When we realized we hadn’t yet gotten around to hosting an event at our office in Newport Beach, California, we seized the opportunity to host a party/fundraiser to spread the word. Tuesday evening, staff, clients, and friends both old and new joined us for our “160overNine-Nine-Ninety Whiplash Bash.” The punch was flowing, and so were the $$$s. Thanks for the contributions, and for helping us open up our new digs in style. And thanks to the locals for welcoming us and not busting up our boards. Next stop, White House!

Check out some of these hot pics:

Upstairs view of the office, located in the amazing Cannery Village of Newport Beach:

These garage doors really let in a lot of bugs. Who comes up with this stuff?

The piles of magazines prove that we’re for real:

Despite some of the world’s freshest seafood being literally steps from our door, we imported these oysters all the way from Nova Scotia! Take that, carbon footprint! And the flowers are edible (I had five, but they didn’t really taste like anything). Decadent!

Doubly decadent!:

Meanwhile, just down the street, Wednesday morning. If this beach was at the Jersey Shore, there’d be like a billion people on it:

Last Wednesday, Kay and I had the opportunity to accompany Creative Director Tim O’Donnell to a lecture he was giving at Kay’s alma mater and local Philly art school, Tyler School of Art. This was a great experience to get to know once of our CD’s better, and to join Tim on his first ever ride on the Philadelphia subway!

With the help of Kay’s navigational skills we made it to a very crowded classroom in Tyler’s Design Department, albeit a little out of breath and in Tim’s case, a little dazed due to his “lack of sleep [aka an upcoming presentation] and Dayquil.”

Tyler students ready to get their presentation on.

Tim started the presentation with how he first realized he was interested in design. At age 5 while living in New York, his dad asked whether he liked the Jets or the Giants. He chose the Dallas Cowboys because he liked the star. When traveling, he made his parents stay at Sheraton hotels until he was 18 because he loved the logo so much. His love of drawing segued into design, which led him to Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he studied graphic design at a time when the program was progressing from hand skills to computer techniques. (This came full circle, he is now the CD for the RIT account here at 160over90).

His first experience out of school was unfortunately a “demoralizing first job” that left him burnt out after a year (we interns are treated much better here at 160!). He then worked at a gift shop until he was ready to apply to his dream job: designing record sleeves for 4AD Records in England. He put together a book that illustrated poems he liked, which he then hand bound and mailed to 4AD unpretentiously. Luckily, with this attitude and the knowledge of Mac computers during a time when 4AD was still doing everything by hand, Tim landed his dream job designing music packaging in London. Working in the music industry was insane. For example, an artist would say “mittens, stars, whales,” refuse to answer the phone, and give no other direction to the design. This was fun but crazy, and after 5 years Tim left to settle down and have a real life.

Action shot.

Tim worked at MTV for a year (“art directing the photoshopping of Britney Spears arm” among other things), followed by a year at Razorfish, freelanced for 5 years (Tim’s favorite job), spent some time at New York Magazine, and then worked as Design Director at Johnson & Johnson for 4 years. During his time at J&J, Tim heard of 160over90 and instantly loved their work. He sent a book to the office out of the blue of compiled work that he really liked, not just projects that were deemed important to have in a portfolio but “projects that reflect me.” Tim visited the office multiple times and as soon as there was an opening he joined as a Creative Director in February 2011.

Tim's gift to Tyler--a copy of his book!

During his career, Tim realized that “the mouse in between me and the screen is too many layers. Something is getting lost in translation.” He wanted to celebrate the work that went into design, the sketches behind the scenes. There are beautiful ideas on websites but with no context, they seem to be plucked out of the sky. Tim called it the “rabbit hole of The Dieline.” He wanted to explore the background and progress of these ideas, and so wrote a book featuring sketches of notable graphic designers. Check it out here.

At this point in the lecture, Tim guided the audience through RIT’s case study, detailing 160′s creative process from the brand concept to the executed ads. During Q&A one student raised her hand and said, “you just walked through about 10-15 minutes of work for RIT, and I wasn’t bored once. How did you do it?” Answer: MAGIC. But really, Kay and I will have get back to you at the end of our internships. That’s what we’re here to find out.

The 160over90 design interns.

Love, Atlee (left) and Kay (right)

All we had to do was capture the essence of this insanely awesome experience, which resulted in the work you can view here.

At the risk of humble bragging here (or is it old fashioned bragging?), this was the easily the greatest day of work any of us had ever had. The kicker? Our hotel was the site of the third most famous event in human history, the place where Grape Stomp Lady punctured her esophagus:

Unable to resist, our crew of highly trained thespians created the following re-enactment:

Once we arrived at the track, we got much, much, more serious about approaching these finely tuned, hand-built German marvels of engineering. Our automotive muse for this excursion could only be one person.

Compare!

