When companies want to beef up their brand identity they go to a design firm or ad agency for an image overhaul. When design firms want to breathe life into their images they go to ArcStone.

Target came to Sussner Design Co for help redefining their new commercial interiors division. Sussner created, among other things, a compelling new web site design that would serve as the basis for an interactive Flash experience.

Few Web Development Shops Possess Both the production skills & Design Sensibilities
Faced with a tight budget and even tighter time-line, Sussner invited ArcStone to provide Flash production work that would live up to the high standards Susssner’s clients expect. And Sussner Design Co. is well aware, not all Flash work is created equal. Few web development shops posses both the production skills and design sensibilities to work side by side with design firms developing Flash sites.

Beyond Looks
Truly effective Flash sites that wow visitors and create lasting brand impressions do more than just look good. Load times, image quality, typography, and navigation elements all factor into the overall user experience.

This is where ArcStone’s Flash production expertise comes into play. Each image used is optimized for Flash delivery and pre-loaded behind the scenes to insure smooth transitions.

We also leverage Flash’s excellent XML support and AS3 coding language to make much of the site dynamically loaded, making maintenance easy for the client and extremely cost effective.

ArcStone Has Developed A Keen Sense Of How To Blend Flash With HTML, PHP, ColdFusion
To Flash Or Not To Flash
Another key part of Flash production work is deciding which elements should be Flash based and which are better of presented another way.

After years of building Flash sites ArcStone has developed a keen sense of how to blend Flash with HTML, PHP, ColdFusion, and other tools, delivering a seamless user experience and the highest bang for our customers buck.

In Target’s case ArcStone found creative ways to integrate existing content, saving time, money, and preserving some of Target’s initial investment. The product search engine, for example, feels like a native part of the site even though it comes from a third party system.

Beauty & Brains
Although most sites could be built without the use of Flash there are many reasons designers and developers choose to leverage Flash’s unique capabilities. Flash is often the best choice for:

• Showcasing High-Quality Imagery
• Creating a Unique User Experience
• Melding Multiple Types of Media (Text, Images, Video, Audio)
• Telling a Compelling and Memorable Narrative

The marriage of great design and smart Flash coding make the new Target Commercial Interiors site an effective branding tool and a useful source of information for visitors.

Check out the new Target Commercial Interiors Site, learn more about Sussner Design and read our other Technology Translated Flash Blog Posts.

To learn more about how Flash can make your products look their best, leave a lasting impression on visitors, and differentiate you from your competitors, check out ArcStone’s web site.

Like store-brand cough syrup, VoIP (Voice Over IP) has left a bad taste in many peoples mouths. Expense, reliability, and complications have plagued many small business VoIP adoption. Although not often viewed as a complete VoIP system, the scrappy software based solution known as Skype can be an excellent free alternative for testing the VoIP waters, or even adopting as your business’s De facto VoIP solution.

You Can Call Your Clients From A Beach In The Bahamas and No One Is The Wiser

Voice Over What?
Simply put, VoIP is a way to make phone calls over your computer, mobile phone, or specialized desk phone’s Internet connection. With VoIP you don’t incur any costs from the phone company on a per minute basis or for long distance. Generally, if you make a lot of long distance calls a VoIP provider’s monthly fees will be less than what you would usually pay the phone company.

The biggest VoIP advantage is the ability to bring your phone, and number, anywhere you go. You can call your clients from a beach in the Bahamas and no one is the wiser.

Skip The VoIP Headaches With Skype
Because Skype is a software based solution there is no need to buy an expensive specialized phone to get started. Simply download Skype for your computer or supported hand-held device. Skype also works on hundreds of cell phone, including the iPhone (I use Fring), and is now coming pre-installed on many Nokia handsets.

Once installed signing up for an account and making calls is a snap. Calling from one Skype user to another (Skype-to-Skype) is always free, and has the added benefits of accessing all the other Skype features that go beyond simple voice communication. Calling from Skype to a normal phone requires a paid plan. Paid plans fall under a pay-as-you-go model or unlimited service. Unlimited US calling is less than three dollars a month.

