Russell & Mackenna has reason to be happy. Several months ago they decided to re-route the money they had been planning to use to open another physical store to showcase and sell their cottage style furniture into an e-commerce Website. And not just your run of the mill e-commerce site. This Website needed to let potential buyers customize their furniture to their exact preferences, to match the options experience the company has been offering via catalog and in-store for the past several years.

Fastspot worked diligently to make sure the user interface was easy yet engaging, and we were all banking on the idea that if you let users create exactly what they want, even entire collections of pieces they want, that they will make the big decision and actually purchase. There are big ticket items, when you buy from Russell & Mackenna - you are purchasing hand crafted, made in America, beautifully designed and conceived furniture, ideally suited for your house in the Hamptons or your imaginary house in the Hamptons wherever you happen to live.

While usability and customization were our top priorities, we also wanted the design of the site to tell the story of this brand. We looked at Emeco as a great example of how a brand’s story and marketing can help support a high price for a high quality piece of furniture, especially when cheaper, lesser quality knock offs are easy to come by. We certainly stand behind the importance of well conceived and produced interactive design, but this was the first time we would be putting that to the test with online purchases in a retail environment. And it didn’t help that as we neared the launch date, the economy continued to nose dive.

So, the site quietly launched in late February 2009, and on March 3 an email went out to about 2000 names (gathered from past customers, people who had requested catalogs, or who had simply provided the info so they could get emails) announcing the new site and offering a 2 week discount offer for online purchases. We waited, and as the weekend approached (when we expected these shoppers to actually sit down, discuss with the significant other and make the purchase) the sales started coming in.

I am very happy to share with you what Russell & Mackenna shared with us recently. When they compared their sales from March 2008 to March 2009, they were up 425%. Yes, you read that correctly, 425%. And yes, most of that was from the Website. They were making money while they slept, while they ate breakfast on Sunday mornings and while they juggled more orders than their builders had ever seen. Needless to say - we have a very happy client.

So, next time you think about ROI and how much the Internet can impact a business and a brand, think about this post. When you compare the impact to that of a traditional print ad, billboard, commercial or even a physical store, there is simply no comparison. Not only is the Web accessible to millions, 24/7, it is accessible to the exact people who are looking for “you”. How many people flip past an ad because its not compelling to them, or drive past a billboard and never think of it again? Online, these same buyers are actively searching for the brand, the company, the product. And with the Internet, you can tell who they are, when they come, what they do, what they look at, where they leave from, how long they stay, the list goes on. In fact, the next post will be a long long list of all the reasons why every company out there should be devoting their budgets to Interactive, I have too many for this story.

Feel free to join the discussion, and if you are a retail brand that isn’t doing what Russell & Mackenna is, I suspect you are already dialing our number. In fact, I will probably be expecting to hear from you since I will have seen you in our analytics.

I work with clients every day trying to help them determine what their unique value proposition is and it’s more difficult to identify than one might think. However, it is critical to any brand or organization to identify what is unique and appealing about them before they can convince anyone else to pay attention, let alone spend money. At Fastspot, we have identified our own unique value propositions and we promise these things to every client we work with. We provide creativity, problem solving, customer service and solutions based on achieving identified goals. We do these things better than most other companies in our industry and we back up these propositions with client references, testimonials, ROI reports, analytics reports, awards and, of course, increased revenue for our clients. It’s very important to support your value proposition, especially if it’s not completely unique — for example, we don’t propose to be really good at one specific niche type of work. While our value propositions aren’t in and of themselves unique, the level to which we deliver on them is the unique factor.

This idea of value propositions came to mind during a recent trip out to Tacoma, Washington, to visit one of our clients, The University of Puget Sound. During our research phase at the beginning of our engagement, we found that many people had a less than optimal view of Tacoma as a city, and it was often seen as the ugly step-child to Seattle and Portland. During our first visit to the city, I was impressed with what I saw: a fantastic hotel to stay at (The Hotel Murano); many accommodations within walking distance to a very new looking convention center; several art museums; lots of local restaurants and brew pubs. The city of Tacoma was clean, friendly, picturesque, and had a very clear unique value proposition. It is a city devoted to celebrating the art of glassblowing.