Steve McQueen: A ruggedly handsome, danger-tempting iconoclast who was irresistible to women and a swashbuckling bon vivant that men aspired to be.

Contrast!

Justin LaFontaine: Everything McQueen is, but with a better understanding of kerning.

Our squad of Justin and (from left to right) Kyle Arango, Corey Levin, myself, and Megan Pomplas were ready. Well, most of us were ready; Kyle was equally intent on making his Facebook friends jealous of his jet-setting lifestyle.

Our fleet of vehicles:




Oh wait, that last one is the shitbox that I drive every day.

After a few minutes of instruction, some quality pastries and strong coffee, we hit the road. Kyle and I were partnered up, and we got behind the wheel of the SLS AMG, the gullwinged super car that costs upwards of $200K and has 563 horses sitting under its meticulously sculpted hood. Kyle and I had not been this excited since Bacon Salt was invented. What followed was inspiration for a headline.

Anatomy of a Headline:
Now, we thought we had an understanding of what these cars were, and what driving fast was like, but then you step behind the wheel and are instructed to hit the gas as hard as you can. Within nanoseconds, your heart gets pinned to the back of the leather bucket seat, your head kicks back from the G Forces, and an uncontrollable smile hits your face and laughter takes over. In fact, here’s a ghetto video I took of Kyle’s first run with the SLS (I get too excited and curse in it, so beware):

The resulting headline and spread:

There’s a whole lot of work over at our main site that I’d encourage you to check out. It aims to capture the essence of fun and excitement from the event, where normal folks get to channel their inner Steve McQueen and become as giddy as children on a sugar rush. We hope you enjoy it, cause we sure had a blast making it.

And we can’t thank the people at Mercedes enough for the experience. They were generous and unbelievably accommodating during the trip, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with through our relationship. And with clients like that, you always go the extra mile (per hour?) for them.

Last week I was honored to be a reviewer for AIGA Philly’s 13th Annual Feedback student portfolio review. For fifteen minutes each, I met with eight graduating seniors who looked very promising for the design industry. A few had the beginnings of a great portfolio, and the rest still needed a little more tweaking to strengthen their body of work. Understandably, the past month has probably felt like an infinitely accelerating train where the last stop was AIGA’s Feedback. The printing, the cutting, the gluing and repeating have probably taken a toll on these emerging designers. Trust me, we’ve all been there, but it only gets better.

After the review I spoke with fellow reviewers, and I was able to collect their feedback to the graduating seniors which I’d like to share with you. Take it or leave it, it might help you land your first big job. (FYI, 160over90 is still hiring.)

_______________________________________________________________________________

1. Don’t forget to present your portfolio as a narrative. Tell your story through your work, and guide the viewer in an interesting and engaging way.

2. Vary up the pacing of the portfolio. Instead of presenting five websites in a row, throw in a printed piece in between to show variation and diversity.

3. Try not to include projects that were type exercises. They’re exercises for a reason: To help with bigger and better projects worth presenting. We’ve all done type exercises but they don’t belong in a portfolio. Which brings me to the next tip.

4. Curate your portfolio to a limited number of pieces. Instead of presenting 20 pieces, limit yourself to your strongest 10-12 pieces. You can always show the rest on your personal portfolio site.

5. Pay attention to how you visually present your work. Try not to shoot your book covers or packaging projects on your wrinkled bedsheets. It can be distracting. You can always take it outside and use natural lighting if you have to instead of the harsh flash that most digital slr cameras have.

6. If you have a portfolio book, try to keep it to one project per spread. When looking at two different projects on a single spread, it becomes difficult to focus on one piece.

And the last tip for you:

7. Don’t save your strongest piece for the ‘grand finale.’ In an interview, you may not have enough time to show your entire book. Bring them up to the front where you can spend the right amount of time explaining the concept, the process, and the final product.

_______________________________________________________________________________

These are just a few tips that I gathered from my experience at Feedback Thirteen. Again, take it or leave it. It’s ultimately up to you on how you want to present yourself and your work. To all the graduating design students, congratulations and good luck!

Special thanks to Dave Copestakes and Gigi  McGee and the rest of the AIGA Education committee for organizing this great event!

Content (and Mobile) First

For years A List Apart has championed the idea that users, content, and standards are the basis upon which web design should be built, and in his talk opening the conference Jeffrey Zeldman continued to reinforce this core ideal. However, he also made the following statement:

RIGHT NOW is the best time in more than a decade to create websites and applications.

