Our work for the CSPI has led to a branding effort that tries to get to the essence of what that organization is about – identifying the characteristics that charter schools must have to be successful. We're calling it "The Essential Elements of Quality" and using a periodic table design as we help the client produce a four-part series of academic publications, events, and online resources.

Check Out the Flash Banner.

Here's an example of bringing video into Flash 8 – apologies if you do not have the Flash 8 Plug-in yet. This example is on the site we did for the Charter School Policy Institute. There are many different ways to play video on the web, this is one that lets us bring video into the same space as other content delivered in Flash.

The numbers on the Nike soccer 'commercial' on YouTube.com keep going up – 3,605,707 views as of this post. So this is basically a commercial – see Nike logo in background pan – that they shot for very little and bought no media on but still get a massive audience because it's great content and it's flourishing within an online community.

You hear people talk about 'viral' and 'community' from the commercial end all the time and most of the time it's not worth listening to because they are talking about it before the fact not after. What does that mean? It means that you cannot manufacture viral spread or a healthy community under your control – they develop under the collective input and pressure of users. What can you do? You can create the best possible content or tools and put it out there – sink or swim.

"What if they're not on the Internet? What if some people have dial up?"

From Pew Internet & American Lfe Project report Internet Evolution: Internet Penetration and Impact by Mary Madden published on their site today:

"...our latest survey, fielded February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey. And the share of Americans who have broadband connections at home has now reached 42% (about 84 million), up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005."

Worth noting in the above is the "at home" reference to broadband usage. If you are business to business or targeting your customers at the office, broadband usage should be much higher. The report also found the following in terms of percentage of people who are in online within different age groups:
87% of 12-17 year-olds are online
88% of 18-29 year-olds are online
84% of 30-49 year-olds are online
71% of 50-64 year-olds are online
32% of those age 65 are online

The Flash site we created with ad agency Taylor West for their own promotion won Gold at the San Antonio Addys and will now, I think, go onto the regionals.

1.) You make sufficent plans for Search Engine Optimization.
2.) Your client is not going to want to update that often or your client has you build an xml updating tool. That way the client can just type into a CMS tool and the Flash site is updated right away.(We just finished a Flash php/xml tool for an agency here in Austin but the site is not live yet. I'll put a link when it is).
3.) You're actually designing for Flash. This is a completely different thing than designing an html page.

About a third of our work over the last year has been blog-based but I'm not going to try to define "what a blog is." If you think you know what a blog is you probably think it is "an online journal of personal thoughts and events." That was how it all started but today that is just part of the picture as blogging platforms are being used in many different ways.

Is one of these sites a blog? http://www.charterschoolpolicy.org/ http://www.lifeslittleannoyances.com/ http://interpretationofmurder.com Hint: Look at the 'Tour & Reviews' section
The answer is that they all use a blogging platform in different ways. In another, more web application setting, we custmoized a blogging platform for the PGA event in San Antonio – The Valero Texas Open – to help their 1,400 volunteers manage and communicate among themselves. We've also used bloging platforms for internal communcations systems where multiple people need to easily contribute content. The point is that a "Blog" can take a lot of forms, all of which have one thing in common – ease of publishing and managing content online. We've done single author, high traffic blogs like the lifeslittleannoyances.com site and we're getting into bigger blog-based systems – I am working on a multi-author blog-based site with 25,000+ pages right now – so if you or a client are considering a project with a blog component and you're interested in help, feel free to send us a note.

You've probably heard of RSS in terms of an RSS reader and if you follow blogs you might use one or subscribe to a service like Bloglines. RSS is a way to output the content of a webpage so it is readable by RSS readers or by another website. The point is that a web page's content become portable because it can be pulled in and displayed anywhere by anything – web page, online application, mobile device – that can read RSS.
For ad agencies RSS presents a couple opportunities:
1.) You can make your content available in RSS so people are aware as soon as you update your site – this only works if you have content people are interested in. An example is the Life's Little Annoyances site we did for the publishing house Henry Holt and the New York Times Writer Ian Urbina. See the little orange button at the bottom left of the page? Click on it, I dare you. That's the site's most recent content as RSS and that feed generated a lot more interest than email updates did (our audience was tech savvy).

Our clients run the gamut from large corporations to artistic endeavors – books, films and galleries. The books and films are themsleves commercial but some gallery projects such as this exhibit in China for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts or this companion to a NYC gallery opening have little traditional commercial motivation behind them. So why should this work matter to our current corporate clients and to ones considering hiring us? Because creative thinking is valuable, powerful, and necessary to win.

VM Foundry has been awarded by Communication Arts and is featured in the Communication Arts 11th Interactive Annual for the Flash design and programming we did for Larry Martin's website. This is an honor for the designers and programmers here who worked on this cool website.