Skype For You, Your Business, and More
Skype also offers free tools to help manage your companies Skype implementation. There are also a multitude of partners offering additional services, and a constantly expanding set of business centric tools that leverage the Skype communication network.

A few of the great things you can do with Skype beyond just making calls:

• IM (instant message), conference call, and send files
• Hold a web conference, share your screen, and collaborate on documents
• Video chat, screen cast, and send faxes
• Run a call center, run your help desk, and dial from SalesForce.com

Flattening The Communication Landscape

With Skype There Is No Large Upfront Investment And No Need To Dump Existing Infrastructure

Although the web 2.0 revolution (coupled with the explosive use of smart phones) has opened up many new avenues of communications, Skype stands out for many reasons. Skype has a multi-dimension / multi-media / multi-device approach to communication, and melds old-world networks with the latest cutting-edge trends. With Skype there is no large upfront investment, no need to dump existing infrastructure, and virtually limitless potential for creative applications of the Skype protocol.

If you have used Skype in the past let me know what your experience was like in the comments of this post.

Happy Skypeing!

Flashbelt 2009 is right around the corner. A truly exciting event where local flash designers and developers converge to see some amazing demo’s. A chance to learn what Adobe and flash masters are working on to push the boundaries and maximize the efficiencies of using flash in day-to-day work and play. The event is made up of both presentations and workshops and other events, and is appropriate for all experience levels.

Never been? Check out at least one presentation, you will undoubtedly go back for more. get yourself registered, space is limited.

Learn more about it and see who’s there this year.

Thanks to our friend Dave Schroeder at Pilotvibe, the founder and host

Last Saturday night was Earth Hour. Organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature in 2007, Earth Hour encourages people and businesses to turn off lights and non-essential electronics to raise awareness about climate change.

Since 2007 the Earth Hour movement has spread throughout the world to include over 1,000 cities including Minneapolis. Though – I have to say, in my humble opinion, the word didn’t really get out beyond the Wedge coop member, counter-culture types (guess where I shop).
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We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest makeover!

Southview Design came to us several years ago (through our friend Kristin Kowler at Genius to Go) in search of a clean, professional site that reflected the caliber of work which they were producing in landscapes. The new site not only improved their image, but made their team proud to share it. That was the site design “version 1″

Just yesterday we launched the all new Southview Design, while the previous site was plenty good they sought a more interactive and engaging user experience – and to continue to their already strong search engine presence. The new site features a striking new look, continually updated project slideshow on the home page, and intuitive navigation scheme. The project gallery allows visitors to explore by image – or quickly filter the list of landscaping projects by Service or by Price.

With this new site Kristin has again provided powerful and effective search engine friendly content, which will continue to build upon the already strong search engine presence Southview Design enjoys. Coupled with the ultra-clean site code and site optimization techniques employed in this go-around we wish them much happiness and success with the new site.

And just in time for Spring!

I’ve been putting some thought lately into the best way to render shadows in AS3. The built-in DropShadowFilter is perfect for most situations – particularly headlines and simple movie clips – but it lacked perspective control, at least for what I was envisioning…

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We recently completed an ‘Interactive Roof Designer’ Flash piece for Trimline Building Products. The objective was to create an area where prospective clients could customize the look of a house, and apply different colors from Trimline’s Distinction Tile and Distinction Slate composite roofing product lines. The final piece allowed for some interesting looking houses – here’s a break down of the process for each step…

1. CHOOSE HOME STYLE
3 photos were selected to represent different house styles. The idea at this point was to focus on the overall structure of the house – as the material, color and roof product would be customized in the following steps. ArcStone’s Nick Longtin created line drawings of each house. He did it all with his left hand while sipping a delicate blend of herbs and spices with his right.

2. SELECT MATERIAL & COLOR
This stage allows you to select a building material – brick, stucco or siding – and customize the overall color. Using ActionScript’s BitmapData, a custom ColorSelector class was written to avoid using a simple color picker with a limited palette. This allowed use of the full spectrum and a color intensity slider (saturation).