That’s a strong statement, but you can certainly feel renewed energy in web design after a period of stagnation. Part of that is due to browser makers adopting advancements in html and css more rapidly, but in my opinion the largest factor has been the disruptive emergence of mobile browsing. In his talk “Mobile Web Moves”, Luke Wroblewski put up some key statistics, and the one that caught my eye was this one:

Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013

What does this have to do with the central idea of content? The emergence of mobile usage is interesting from a technology standpoint, but Luke Wroblewski also cast it as an opportunity to re-focus on the content side. To paraphrase him quite liberally: we’ve increased scrutiny on content that we provide to our mobile users, but why should it stop there? Shouldn’t this be an opportunity to cut the fat from our “desktop” sites as well? Wroblewski has given several talks proposing that writers, designers, and developers should think “mobile first”, and layer enhancements on top of that for devices (mobile or desktop) that have better capabilities. This stands in stark contrast to the more common practice of taking the desktop experience, slashing out non-essential pieces, and serving up what’s left as the mobile version.

Responsive Design

Ethan Marcotte delivered a talk titled “The Responsive Web Designer’s Workflow”. Responsive web design has been one of the hottest (and controversial) trends over the past year (Media Queries has an ongoing collection of notable examples), and it was refreshing to see Marcotte dive into the topic. He started with the philosophical basis, covered the tools/techniques he uses, and finally presented a case study: the Boston Globe, redesigned as a responsive site. The redesign is expected to be unveiled this summer.

Responsive web sites catch attention for visual reasons – it’s easy to get excited by how the design changes depending on the user’s browsing context, from mobile phones to tablets to widescreen desktop monitors. Focusing on layout, however, ignores the whole reason behind responsive design: to present content to users in a visual context that scales with their device’s capabilities. Marcotte and Wroblewski are essentially saying the same thing: start with good content, and then figure out the best way to present that content to your user given what you know about their viewing context. In this way the user on a mobile device isn’t getting a patchwork, dumbed-down subset of content, but instead the full content with a visual treatment appropriate to their context.

In the middle of his presentation Marcotte put up a quote from Jason Santa Maria:

The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.

Santa Maria was referring to applications (Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks), but Marcotte used the quote to draw out a larger issue with traditional production workflows. To illustrate this showed two slides. The first illustrated a more traditional, linear approach to creating a site:

Slide courtesy of Ethan Marcotte

He then followed that slide with one depicting how the workflow for responsive sites follows a more organic, iterative model.

Slide courtesy of Ethan Marcotte

This is a process that acknowledges the rendering differences across devices, and allows the designers and developers the leeway to adjust to what they see in actual testing and usage. It’s something that I hope can make its way into the process here at 160over90.

There is No Page

One of my favorite talks came from Mark Boulton, the designer and author/publisher behind Five Simple Steps. He began his talk “Outing the Mind: Designing Layouts That Think for You” with an overview of typographic grid design through history, and then launched into the back half of his presentation by saying that the web has flipped everything on its head. Where previously designers worked from the page in, Boulton now urged them to work from the content out. He called this “Designing for the Mess”, which in my opinion elegantly captures the tension between the web’s wide-open, multi-linked nature and the desire to enforce some form of visual coherence. In practice this means taking the core elements of your content and using those as a basis for your grid system, as opposed to designing a grid and then forcing your content into that structure.

Here Come the Tools

I’ve been playing around with jQuery and CSS3 animations more and more in the last couple of years, but one thing I’ve always wished for is a solid tool for visualizing these animations. Whatever you think about the Flash format, it has a relatively intuitive timeline-based authoring tool. Why is there no counterpart for creating CSS3 animations? Well, at AEA Andy Clarke showed off Animatable, which is an entirely browser-based tool for building complex CSS3 animations. I’d seen a movie demo of Animatable prior to AEA, but as Clarke walked through a live demo based on the CSS3 Madmanimation piece my head was spinning with the possibilities.

Opening (responsive) screen for Madmanimation

I was glad to see that Clarke was quick to steer the discussion away from the typical knee-jerk “this is the end of Flash” sentiment. I think Flash will continue to be used in contexts where its strengths are best put to use, and at the same time CSS3 animations will continue to give designers alternative options where they previously had none. I can’t wait to try out Animatable and see where it fits into our ever-expanding toolbox.

Do it Yourself

The final day, dubbed “A Day Apart”, was split into two. In the first half Jeremy Keith walked through the new HTML5 elements available to designers, and highlighted the ways in which those could be used right now. In the second half Ethan Marcotte (him again!) focused on CSS3, and the options for web fonts, transformations, and animations. Ending the conference with a practical workshop day was a good idea – it reinforced the previous two days with techniques for immediate use.

I emerged from the conference inspired but focused. I haven’t highlighted the other presentations from the conference, but I found all of them to be worth my while. What could be done better? I hope that the conference organizers are thinking about capturing and distributing the presentations on video (much like the TED conference makes some of their talks available). There’s thousands of web designers who could be inspired by these talks, and it would be a shame if they didn’t have access outside of actually attending the conference. I’m not arguing that access should be free, just that there’s a broader community out there that needs to hear these ideas.

