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

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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?

(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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Muzak Expressions

Will 1 Comments

This year for the 2008 GlobalShop (the world's largest annual retail design event) Muzak created a unique multi-faceted marketing campaign based on the concept of expressions.

The Muzak booth featured hundreds of photos of people expressing angst, desire, elation and pride on 14 high-definition plasma screens with custom music programs that evoked each emotion. Booth attendees became part of the experience by being professionally photographed expressing one or more of those four emotions, then seeing their own photos added to the visual display throughout the event.

Expanding the experience into the web, Studiobanks created a micro-site for Muzak Expressions, allowing users to casually browse through the hundreds of photos Muzak took over the course of their campaign.

New Studiobanks T-Shirts are Here!

Studiobanks 0 Comments

At last, our new t-shirts have arrived! We will be giving them to our clients, but have also decided to sell them to anyone else who might want one here on our blog.

The shirt features a design we hired Bloo Empire's Keeley Carrigan to create for us. The design depicts a large Studiobanks robot bashing in a computer monitor with elements of the internet flying out. Along with the rest of the internet, our various Toolbox packages and a bird (since we often code name our redesign projects after birds) pop out.

Read More

Studiobanks Receives 7 ADDY Awards

Studiobanks 5 Comments

The ADDYs are the advertising industry's largest and most representative competition, recognizing and rewarding creative excellence. This year more than 50 Charlotte-area companies submitted over 375 entries of work to the Charlotte ADDY competition. Only 135, or roughly 35%, of those entries were honored with an ADDY Award. We are happy to announce Studiobanks received 7 of those ADDYs. We snagged 5 of the 12 ADDYs bestowed on website development. Studiobanks was the only shop to win a Gold ADDY for web development.

Read More

(Project Update) Bouvier Kelly Website Launched

Banks 0 Comments

We were recently asked by a Greensboro advertising agency to help redesign their corporate website. Bouvier Kelly is a agency built on solid marketing fundamentals and strong creative. They must be doing something right, they have been around since 1974. Without any internal web design capabilities they were looking for someone to create a website that would better represent their current direction and quality of work.

Read More

Bourbon Boards - Next Big Thing Article

Christy 1 Comments

As you know, we recently launched the Bourbon Boards website. There's a great article in today's Charlotte Observer by Doug Smith about their business, which just opened it's new showroom at Interiors Marketplace (designed by our good friends over at Eye Design). Thought we'd share!

The Old Crow Distillery near Frankfort, Ky., shown in this photo, is being dismantled for its vintage heart pine, brick, limestone and other materials. Charlotteans John Vieregg (from left), Jubal Early and Monte Ritchey bought salvage rights to the 14-building complex and are marketing the reclaimed materials through a South End showroom. Their company, named Bourbon Boards, shares space off South Boulevard with Interiors Marketplace.

Read More