Surprisingly, the bulk of the work at this stage wasn’t the ColorSelector or Flash development – it was the laborious job of masking out the exposed building on all 3 house photos and applying brick, stucco and siding textures to to each house with perspective and shadows in mind. The textures where then desaturated to a medium gray and applied to each house in Flash as a MovieClip, set to BlendMode.OVERLAY. When the ColorSelector dispatches a CHANGE event – the new color gets applied to the selected texture movieclip (via ColorTransform manipulations).

3. DESIGN YOUR ROOF
The final step – applying different roof products – was achieved through the same techniques as step 2, but the tint color overlay was limited to the colors of the individual composite roofing products.

The final product allows visitors to visualize their dream roof in real-time, right in the browser, and without downloading any software. Other similar systems from Timeline’s competitors often rely on server side image manipulation that is slow, requires page refreshing, and just isn’t very interactive.

Flash is a great technology for visualizing products, and incredibly effective at drawing customers into site content by offering engaging interactive elements. If you’re interested in bringing a product or service to life on the web please contact us. We would be happy to discuss the wonderful options Flash and other technologies offer.

The numbers are in. I’ve thought about this thoroughly and in keeping with ArcStone’s nerdy roots, created an algorithm.  I added up productivity gains subtracted employee gripes and moans and then divided by hours logged.

(Gains – Gripes) / Hours = X

The clear winner for best technology investment in 2008?

Our switch to Google Apps for our company email, calendar and documentation platform.

Google Apps has five elements that you need to know about…

1. User Management – to secure access and set permissions for your team.
2. Email – in this case Gmail, which is Google’s fantastic web mail service.  Users can also use mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird if they wish.
3. Calendar – An online personal calendar which may be shared with your colleagues.
4. Sites - An easy to edit wiki system.  Need a quick wiki to organize a project, or documentation?  It literally takes a non-technical user 5 minutes to create a new site and start adding content.  You can then restrict content to certain users or publish to the web at large.
5. Docs – an online productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and data collection application.   These have become very important tools in the tool box for us at ArcStone.  We use Docs for tracking basic spreadsheet information centrally like employee phone extensions and incoming leads, to collaborating on our 2009 business plan.  Google Docs also includes a slick form generation tool, enabling non-technical users to easily create online forms for surveys and similar data collection projects.  Google is clearly targeting Microsoft Office users, but I have to confess Google Docs still has a ways to go before replacing Office – don’t plan on using it exclusively.

And how much $$ for all these goodies?  If you have fewer than one hundred employees, the price is truly right. You pay them $0.  All it took for us was a DNS update so that Gmail started getting our our email and then some configuration / internal communication / training to make the transition.

Before you ask, no I’m not working for Google.  I just want to share something that’s working well for us.

If you’re an ArcStone client and you’re interested in making the transition to Google Apps, drop me a line.  If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to schedule a group Webinar demonstrating how we use Google Apps and help you decide whether or not to make the move.

For those that weren’t aware of my latest adventure, here’s a recap
Not technology related – but interesting nonetheless….

With the recent arctic air passing through, my buddy and I had a brilliant (well, crazy) idea…. We wanted to experience what 45 degrees below zero felt like. After a regular day at work, we somewhat spontaneously made the 4 hour drive up towards Embarrass, MN, where the lowest temperatures in Minnesota are typically recorded.

The conditions were just right for extreme low temps in that area – high pressure a little bit North West (pushing cold air from the North down), and very clear, calm nights.

We rose at about 6 am, bundled up, and walked around with a wired thermometer for a little over an hour…

Cold like that feels quite a bit different than 10 below and windy in the cities. That windchill feels like its ripping your skin off. The extreme but calm cold isn’t as sharp, but it’s unrelenting — loose a little bit of heat with a glove off or exposed skin, and its pretty difficult to warm things back up.

After our chilly morning walk, we got some pancakes and I spent the rest of the day telecommuting from our hotel.

Ridiculous, I know.