The Pacific Northwest is known for its fondness for glassblowing and many world-renowned artists keep studios in the region, including probably the most notable contemporary glass artist, Dale Chihuly. Wandering around Tacoma and even within the hallways of the Hotel Murano, you begin to understand the importance of glass and, more importantly, the creative process and role it plays in the identity and unique value proposition of Tacoma.

Glass blowing is both a volatile and fragile process with happy accidents resulting in beauty as often as shattered destruction. The molten materials are constantly spun, heated, cooled, hammered, melded and joined. The process requires a team of people who work together like a well-rehearsed improv dance crew, handing off and negotiating around red hot art and even hotter tools and equipment. The end results are breathtakingly beautiful and evoke senses of nature, both explosive and calm, violent and gentle, warm and cool. The process reminds us of the region and its volcanoes, mountains, rocky shores, lush forests, and turbulent oceans. It literally feels like the region has created these works of art and this is why it’s such a unique and befitting value proposition to experience this celebration of glassblowing and glass art in a city like Tacoma.

Ultimately, the city is celebrating something that is a perfect fit and it is even better to enjoy this art within the area that has given rise to so many talented artists. Even the Hotel Murano, which I have now stayed at three times and highly recommend, makes art —particularly glass art— the focal point. Sure, the hotel provides beautiful rooms, fantastic service and a friendly staff, but shouldn’t all hotels? What makes the Hotel Murano unique is how every floor features a different local glass artist, including large color photos of the artist at work, showcases featuring actual works by the artist, and sketches and other 2D pieces presented as wall art within the rooms.

As you walk down the street towards the Museum of Glass, the Glass Bridge further immerses you in the art of glass, with an entire outdoor bridge installation flooded with Dale Chihuly’s pieces. During your walk, you pass the train station, also adorned with Chihuly works which completely transform the entryway. For me, the final experience came as I entered the library on the campus of The University of Puget Sound and was greeted with another breathtaking contribution from Chihuly’s creative genius. It seems fitting considering his status as one of the preeminent glass artists working today.

I now have a permanent concept of both Tacoma and the places I have visited during my time there, and that concept is indelibly linked to glass, art and the creative process. In fact, I would expect to see Tacoma continue to gain traction as a desired tourist destination with its convenient access to those bigger cities, as well as other prominent sites like Mt. Rainier, top tier accommodations at affordable prices, great local restaurants, shopping and cultural highlights and an extremely impressive-looking convention center. The city and its inhabitants definitely have identified their unique value propositions— now they just need to get the word out.

I find it ironic how often clients overlook this very basic and important element during their design or rebranding processes. After all, how can you sell what you don’t truly understand? Once we help our clients really focus in and determine what makes them unique, it’s our job to go out and make sure the world hears about it and responds appropriately. This very simple, yet critical element can have a significant impact on a business— just ask our client Russell & Mackenna. Their revenue is up 425% in the month since their new Website launched compared to that same month in 2008. No, that isn’t a typo. Our next blog post will explore exactly how we accomplished those stunning numbers, by focusing on their unique value propositions.

One evening, while sitting around visiting with friends, a comment was made which became the inspiration for fly-post.com - a Website dedicated to the art and utility of the promotional flyer. The comment was, “I miss the good ole days when you could walk outside, look at the telephone pole, and know what was going on.” The resulting discussion honed in on one important element missing from the plethora of event based Websites which have become so ubiquitous in the recent years - they aren’t any fun to look at!

Of course, I am biased. I went to art school at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the early 90s, pre-Internet, and where every occasion from house parties, to yard sales to impromptu gorilla art exhibits warranted a flyer bordering on fine art. Around that same time, bands like Nine Inch Nails were emerging and working with talented artists like Derek Hess to turn the promotional flyer from utility to collector’s piece.