On a final note, I was struck by how generous the speakers were with their time during the breaks between sessions. In my opinion that’s always been a hallmark of the web design community at large, but it was extremely encouraging to see the passion the speakers brought to sharing knowledge and building community away from the podium. That’s arguably more important than any idea or technique they could have shared up on stage.

Come check out our lecture next Wednesday, March 9th at the Kanbar Performance Space at Philadelphia University.  We’ll be answering questions that have puzzled human kind for centuries. And if we don’t have the answers to said questions we’ll show a bunch of work and speak to how we make it. Also, we’ll have a limited number of screen printed posters (pictured above) that you can take home with you. See you there.

Travel junkies have mountaintop temples in Nepal.

Elvis impersonators have Graceland.

Comic book nerds — as well as a lucky few from 160over90 — have Comic Con.

Comic Con, a mecca for anyone who’s ever picked up a comic book, figurine, or video game console, attracts tens of thousands of fans and fanatics every year. Naturally, with the influx of zombies and monsters and vampires in the media these days, a few of us from 160over90 attended the conference in the name of (ahem) research.

Our time at New York’s Javitz Center (filled to the brim with the curious hordes) was a remarkably analog-meets-digital experience: one that simultaneously honored where comic books have been, and where they’re going. On the one hand, there are the old school comic books set up on tables covered in vintage superman sheets, sketching artists with their portfolios on display, and the dueling monstrosities: Marvel vs. DC Comics. On the other hand, there’s the audio-visual overload: Michael Jackson-themed video games, multi-player garage band competitions, lectures on gaming techniques, a fake bog where you can perform a black light search for a lost yeti, a seven-foot tall transformer who stalks his way across the convention floor.

Among other things, comic books have taught us that sometimes pictures get the job done when words aren’t necessary. So rather than listening to us ramble on, check out our photos instead. (courtesy of Justin “Aqualad” LaFontaine)

THE OLD SCHOOL:

THE NEW SCHOOL:

All good things must come to an end:

Are you a creative, media savvy, advertising genius who loves competition? Do you enjoy high socks, shin guards, sweat and soccer balls?

If your answer is “yes”, then 160over90 wants your team to compete in the Agency World Cup!

Advertising, branding, design, media and interactive agencies in the Philadelphia area are invited for a soccer showdown on Thursday, August 5 from 3pm-5pm for the Agency World Cup.

The teams will be co-ed and consist of 5 v 5 plus goal keepers.  Each game will last 20 minutes. There will be a minimum of a three game qualification stage, followed by a knockout/bracket stage. Teams will be scored three points for a win, one point for a draw.

The Agency World Cup will take place in Philadelphia and the exact field location will be determined based on the number of participating teams.

This competition will separate the creatives from the athletes so leave your projects at the office and bring your A-games to the field!

Please RSVP by Thursday, July 22

Michelle Prescott

AgencyCup@160over90.com

Hey, remember that movie Space Camp, where the kids get accidentally launched into space? Well, I came close to that cinematic glory on my recent vacation to Florida, when I went to (watch) the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch in Cape Canaveral.

It was the perfect experience for an ex-Space Camp Nerd-turned-writer, and a sad send-off to the space program. Needless to say, it was an incredible day. The viewing area was set up about 6 miles away from the Cape Canaveral launch site at the Kennedy Space Center, so we entertained ourselves with Astronaut Ice Cream, flight simulators and IMAX movies about the Hubble Telescope while we waited for the countdown. There was also a “Rocket Park” filled with to-scale models of nearly all the aircrafts throughout NASA’s history, including a replica of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, as well as one of the Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, that sent Alan Shepard to space in a compartment about the size of a bathtub. (FACT: did you know the outside of the space shuttle is made out of silica tile that can be safely handled at nearly 2000 degrees Farenheit, only ten seconds after removal from a high temperature oven?)

The launch itself was really impressive, and the day was so clear that we not only got a great view of the shuttle as it went up, but also got a glimpse of the external fuel tank as it fell off the shuttle, and the after-burners diminishing into space. It was pretty cool to be able to simultaneously watch the flight video on a large flat screen, hear expert commentary, and watch the actual shuttle taking flight. NASA has obviously created many checks, balances, and procedures that go into such a large, complex, and carefully choreographed production. Enjoy some of my own photos of the venue and the launch below. (The shuttle photos were taken with a telephoto lens–click on them to get a larger resolution.) Or for some really breathtaking ones of liftoff, check out this photo gallery.

I have to say, even as I get older, space exploration (like dinosaurs and costume parties) really doesn’t get any less mind-blowingly awesome.

The Launch:

This screen showed the different steps to Countdown, and then video feed of the launch:

it’s like Woodstock for aerospace afficionados:

Zoomed out photo of the stream of smoke:

The Venue:

“Astronauts” attached the roof of the Kennedy Space Center:

The Rocket Park:

To give you a sense of the size of these rocket boosters: