My favorite so far is Liar Liar. See if you can find that one.
Heather / May 29, 2009, 1:13 pm
Earlier this week, Blenderbox CEO and Co-Founder Jason Jeffries presented at the Brooklyn Business Summit on the importance of good customer relations.
Created by the Brooklyn Business Center, the Brooklyn Business Summit is dedicated to providing a “progressive venue and agenda for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking to become small business owners”. After building three successful businesses, Jason has gained extensive insight into creating and maintaining quality relationships with his clients and customers, insight that he shared with 50 small business owners at Wednesday’s Customer Satisfaction & Retention workshop.
Cutting through the traditional Customer Relation jargon, Jason mapped out a simple and effective guide to securing customer satisfaction using a modified version of the “Blenderbox method” — Listen, Think, Create, Deliver. By listening to your customer’s needs and desires, making your service memorable, and maintaining a personal involvement in your company’s client relationships, you can positively shape the perception of your company and generate quality business leads.
The message is simple, should business owners wish to embrace it: listening to what your clients have to say about your methods and addressing these critiques in your process is always the most effective way to keep your clients happy and your business booming.
While the next Brooklyn Business Summit has yet to be scheduled, video of Jason’s presentation will be available on their site soon, so keep checking back for more details.
Heather / May 4, 2009, 2:18 pm
Blenderbox is pleased to announce our most recent SCA wins – two Bronze awards for 7 World Trade Center Events and BackboneNYC, two Silver awards for World Trade Center and the Bedford Cheese Shop, and a Gold medal for the Clinton Presidential Center website!
The Summit Creative Awards were created in an effort to recognize and celebrate the creative accomplishments of small and medium sized advertising agencies and other creative companies throughout the world, with submissions evaluated based on the strength of their “big idea”, the quality of execution, and their ability to communicate and persuade.
The Summit International Awards organization is dedicated to furthering excellence in the communications industry and has established itself as one of the premier arbiters of of creative and communication excellence.
Dave / April 7, 2009, 1:06 pm
This may be a refresh for the SEO experts out there, but this came up in conversation today at the office and I thought I’d share my new found knowledge!
When a search engine indexes pages it considers http://blenderbox.com and http://www.blenderbox.com to be two different websites. While the idea of indexing twice sounds good, it is in fact bad for your Search Engine Optimization!
The popularity of your link is split between the two URLS, decreasing the value of each link and subsequently your site content.
The good news is there is a simple solution.
Create a 301 redirect on the site without the ‘www.’ to make the site permanently redirect to your ‘www.’ domain, combining your link popularity to represent the true value – and in the end improve your search result rankings!
If you found this tip helpful, please share the knowledge :-)
Heather / March 19, 2009, 4:14 pm
When Blenderbox first engaged with the Hewlett Foundation to redesign their existing site, Hewlett wanted to be sure that their site’s users would stand to benefit first and foremost. So Blenderbox developed beta.hewlett.org, allowing the Foundation to gather feedback from the site’s users that could be used to gauge their level of satisfaction with the new design and influence the ultimate re-launch of hewlett.org.
After receiving initial user feedback, the site’s new design is a rousing success! New sections like “What We’re Learning” have been met with remarkably positive feedback, and many users are applauding the Foundation’s user-friendliness and transparency as well.
Since 1967, the Hewlett Foundation has been making grants to solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. For more information about the Hewlett Foundation’s mission and work, and to check out the Beta redesign, head over to beta.hewlett.org.
Matt / February 19, 2009, 6:25 pm
A long time ago for a project that didn’t require much visual design work, I created wireframes in HTML. I thought I was making the handoff to our developers a little smoother, but it didn’t really work out that way. In my case, two things were wrong with this approach: 1) my basic assumption was off: creating the HTML for this project was not really the giant task that I assumed it was; 2) the code I wrote wasn’t really re-usable. *cough*
I think a lot of IAs & interaction designers have gone looking for this “holy grail” deliverable at one point or another—the deliverable that’s more than just your standard, garden-variety deliverable, the deliverable that is the shell of a site that everyone else builds upon. As far as I can tell, it never really works like that.
I forgot all about it until today, when I came across the Fluid 960 Grid System, a set of interactive page layout templates written with HTML, CSS, and Mootools.
I’m tempted to try wireframing with this framework, but I think it works best in the following situation:
- Rapid development environment (or just the old fashioned compressed timeline)
- Buy-in on using a 12 or 16 column grid from visual designers
- Buy-in from developers that they can work with this framework with few modifications
Even if 960 Grids doesn’t work as a wireframing tool, I can see a lot of potential just for getting a quick idea across, or developing a clickable prototype for user testing.
Nathan / December 12, 2008, 4:52 pm
One of the things I like most about TDD, and shoulda specifically, is that if a thought pops up of something I need to add I can add a deferred test and come back to it later. In shoulda you can do this with:
should_eventually "do something"
#or just leave off the block
should "do something"
This works great for models/controllers, but I also wanted a way to integrate a miscelanious todo list into the flow that would pop up in autotest or when running the whole test suite. To accomplish this I’ve been keeping a TodosTest in the integration tests directory:
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'
class TodosTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
context "TODO:" do
todos = [
'add the jquery rounded corners plugin',
'add the jquery dropshadow plugin',
'scope actions in application.js to specific pages'
]
todos.each do |todo|
should_eventually todo
end
end
end
The output of this is:
* DEFERRED: TODO: should add the jquery rounded corners plugin.
* DEFERRED: TODO: should add the jquery dropshadow plugin.
* DEFERRED: TODO: should scope actions in application.js to specific pages.
Since this isn't really an integration test I usually add a line for this in the .gitignore.
Also - this is a handy bash alias to print the todo's without the deferred/should language:
alias todo="ruby test/integration/todos_test.rb | grep TODO | sed -e 's/DEFERRED: TODO: should //g'"
The cleaned up output is:
* add the jquery rounded corners plugin.
* add the jquery dropshadow plugin.
* scope actions in application.js to specific pages.