We conceived of fly-post as something in between the local city paper, the bulletin board found inside an art school or other visually inclined location, the neighborhood telephone pole and an invitation service like Evite. We wanted to provide tools to help the flyer makers promote their event or service, provide ways for the community to easily find and peruse these visual artvertisements, and celebrate the art of the flyer by allowing users to rate and comment. Lofty goals indeed, but after many months of brainstorming, designing, programming and testing, fly-post.com (beta) has launched!

We have been letting the beta site gain traction organically while we evaluate user interaction, gather feedback, make improvements, and slowly leak the word out via Twitter and Craigs List. While we want to blast it out to every blog and tech magazine out there, we are also cognizant of the power of growing slowly and being flexible enough to make improvements based on our community and user requests. So far, so good.

Fly-post has already had over 6,500 visits, with users spending an average of 3:09 on the site since it launched in beta last October. Word of mouth has served to help grow the user base, with many local businesses and organizations located in our home town of Baltimore being some of the most active early adopters. Regular posts from The Walters Art Museum, Atomic Books, and crowd favorites Dr. Sketchy (figure drawing class meets burlesque) and local band We Read Minds. As of this blog posting, fly-post flyers cover over 140 cities nationwide.

The site offers users many tools to help them share and promote their event, or an event they are interested in. Easy links allow users to post flyers to Facebook, insert into their MySpace pages, or email to a friend. Soon we will be including Craigs List friendly code snippets, and additional sharing tools for Twitter, Digg, etc. Comments and ratings will soon notify the flyer poster via email, and we hope to offer analytics for flyer creators to track their traffic. We also have plans to significantly enhance the RSVP system. We are in discussions with “green” printers, so we can enable flyer makers to place print orders at the same time as they are uploading to fly-post, if they are so inclined. And yes, an iPhone app is in the works - for those flyer fans who spot good ones out in the wild.

While we quietly work away in the background, focusing on improvements and enhancements, we welcome the growing community that will turn fly-post into the Web’s very own local telephone pole. So, looking for something going on in your neighborhood or city this weekend? Check fly-post.com, now you know.

1. We contributed a chapter to Flash 5 Studio (published by Friends of Ed) on how to make your own music mixer using Flash.

2. Our first big client / job was for McCormick (the spice company) to create a motion graphics Flash piece hyping their new spice labels.

3. Our Art & Technology Director, Curt Kotula, once spent the night in a tent on the office floor, after an evening of one too many networking events.

4. After presenting a session at Flash Forward in NYC, 2001 - we were courted by Wieden and Kennedy to come out and collaborate with their Nike team.

5. The first award we won was a Flash Film Festival award for our online experience, Memoire, at the Amsterdam Flash Film Festival.

6. The name “Fastspot“, originated in 1998 from an idea that eventually television and the internet would be interchangeable, and motion graphics advertising online would be pushed as heavily as television commercials (spots), once the bandwidth caught up.

7. Our Senior Programmer, Tim Buckingham, eats Burger King almost every day for lunch. It was a pre-requisite for him taking the job that there was a Burger King near by the office.

8. After something triggered a false alarm at the office, police nearly blew the head off Elvis, thinking he was an intruder in the dark hallway.

9. We were once asked to design T-Shirts for Maverick Records and Madonna’s upcoming tour. For inspiration we had one full work day where Madonna music was piped throughout the office.

10. There are usually 3 dogs in the office, sometimes as many as 5 at one time. Office regulars are Truck, a Lab Shepard mix, Rufus, a Lab Pitbull mix, Leyla, a Boxer, and Stella, an English Bulldog.

11. There is a paintball gun and a target in the basement. The practice helped ensure our victory over Orange Element.

12. We like to take time out to kill each other in network Quake games, and Curt always wins - with the Rail Gun.

13. On a visit out to Tacoma to meet with our client, University of Puget Sound, we stayed at the wonderful Hotel Murano. Each floor features a glass artist and a collection of themed works, we ended up on the boob floor.

