DigitalDay’s Winter Site Refresh is Live, along with Silly Holiday Video

Arriving home from a great meeting in Chicago this evening, I popped on the DigitalDay web site to and saw that the DigitalDay Winter Refresh was live. This was a great group effort by everyone in the agency, with this iteration of our site’s design led by Ganbold.

In addition to the seasonal face lift to this one-page site, we updated our client list, added new portfolio pieces, posted new job openings (YES, We’re HIRING!!!) and interjected the personalties of the DigitalDay teammates.

The fun part to this refresh was the creation of the “12 Days of Email” video, embedded on our site which is part of our online Holiday Greeting Card. If you’re not on our mailing list, visit DigitalDay to opt in to our e-mail list.

And now, through the wonders of YouTube, here’s DigitalDay’s “12 Days of Email”:

The Trajan Horse

Quick, beside that cool announcer guys voice, what do you think of when I say movie trailers and posters?

It turns out you should think of Trajan as well. In what can only be described as a typographical travesty, the ever popular Trajan font is used, almost overwhelmingly to promote and represent modern movies. This observation is the sole inspiration for a whole blog, and a humorous video.

Named after a Roman emperor, Trajan is not a poorly formed or simply ugly font (others aren’t so lucky), but it has become so clichéd and overused that it represents laziness on the part of both designers and the marketing community that supports them. Surely there are other interesting typefaces out there, many of whom have more character and unique features. Think of the films of yesterday, especially their titles. Hand-created type was the norm, and creativity ran rampant (see Hitchcock films, or old Bond films especially). Yes, it’s nice to have a semibold font with big pronounced serifs, but I think we can all do better.

Crest SpinBrush Holiday Ecard for American Greetings

In a great display of superb customer service, the DigitalDay Creative team developed and delivered an online advergame for American Greetings and Crest Spin Brushes.

I’m not sure how long the site will be live, but it’s live now on AG.com.

Just in case it goes away, here are some screen captures for posterity.

Game Start Page:

Instructions Page:

Game Play (fill four stockings):

Final Marketing Message:

Sherwin-Williams Industrial & Marine Site Design Still Holds Up

I was looking for some B-to-B samples to send to a prospective client and remembered the Sherwin-Williams Industrial & Marine Website we designed in 2004:

While SW is no longer a client, it’s nice to see this site still is live and that the design still holds up.

One of the most interesting pieces of this project was the design and development of the Coatings System Wizard, a custom, online tool we created to help Industrial Painting Contractors determine the proper “Coating System” (primer and paint) for the right substrate (surface).

Here’s the Wizard interface:

And here’s the Coating System results with MSDS and Data Sheets:

2007: The Year of the CPG?

An Ad Age piece from yesterday trumpets very good news for our market. Ad Age and ComScore report that packaged goods had quite a year in 2007 with traffic to industry websites growing twice as fast as the U.S. internet population.

What does this mean? For one – CPG has finally caught up with the big dogs of digital marketing. Packaged goods advertising has long been considered lagging in the digital age. According to Ad Age, ComScore attributes most of the surge to searching AND online display advertising (like banner ads on high-traffic sites). Ad Age says:

Unique visitors to package-goods brand websites soared 10% compared with a year ago in the third quarter to 66.4 million, according to data shared exclusively with Ad Age by ComScore.

The tally is double the 5% rise in the U.S. internet users to 181.9 million. Much of the growth comes from food marketers, who occupied all 10 of the top spots in ComScore’s third-quarter industry scorecard.

Less important – but plenty interesting – is this hypothesis: The new influx of grocery store staples finally finding their way online will come with a heaping helping of controversy where children’s marketing is concerned. With television ads for kid-geared products becoming more and more scrutinized by the FCC and watchdog organizations, many advertisers are finding that pitching to kids online has plenty of benefits – and they’re seeing results.

The Dot.com Bubble… 2.0?

I came across this video yesterday during my daily check of Digg. It’s about the speculation of a Web 2.0 bubble and it’s to the tune of Billy Joel’s, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

The video even asked me to blog the song… how could I deny that?

HTML 5 – A Glimpse Into the Future

On A List Apart, there’s a great write up of HTML 5, a new standard for the programming language that makes up the framework of each and every website out there.

For many of us working with websites, HTML 4 is essentially all we’ve ever known. It’s been around for 10 years, and is basically second nature to programmers, web designers, and front end developers everywhere. Nobody likes learning new versions, but HTML 5 offers a lot of exciting new elements and properties.

Among the new elements are things like <header>,<nav>,<article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer>.

Anybody coding HTML/XHTML pages today will look at these and smile; the amount of time spent on every page setting up divs for these elements, which are found in almost every web page. In a semantic sense, being able to specify an area as a header, or a menu will help further identify content from extraneous, but still necessary page content.

There are smaller changes as well, such as the <b> tag coming back into favor, not to bold text visually, but to serve complementary to <strong>. The new <b> can be used to identify text that is called out visually, but deserves no true semantic differentiation, a la <strong>.

A more expanded list of additions and changes is located at the W3C site. The specifications are not final yet, but it’s fun to look at what’s planned.

It’s an exciting time to be in web development, and we’re glad to be along for the ride.