Archive for August, 2010

This week in Nerdery

Tuesday and Thursday: Banner ad webinars. Next in our monthly series of agency primer webinars, we’ll talk about how we help partners develop banner ads designed for brand awareness, or, to provoke those inclined to click them to click them. RSVP at http://www.nerdery.com/banners.

Game dev club: Some stay after work to play with game development, Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.

Thursday: MN PHP user group meetup, 6-8 p.m., with a tech talk on HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) by Daniel J. Post. RSVP at http://www.mnphp.org/.

The Nerdery ranked #1 on list of Best Places to Work

In case you haven’t heard The Nerdery was ranked #1 on Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s Best Places to Work list.

The rankings were determined by employee surveys created by Quantum Workplace, which reported the results to the Business Journal. We topped the list of medium sized companies – those with 101 to 1,000 employees – that do business within the Twin Cities thirteen-county metro area.

The nerds had a lot of nice things to say about working at The Nerdery, including:

“Every day I wake up and actually look forward to going to work. I know that my opinion matters, what I do matters and that I am valuable to the company.”

We take our Nerdery culture seriously, and that makes winning this award a great honor.

Want more? Take a look at what Nerdery leaders had to say and get a few tips on how to create a rocking workplace.

Friday Links: Zero waste creativity and the tech exec who worked with Iggy Pop

• Silicon Valley’s secret rockstar: For more than two decades James Williamson worked at high-level jobs at places like Sony. Then his old boss Iggy Pop called again.
• Zero waste creativity, crazy enough to work?
• 25 best movie geeks, it’s a list with quite a few surprises (and includes one of my favorites, William Miller from “Almost Famous”).
• Online Advertising: Losing the race to the bottom, Jim Coudal and John Gruber from last year’s SXSW.
• Meet the LEGO architect.
• If historical events had Facebook statuses.
• A helpful infographic on Memes.
• Dungeons & Dragon’s themed sports logo t-shirts.
• How to forecast weather without gadgets.

Nerdery webinar on banner ads, Aug 31 and Sept 2

Some people find banner ads maddening, sometimes with probable cause. Some are conditioned to never ever click a banner ad, but with the right design you can get them to have a look. And we can help. RSVP at http://www.nerdery.com/banners to check out one of our two free webinars on banner ads – Tuesday August 31 at 10:15 a.m. Central and Thursday September 2 at 3:15 p.m. Central.

We’ll address two primary kinds of banner ads: those designed as a call to action (the ones that beg to be clicked, made to drive traffic) and those that just sit pretty for the sake of brand awareness. We’ll cover development best practices favored by media service providers and the standards of rich media service providers regarding tech specs, sizes, bells and whistles.

If you want your banner ad to really make a scene, we can make that happen – but buyer beware that placement costs rise, as do risks of being more distraction than attraction to some online consumers voting with dollars of their own. Maybe a game is the right play for your banner, but maybe not. Nerdery developers are good at weighing in on what will work, and really good at working directly with media and rich media service providers to implement the ideas of our agency partners.

Good seats (of your choosing) are still available, please RSVP.

Nerdery Inc.-listed again

Not pictured above: Inc. 5000 commemorative plaque #3 (it’s in the mail)

For the third year in a row we’re on Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s fastest growing, privately owned companies. Inc. saves trees by featuring only the Inc. 500 in its print edition, so here’s us in Inc.’s inkless edition, and here’s how our publicist has marked the occasion.

Great Moments in Nerdery: The birth of Windows95

It was on this day in, well, 1995 that Microsoft launched Windows 95. Gizmodo has a sweet, almost sentimental birthday post for the venerable OS that includes this brilliant quote from a review of the software.

“In many ways [Windows 95] is an edifice built of baling wire, chewing gum and prayer, but you will probably end up living there.”

Redesigning banana packaging

I can’t tell if the design a sticker campaign> for Chiquita bananas, as reported by the The New York Times, is awesome or a sign of the apocalypse.

Whenever I see words like this in quotes, which in newspapers means someone actually said those words, I get a little scared:

“Ciafardini says Chiquita is particularly interested in communicating to the under-25 crowd that the company offers the “convenient healthy snacking platforms that people are looking for these days.”

Healthy snacking platforms? Sounds kind of like a cracker to me. But anyway, the story is pretty interesting tale of branding and packaging, when your product is a banana.

Friday Links: Lots of StarWars links for reasons I cannot explain

• StarWars Uncut a re-make of StarWars: A New Hope reenacted by fans in 15 second chunks.
• R2D2 iPhone case coming soon.
• Stormtroopers singing in the rain.
• 35 lessons in 35 years.
• Trends in Fantasy Cover Art.
• The Old Spice campaign by the numbers.
• A letter to all of advertising and marketing.
• McCann responds to Mad Men diss.
• Science cookie cutters.
• 250 beautiful typography shirts.

The tabs on Facebook they are a-changin’

Facebook is reducing the width of custom profile tabs to 520 pixels (down from 760). If you’ve created a custom tab (think landing page of a Facebook app) it’s gonna get 32% slimmer next week.

Imagine if someone came along and lopped off “are a-changin’” from the headline of this post. Bob Dylan and I would be pissed about losing context and leaving you hanging like that. Now, picture that Facebook tab you so lovingly designed, and imagine watching helplessly as that awful Leatherface severed it by one-third with his chainsaw. How does it feel?

Words and images, if not cut off, may be scrambled instead. Clickable links might lose their interactivity. Scary stuff.

Obviously, from here forward we’re building within the 520 frame, and we’re ready to help you adjust existing Facebook tabs – whether we developed the original or not. So fear not, agency partners and clients. The Nerdery will protect you from Leatherface.

Walk with purpose

Yesterday The Nerdery raised $200 for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society by having waffles. Thursday night (August 19, 6:30-10:30) we host a poker party for the cause – and we’ll take your money. Our gambling/waffling ways represent a couple supplemental fundraisers leading up to our involvement in the Light the Night Walk on September 26 at Target Field.

We have good reasons for doing this, namely, our friend and colleague Bill Brown, who lost his wife Kate and son Matthew, both to Leukemia, both in the last year.

Check in on the steps our team is taking to pay tribute and bring hope to people battling cancer at http://pages.lightthenight.org/mn/TwinCiti10/httpnerderycom.