14. Our office was built in 1889 and you can see Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from the 3rd floor - confirming that Butcher’s Hill is really on a hill.

15. We talk allot about the beauty of restrictions - Being a painter, I like the limited palette metaphor.

16. There are several tattoos in the mix.

17. We are all borderline mysophobics.

18. Our “spot” for World Aids Day won first place in a competition run by MTVuk, and was aired all over Europe on TV and the Internet.

19. Fastspot “Fun Events” have included a Paintball battle with Orange Element, a trip to Dave and Busters, a rematch with Orange Element at Patterson Park’s Duckpin Bowling (we won), a trip to an Orioles game at Camden Yards, a ski / snowboard trip to Liberty, a poker tournament (Zach and his wife took 1st and 2nd place and all the money) and a BBQ / flower planting / happy hour. Of course, the happy hours are reoccurring fun events.

Do you know an interesting tidbit about Fastspot that you want to share? Just remember, some of our moms read this blog, so use caution!

Baltimore, Md (March 4, 2009)—Fastspot, a national interactive agency headquartered in Baltimore, has been selected by Dickinson College and the University of Puget Sound to redesign each institution’s Web sites, according to Tracey Halvorsen, creative director and co-founder of the firm.

“The critical role that Web sites have in the overall communications activities of colleges and universities has changed dramatically since most of them created their initial sites,” commented Halvorsen. “For example, potential applicants to colleges and universities now typically first experience a school through its Web site. Therefore, it’s really important that the site engages, excites and informs these applicants as well as establishes a foundation of trust.”

Fastspot is creating each site in collaboration with other marketing and communications efforts currently underway by each institution. “This team approach will ensure that their brand attributes are integrated through visual and message consistency,” emphasized Halvorsen.
Dickinson College, a four-year liberal arts institution founded in 1783 in Carlisle, Pa , has an enrollment of approximately 2,400 students. “We’ve been quite pleased in our work with Fastspot,” said Paul Dempsey, director of electronic communication at Dickinson. “They’ve provided a number of strong design options and have been very flexible with making things fit our unique needs. It’s been a very effective collaboration.”

“We’ve been pleased in our work with Fastspot,” said Paul Dempsey, director of electronic communication at Dickinson. “They’ve provided a number of strong design options and have been flexible with making things fit our unique needs. It’s been an effective collaboration.”
The University of Puget Sound, with an enrollment of about 2,600 students, was founded in 1888 in Tacoma, Wa.
Fastspot, with a recognized expertise in interactive communications for higher education institutions, recently completed a comprehensive interactive project for Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pa.

About Fastspot
Fastspot is a premiere interactive agency, widely recognized for its strategic award-winning work, collaborative approach with its clients and its ability to deliver successful, long-lasting solutions. Headquartered in Baltimore, the firm works with clients across the country who seek to develop highly creative and complex marketing, advertising or business solutions. The firm has a particular expertise working with associations, colleges and universities, museums and cultural organizations, architectural and technology firms. For more information, visit http://www.fastspot.com.

The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, a Baltimore foundation with an arts focused philanthropy, contacted the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance about helping the Fund develop an annual awards program for individual artists of the region.  GBCA suggested thinking about approaching Fastspot about how they might build on the concept of the People’s Design Award Website, created by Fastspot for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and National Design Week. A collaboration quickly commenced on how this concept might translate for the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund.  We knew we wanted to make the nominating process for this particular foundation program much more transparent and community focused, but we had no idea how the artists and community would react. Obviously, we had little reason for concern. It is clear from the numbers, this type of awards program and online nomination process was something the arts community had long been hoping for, not to mention the success we saw from integrating a “People’s Choice” into the mix. We hope to see other cities and artists’ communities throughout the world adopt and build upon what the Baker Artist Awards Website has established for the Baltimore arts community. Here’s what we ended up with.

Nominees, Registered Users and Votes

656 Artists nominated themselves and uploaded their work and info, including painters, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, crafts people, performance artists, experimental artists, designers, sculptors, photographers, you name it.
10,372 people not only came to the site, they created accounts and registered to vote for their favorite artists or artwork.
8,531 total votes were cast (this includes people who found ways to unlock extra votes by browsing and becoming more active in the site.)

Pageviews, Visitors, Time on Site and Geographical Info

688,520 Pageviews (spanning from early October 2008 to Feb. 1, 2009) The site will remain online for people to browse and enjoy the vast amount of art that was uploaded, so we expect to see this number continue to grow.
66,252 Visits
34,976 Absolute Unique Visitors
7:44 Avg. Time on Site - this is a very long time for the average time spent on any Website.
Most visitors were from the US, but we had 530 visitors from Canada, 447 from the United Kingdom, 232 from France, 182 from Germany, 133 from Australia, 132 from Italy, 127 from Spain and 88 from the Netherlands. They spent on average between 2:12 to 14:30 on the site.

Who Was Browsing?

If we dive deeper into the analytics, we can see to some degree who was browsing. As expected, there was lots of traffic from local universities and educational institutions, including Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, Catonsville Community College, Loyola, Towson State University, Villa Julie, Goucher and Morgan State. However, more interestingly, and probably of great interest to the artists who have their bodies of work on the site, we saw heavy site viewing from these organizations and entities:

National Gallery of Art - 86 visits
Museum of Modern Art - The MOMA spent 42 minutes surfing the site
Smithsonian Institution - 56 visits
The Baltimore Museum of Art - 50 visits
Standford University - 31 visits
Rochester Institute of Technology - 25 visits
Cornell University - 24 visits
WYPR (National Public Radio) - 17 visits
Discovery Communications - 16 visits
CBS Corporation - 15 visits
Duke University - 13 visits
Black & Decker - 12 visits
Apple Computer - 10 visits
Bank of America - 10 visits
Diamond Comics - 10 visits
Pratt Institute - 10 visits
Yale University - 10 visits

Other Visitors of Importance

Eli Whitney Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Fine Art
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The New York Times
Corcoran
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Walker Art Center
Fuller Craft Museum
Harvard University
National Geographic Society
Tulane University
University of Southern California
California Institute of the Arts
The Kennedy Center
Boston University
Carnegie Mellon University
Intercontinental Hotels Group
Princeton University
Under Armour
Cooper Union
Dartmouth College
School of Visual Arts
Hunter College
Nike, Inc.
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
The Washington Post
Electronic Arts Inc.
Herman Miller Inc.
Liz Claiborne Inc.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Lucas Film

There were over 4,500 network locations logged, and while we don’t know exactly “whom” was looking, we can assume this kind of visibility is extremely valuable to artists who may have limited opportunity for exposure. Additionally, we feel the quality and volume of work entered into the Baker Artist Awards will bring national awareness to Baltimore as a creative city that nurtures and cherishes its artistic community.

Referring Traffic

Another important element contributing to the huge success of the site was the amount of traffic driven to it by artists’ self promoting in hopes of winning the People’s Choice award. While the primary grants will be decided upon by a select jury, the people’s favorites will also win smaller cash awards and recognition. This angle helped spread the word, by encouraging artists to get over their shyness and get busy marketing themselves. There were over 1,200 referring links logged, meaning that over 1,200 outside sources sent visitors clicking into Baker Artist Awards Website from a link on a blog, in an email, or somewhere else online. Here are a few referring links of note:

Facebook sent over 5,000 visits
Notcot.org sent over 1,500 visits
Commarts.com sent 1,366 visits when it featured the Website as its pick of the day
Bmoreart.blogspot.com sent 445 visits
Fastspot was happy to send 426 visits from our Website
Flickr.com sent 322 visits
Twitter sent 220 visits
Baltimoreclayworks.org sent 168 visits
Delicious sent 159
Baltimoreculture.org sent 142

Over 50 blogs linked up to Baker Artist Awards, sending a tremendous amount of virally generated traffic (traffic that wasn’t paid for or generated through direct PR efforts). That is the best kind of traffic you can get because it’s usually very targeted to the audiences most interested in the content.

