Insights

Last week the Hornall Anderson Interactive team (the team I'm on) spent the majority of a workday in a conference room learning about our work and communication styles.

For future reference, I'm listing some of the strengths and weaknesses from the session that to varying degree, describe me. Hopefully in the future I can look back on this post and see where I've grown, and what I still need to work on.

Strengths

• Self Reliant


• Commitment to his work


• Usually weighs up all relevant factors before reaching decisions


• Thorough and painstacking


• Values truth and high ideals

Weaknesses

• May be slow or unwilling to express his true feelings


• May worry unduly–prone to pessimism


• Constantly finding faults


• Can appear indecisive


• Can look for flaws and errors in almost everything


• Occasionally becomes to focused, risking "tunnel vision"

Just Start Typing

When I was first hired on as a designer for the then named, Hornall Anderson Design Works, the first thing I really wanted to do was redo the old website. It was tired and dated in that it did not at all represent what the interactive team has become over the past couple of years, in terms if aesthetics, user experience, technologically, nor did it meet the very necessary requirement of easy update-ability for a design firm as large as us (100+ people now!). It also did a poor job of representing the most well-known segment of our business, identity development.

A little more than 6 months ago, with those challenges in mind, we set out to provide ourselves a framework to show off the integrated branding firm—print, interactive, strategy—that Hornall Anderson is today. We finally launched the site a few days ago, and I think we achieved our goals. There's plenty of room for it to grow, as the company continues to grow in size and capability. So check it out and tell me what you think. When you get there, just start typing!

Busy Weekend

Last Friday we had our annual holiday party. They created a casino setting for everyone to gamble for playchips, which at the end of the night you used to purchase raffle tickets for prizes. Free booze and "high rolling" make for a very fun time.






Saturday night we celebrated Adrien's birthday. We had dinner at Oceanaire, which quite honestly wasn't that great. But we finished strong at Typhoon for drinks and to party!




Congratulations to Chris and Marissa on their engagement! It's about time!!!



On Sunday Austin and Jennifer from Dime came through the shop to shoot some shots for the magazine. Look out for the issue in February; Bruce and I might be in it!



p.s. I think I need a flash for my camera.

Going Out

I tend to be a homebody on days off, but for some reason this weekend I felt compelled to go out and actually be social (a little). Maybe it's all the hours I've been putting in at the store and at the office...

Friday night after a good meeting at the shop, Adrien and I met up with Kevin and Jonathan at Umi to have dinner and catch up.



  



Saturday night, Tara and I went over to Corey and Lauren's house for Corey's birthday. They've got quite the set up of instruments and amazingly, practically everyone in the interactive team at Hornall Anderson knew how to play something (except me). I can not believe how many musicians I work with! Not only can they design and develop your website, they can do the soundtrack too...

Corey plays with Matt, another one of my coworkers, in a band called The Fading Collection. Go see them if you get a chance.

Tommy Bahama

Tommy Bahama's online shopping site, a project that I worked on over the Summer, recently launched. There are still some layout bugs, but all in all I think it turned out pretty well. The product photography turned out great. The lighting (highlights and shadows) really makes each shirt dimensional and it just feels on brand.

Our primary responsiblity was translating Tommy Bahama's brand into an online shopping experience, while another firm did most of the development. My role was as a lead designer/art director.

Bizzy

Things have been pretty busy for me the past month or so. It feels like I'm in meetings every other hour during the week, which makes it difficulty for me to get anything done. I pretty much need an hour just to get started. Rather than actually being able to sit down and DO work, I sit down and TALK about doing work for one project, and then talk about doing work for another project. Today however, was an exception since I had no meetings. I wonder if it had anything to do with my today being my birthday, or if it was just a coincidence.

We're (mostly Drew) also still busy photographing all of the work we're going to launch the new Hornall Anderson sight with. Shooting work for 40+ projects has been quite a challenge, but I learned a lot from this experience, especially why photographers have so many assistants.

Hornall Anderson Dot Com

I almost can't believe it's finally happening. After tons of behind the scenes work, clearing schedules and removing red tape, the new Hornall Anderson site design is done, and we are now in the midst of production and development. Stay tuned till October...

Runway Mondays

A group of us at work (men and women) who are little more into fashion than the average person, decided to start dressing up every other Monday. We see it as a way of making things a little more interesting around the office and starting the work week off on a good note. The results have been great as everyone involved has "dressed up" their individual styles, and we've found that even more people would like to participate.

Personally I've been inspired by what I've seen on sites like Pike/Pine, Hel Looks and The Sartorialist. If there are sites that you know of that are in a similar vain (not fashion magazines), please let me know!

Hot in the House

We launched part of a minisite for T-Mobile showing off their new Hot Spot @ Home capabilities, which I must say, is pretty damn cool. Every wireless carrier should offer it's customers something like this. I didn't work on this project myself, but I wanted to point it out because I thought Drew, Matt, Halli and Rachel did a very nice good job of explaining just what T-Mobile's new service is.

One More Chance

We ended up getting our asses kicked 8-13, but the game was only to determine our seeding going into the playoffs since there was a fourway tie for first place. This isn't exactly the best time—heading into the playoffs—to be slumping on defense, but hopefully it was just "one of those games" and it's out of our system.

The Second Season

Last week the Hornall Anderson Swingers finished off the regular season with an 8-3 victory, bringing our record to 5-2, which ties us with three other teams for first place. Tonight the playoffs begin and we plan on going deep (literally and figuratively)!

50%

So far I've been able to ride on 4 out of a possible 8 days of bicycle commuting, which is sort of pathetic, but I anticipate being able to ride more frequently in the coming days. So far I've logged 42 miles (14 miles round trip to work), burning an estimated 1400 calories, saving myself $23.60 in driving costs (calculated using the AAA estimate of 56.2cents/mile). Gone are the days of being able to ride a "century" in a day, but hopefully this summer I'll get myself back into a condition that's close.