Studioblog (n): a blog by Studiobanks about design, marketing, internet, business, Charlotte and more. 

IE 8, HTML 5 and Web Standards

Robbie 3 Comments

Back in March, Microsoft finally caved under the pressure of web designers and developers and announced Internet Explorer 8 will render content in the most current standards-based mode by default (currently, it must be forced out of "quirks" mode by specifying DOCTYPE). In addition, there will be two other rendering modes that are enabled through meta tag declarations—one comparable to IE 7 and another dating back further. Being the behemoth, corporate entity that they are this is understandable, as they can't ignore businesses locked into previous versions of Internet Explorer. Despite my distaste for most of Microsoft's actions, this is a great decision.

With the release of IE 8 Beta 1, the development team at Microsoft is beginning to release details regarding improvements. The most exciting news I've heard on the IEBlog is the HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in the new beta. It appears as if the team is working with the new HTML 5 specification. As we mentioned around this time last year, there a lot of improvements on the way in the new version of HTML. With IE 8 already in its first beta, the WebKit project churning along and the speed at which Mozilla can kick out new versions of Firefox, it's realistic to think we may be able to utilize many of the proposed HTML features in in the next few years. While that still sounds like a long time, the HTML 4.01 specification was recommended as of December 1999 (XHTML in the following year). The HTML 5 specification was just adopted at the end of 2007 and the first working draft published in January. So, the pace is quickening, even though HTML 5 reportedly won't be "recommended" by the W3C until around 2012.

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CityBlackBook.com: Coming Soon!

Studiobanks 0 Comments

Five years ago, we noticed a website in Charlotte that was creating a lot of buzz with its online nightlife resource guide. However, the website was horribly designed and even harder to use. We decided that there was an opportunity there to create something along the same lines, but with a much improved user experience. Now, five years later, CarolinaNightlife.com has become a household name amongst the city’s party goers.

We are happy to announce today that we are at it again. On May 21st, we will launch the beta version of our latest internal project, CityBlackBook.com, for public use. The idea was born from the distaste for other large city-based resource guides like CitySearch.com, CityGuide.com and YellowPages.com. About a year ago, we decided we would build a lean, easy-to-use, clean-and-simple city-based resource guide that wasn’t so bloated. Basically, we wanted a guide that would be actually useful.

In the coming weeks, we will release sneak peeks about what we have going on and what will make this resource guide unique. So, bookmark the City Black Book Blog to keep up with the forthcoming launch.

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Studiobanks Desktop Wallpapers

Mike 0 Comments

Studiobanks recently had some t-shirts designed by Bloo Empire's Keeley Carrigan. The design featured a Studiobanks robot smashing a computer monitor and various elements of the internet flying out, including characters based on our custom Toolbox packages.

I decided that since the design is so cool, it would be great to offer our friends a Studiobanks desktop wallpaper with this design. Below are links to the various sizes of wallpapers for everyone to enjoy!

1024x768

1280x800

1280x1024

1440x900

1680x1050

1900x1200

iPhone

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We got to sit with the Price's at the Charlotte Center City Vision Awards!

Christy 1 Comments

Charlotte Center City Partners hosted their third annual Vision Awards on April 10th. Basically, this was one big party for over 700 people that honors and celebrates those who've made a significant contribution to the vision and vibrancy of uptown and South End.

First, let me tell you about the best part of the night! Banks and I were delighted to accept an invitation to attend this event, especially since Studiobanks is in South End and I live uptown. And, well, Banks definitely plays a lot uptown—I'm sure all you night-owls have run into him out and about. Anyway, the event was held at the Charlotte Convention Center and started with a cocktail reception outside and then moved into the ballroom.

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Constructing Usable URLs

Michael 1 Comments

When discussing usability, I tend to bounce from element to element - menu this, font-size that and so on. The last year or two introduced some non-design elements to the conversation, like AJAX, accessibility and semantics. Not until the last few months, however, have I considered URL construction an important part of usability. SEO, sure, but usability? Never.

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Senior Seminar

Banks 2 Comments

Recently, I was asked by an old professor of mine, Jamie Franki, to come speak to a class of seniors about the transition from the college world to the professional world. The class is entitled Senior Seminar and is intended to help graduating art students with that transition. I remember taking the class myself during my final semester at UNC Charlotte. The course covered topics from interviewing skills, to creating resumes, to the presentation of your portfolio, among others. Over the span of a semester the professor will invite five or so UNCC graduates that have had some success in their field, to come back and offer advice to the students. I was honored and excited about the opportunity.

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Starbucks Coffee At Home

Will 7 Comments

Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.

At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.

Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.

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Help Us Name This Thing

Banks 13 Comments

For the last few months, we have been waving our hands in the air trying to explain to clients and visitors that we were having something built to go in between our conference area and our front door. Well, it was installed this past weekend and we couldn't be happier! Reaching Quiet, one of our clients, designed and built the piece. As usual, their work speaks for itself—they did an incredible job. It is made of concrete, steel and wood and weighs over 2,400 pounds. What is really great is that it allows us to utilize a large LCD monitor for client meetings. We could really use some help with what to call this thing, though. Any ideas?

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(Pardon the Buzz Word) Branding

Banks 4 Comments

In a recent post entitled "Pardon the Buzz Word," I explained our usage of the term "webcentric". I've decided to turn that into a series of posts where I focus on certain marketing terms, dispel some common myths around the term and then describe our usage.

I just finished reading two great books on branding, The Brand Gap and Zag. The book's author Marty Neumeier is president of San Francisco based Neutron, a brand consulting firm. I highly recommend these two books to anyone involved in marketing or running a company. I have already been able to apply some of their teachings into my work with our client's marketing strategies.

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Shenanigans: Book of Lists

Robbie 13 Comments

A little late to the punch on this one, but I couldn't let it slide without offering up my two cents:

In Charlotte Business Journal's 2007 Book of Lists, the listing of Web Design Companies ranked Charlotte companies by number of websites designed locally in 2006. Quality is purely subjective, so that's really the only quantitative, non-biased criteria by which Charlotte companies can be ranked. I get it.

That said, I call shenanigans on pretty much the top four companies, based solely on their reported numbers. For brevity's sake, I'll just break down the numbers for the company ranked first on the listing—I'll refer to them as Company X.

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