What’s Next?

Well, the site will stay online as a virtual museum of sorts, and after the winners are announced, we will be working to make enhancements and improvements for next year’s competition and awards.

We would love to know if the site has helped your artistic career or helped you network with collectors, curators, etc.. We are also happy to hear any feedback regarding usability, functionality or features you would like to see incorporated into the site for next year. We can’t promise everything will make it, but our goal is to make the site even better every year, so your feedback is extremely valuable. So share your stories or feedback with us!

I’m always interested in seeing other people’s setups and workflows. I almost always learn about a new piece of software or different way of doing things. So, inspired by a recent series of posts on waferbaby.com called THE SETUP, I decided to present my own.

Hardware:

I use a 20″ 2GHz iMac (aluminum) with 3GB RAM running 10.5.6, an external 22″ monitor, a Logitech MX Revolution mouse and a Apple aluminum keyboard. Modest hardware, but plenty of power for web development.

Software:

I’ve never been a fan of virtual workspaces until Leopard came out with Spaces, and even then, the kinks didn’t really get worked out until about 10.5.3. But now they’re an integral part of my daily workflow. I rarely have to minimize windows to try to find what I’m looking for, I can just switch spaces. With 2 monitors and 4 spaces, I usually have enough room to keep everything open at the same time without overlapping. I highly recommend taking another look at Spaces if you’ve avoided virtual workspaces in the past. I use Spaces mainly to partition apps into different tasks, so I’ll breakdown software I use by task.

Space 1: Administrative

In this space, I keep iChat, Mail, Gmail (in a Fluid SSB) and Safari with Basecamp and Harvest open in tabs. These are basically all the apps I use for basic communication and administrative tasks.

Space 2: Development

I’m a developer, so this by far where I spend most of my time. The most important here is TextMate, which is where most of my day is spent. By far the best and most customizable text editor I ever found. I use TextMate with the Railscasts theme since I much prefer light text on dark background when coding all day. Next is Firefox with Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar extensions. My workflow is a lot of switching between TextMate and Firefox, coding and debugging. Firebug alone is why I use Firefox over another browser since it makes debugging web apps so much easier. I’m constantly outputting things to the console, viewing ajax requests, and checking how css styles are being applied.

I usually always have Terminal with a few tabs open for ssh’ing into a server, using subversion, or tailing some rails logs, and I use Transmit when I need to work off a remote server. I also use Sequel Pro for connecting to MySQL when possible.

Space 3: Design/Virtual Machines

I don’t spend a lot of time in this space, except for getting images from a design. For that I use Fireworks CS3 which I’m not a big fan off, but I hear CS4 is much improved. Also, in this space, I use VirtualBox with a Windows XP virtual machine for testing in IE6 and other windows browsers. VirtualBox may not be as full featured as Parallels or VMWare Fusion, but it’s free, open source, and so far I haven’t had any issues. It’s been working like a champ.

Space 4: Misc

In this space I keep iTunes, NetNewsWire, and Twitterific open. These are mostly some random apps that don’t fit anywhere else, but seem to go together.

Other

There are also some utility apps that I don’t use in a particular space, but can’t live without like QuickSilver and Growl. I also use The Unarchiver which is a great utitlity for uncompressing just about any type of file.

I think that about covers it for me. What does your setup look like?

I was fortunate (or lucky) enough to sit down via Skype with the charming hosts of Lucky Startups the other day (Aronando Placencia and Dennis Lankes), and chat about Fly-Post. Fly-Post is a project that started over a year ago, born out of a conversation about missing the “good old days” of looking at telephone poles to find out what was going on in the hood, via the flyer. It just kept nagging at us, the flyer, how the flyer wasn’t being accurately represented anywhere online, it needed a place to love and cherish it. Enter Fly-Post.com.

