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Silhouette Icons for Effect

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I see a lot of designs lately that use stylized silhouette icons for social media or some kind of site iconography. Before I get started, take a look at this demo page to get an idea of the end goal. Read Full Post

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Content Strategy – Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of Omission

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Organizations typically want to say a lot about themselves in their owned spaces online – every little detail of who they are and what they do. This often manifests itself as pages, and graphics, and charts and entire SECTIONS full of very long, highly irrelevant copy that few if any people ever read or act upon.

This is a common occurrence during the content strategy and development phases of the projects on which we work. And it’s about this time, during every project, that I like to talk to our partners about Hemingway.

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Mobile App/Game Development with Corona SDK

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By far the most talked about technology right now is mobile.  According to recent reports by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of American adults now own a smartphone. We’ve blogged before about creating sites with jQuery Mobile and the recent trend toward responsive design, but what about native games and apps? Read Full Post

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Dissecting the Creative Brief

Dissecting the Creative Brief

The birthplace of any and every successful design — no matter the media — begins at a single place: The brief. At its core the creative brief gives designers a foundation from which to think freely and to explore any number of directions to meet the primary objective. The brief is a functioning document that the design process should be measured against at every checkpoint. It should always communicate clearly by using conversational tones and provoke thought at all levels of the design process. To say it’s a design roadmap is understating its value. It’s a bible. Read Full Post

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Good Bureaucracy

Cut through the red tape

Management Tips for Boutique Agencies
We recently concluded our annual team Visceral Summit in San Diego and came away with a renewed fervor for our line of work, and or the development of our small growing agency.

It’s no easy task to build a company and culture, to learn how to balance office expenses and HR tasks with client service, strategic and creative thinking, and to continue to stay apace with skillsets. We’re gluttons for punishment, but it still can at times feel like an endless slog. It doesn’t have to.

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Custom Theming for jQuery Mobile

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jQuery Mobile is an awesome framework for developing mobile websites with common touchable interfaces. All it takes is some proper markup and importing a few JS and CSS files to display your website in a mobile-friendly way. Let's explore how to get a basic page set up and create our own custom theme for the framework. Read Full Post

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Responsive Web Design Book Review

Responsive Web Design Book

Every once in a while a book comes along that changes how we think about designing and building websites. Nearly a decade ago that book was "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffrey Zeldman. It taught us to shun table-based layouts and push ahead with semantic markup, to embrace standards and shun hacks.

Today I think that book is "Responsive Web Design" by Ethan Marcotte. Read Full Post

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Brand Evolution – Visceral’s new Logo

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Brand Fog

Visceral, like many companies, started out small – with great velocity and grandiose visions of success.

We didn’t quite know who we were, but we shared a sense of youthful exuberance that was tied to the excitement of leaving our former jobs and going out on our own. Our visual logo and brand identity were therefore aligned well with the mood of the time – we were a company borne of a vision to provide objective and fearless counsel on our own terms. Read Full Post

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Drupal 7 Module Development: Book Review

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Drupal has gained a lot of steam over the past few years, and with the recent release of version 7, it continues to climb the ranks of most-used Content Management Systems on the web. Drupal is powerful, secure, and customizable, but it’s also got a relatively steep learning curve. Fortunately, Drupal has a very impressive community of developers, and if you’re anything like me, you visit the Drupal.org forums constantly during development. I have been through several lackluster technical books on Drupal development over the years, but always found the online community to be the best source of information. It’s safe to say that the best documentation for Drupal has always existed online, but now there is finally an offline resource for serious developers.

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