We worked on this site for about a year and finally launched it in beta a few weeks ago. We now look forward to seeing it grow and flourish and help promote the art and utility of the flyer, hopefully for your home town. Enough from me, check out the interview, and go post a flyer!

Cutting it close

The nail clipper, a highly specialized grooming utensil, is the would-be epitome of efficiency in design.  It’s compact, efficient, and boasts impressive Swiss Army Knife-like transformation abilities, but the very attributes that should make it perfectly suited to its purpose are the ones that ultimately stand out as its flaws.

The Cutting Edge

The clipper part of the nail clipper is basically a small curve.  While the human finger- or toenail has a natural curvature, it is the relative size of the blade to the nail that makes it impossible to cut all but the smallest nail in a single, clean clip.  Larger nails end up butchered by the need to double and sometimes triple clip to correct uneven cuts and points.

The only real way to avoid mangling a nail is to slowly clip across with great precision, but nail maintenance is a chore — not a delight to be savored.  Nobody wants to spend a prolonged period of time hunched over one’s feet, crunched up in that strange fetal position.  (The one where your leg is crushing into your chest and your knee is cutting off your air supply as  you’re forced to push it into your neck to see what you’re doing.)

The Nail File

Cleverly tucked away beneath the clippers is a small tool that barely passes as a nail file; its intersecting lines scored into metal cannot produce the texture or grit to actually accomplish the task of filing a human nail.  The curved protrusion at the end of the file intended for cleaning under the surface of the nail is at best intimidating; shoving a sharp object underneath a nail sounds more like torture than grooming.  No wonder they break them off at airport security.

With the help of a thoughtful designer, we might see a more effective tool that’s a great deal closer to what cutting a nail should be:  quick and painless.

How would you change the flawed nail clipper into a sleek grooming tool?

In response to Garret Ohm’s blog post on Orange Element’s blog, in response to being tagged by Darryl Ohrt in his “7 Things” meme, my challenge is to share 7 things about me that I feel you should know, and then choose 7 people to go and do the same. Here we go:

1. My religion is painting. I have a BFA and MFA in painting, and have been at it since I was 15 years old. Without painting, I definitely wouldn’t be the person I am today, and if I don’t carve out adequate time to make art, I turn into a boring, cranky, uninspired person. When I graduated in 1993, I was awarded the Agnes Gund Award, the top honor from my undergrad, Cleveland Institute of Art, so I feel a bit of an obligation to one day leave an impact on the art world in some manner.

2. I hate talk with no action, conclusion or outcome. If it’s not worth doing or figuring out, it’s not worth talking about. Nothing irritates me more than aimless conversation with no real purpose.

3. I have had to work hard to learn to say “No”. As a natural people pleaser, I have gotten stuck being pulled in too many directions, and not having time for things that are important to me. Saying “no” is the best remedy.

4. In contrast to the above point, I hate having idle time unless its a weekend or I am on vacation. When I am working (that can mean business, studio, any number of things), I find that if I have 3 things to get done, I will get 2 done. If I have 10 things to get done, I will get 7 done. Getting 7 things done feels better than getting 2 things done, so I like to stay busy.

5. I believe in good karma, and while I am an extremely competitive person, I also believe how you treat others and conduct yourself in business and in life matters greatly in the big scheme of things.

6. If I hadn’t decided to pursue art for my undergraduate studies, I would have pursued a pre-law program or a writing program, and ultimately would have hoped to become a prosecuting attorney for civil rights injustices, or written fiction novels.

7. Having started my own business, stress has been a constant companion over the years. I have learned to combat that stress by compartmentalizing work issues, so I leave them at the office, and I always remind myself, while it is very satisfying, fun and important work that we do here, it’s not brain surgery. If something goes wrong, we can correct it. In fact, with the Internet, it’s never really finished anyhow!

7 People I would like to know 7 things about that I don’t already know:

Susan Anthony
Hollis Thomases
Brad Johnson
Guy Kawasaki
Malcolm Gladwell
Julie Rubin
Aaron Moore