When the iPhone 4 started to make headlines and telling us, the internet will run faster, you can now run multiple apps at one time, have video conferencing, you can even record and edit a HD Video on your phone, this got me thinking about my childhood and asking, “What technology did I have as a child?” There was not a lot, but I remember being a kid and loading up my Apple IIE computer. In order to run one program I would need to install a floppy disk in drive one, then another floppy disk in drive two and wait for the program to load up. I had a few games, but most of them were educational games, which was my mom’s way of saying if you are going to play you will learn as well.
Internet was a foreign concept for me until I was in 7th Grade. I was visiting a friend and he told me he was going to send an email to someone through the computer and I looked at him like he was crazy! He showed me how to get an internet connection by placing the Telephone Receiver on this funny phone contraption (which was a modem, see below) and would he connect to the internet, and yes it did take a while. Some things do not change.
Now today we still have dial up, but most places you have access to high speed internet in your house, at coffee shops, on your phone or even an Air Card in which you can take the internet with you.
Kids today will never know a day without Cellphones, internet, Apps or even text messaging.Technology has changed so much, so fast new things are coming out all the time. Think about the progress of technology and how it has exploded onto the scene. Some people would say it has helped our lives and others would say, it has distracted us from relationships with others. What would your life be if we did not have technology? Can you imagine life without cell phones or even the internet? Would you consider technology a blessing or a curse?
As I have mentioned before, everyone at Kruhu wears an incredible amount of hats throughout the day. While we could muddle up the bottom of our business cards with a long list of job titles, one word really sums up our purpose throughout the day; creative. Constantly trying to think outside the box to help build your business is what gets us going in the morning. Once the creative juices really get flowing, it is next to impossible to turn them off even after hours. I often find myself in my miniature apartment dreaming up ways to creatively solve our space problems. Turns out this guy might have beat me to the punch.
Some of these pieces are really incredible to say the least. Apparently, they are selling like hot cakes in big cities around the world, including places like NYC, where space is at a premium.
I think it is important to incorporate creativity into any line of work, regardless of your job title. The great thing about being creative is that you never can be quite sure what will happen next, stay tuned.
There’s never been a better time to take a step forward with Kruhu. We’ve buckled down and brought on two new superstars to the team. It takes killer finds and leads to hunt down the best people for the positions – and lots of time – or the honest belief that God has pulled the entire situation together. The people that have come our way since we started - any of them – were never really hunting for jobs. They just came and filled the gaps where we’ve imagined Kruhu being one day. Things we’ve talked about a year ago, dreams that we thought may never happen and directions that we wanted to go in but knew that we couldn’t – are now in motion.
Through this journey, we’ve met incredible artists, visionaries and hard workers who are drawn to the unusual. I apologize if I seem proud to be part of such a group, the tiredness from work has been completely countered with the exhilaration of our new possibilities. These two have different strengths (which we will reveal soon enough) and will take us to where we’ve never been. From a small town design house to heights that are not known. The former introductions will soon be announced. Stay tuned. =)
Summer vacations are planned! Details are confirmed.
One detail that enhances the experience, and brings a warm saturation to the soul, is sweet music. Tunes are an essential accessory — the compound of chairs, coolers and towels that will be parked in the sand for 6 days, the back deck that comes custom with the sounds waves and a sweet breeze, AND the evening-relaxing-wind-down-stuffed with a bowl full of shrimp tails. Yes, we have the soundtrack covered. The art of a perfect mix-tape has been diluted over the years due to satellites and such, but nothing beats the personal craft of hand picking the right songs that flow into the soundtrack that is VACATION 2010.
We have 2 mixes that will serve as the glue that binds memories with mindless relaxification. Smack the bag of ice 3 times on the parking lot pavement, click that deck chair back a few notches, apply the sunscreen, and crank your jam-box. You are now ready to drift into ethers… you’re welcome.
Want some of the ear candy? The auditory mocha? The Jamin-on-the-one?
Email us: info@kruhu.com and give us the name of one song that takes you back to that perfect vacation from your childhood and we’ll send you a link and share the love.
Spend time making memories with the ones you love.
The object was to draw something kinda twisting old kegs into a modern and festive mobile bar system. The first sketch was as is below. The original idea was to cover the front lip with bottle caps. We realized after we drilled the centers out of 2000 of them that it would seriously busy up the overall look, instead, we’ll invest time into the curved wood grain effect. To get this effect it was pointless to try to use real wood due to the density and weight – so – we went with foam.
From there I hunted for some inspiration. The largest bottle cap that I could find was nailed to the side of a cracker barrel. See below
Then it began. We carved and coated the foams and started making the bottle caps. We decided to go with steel for a bar top and base. Then we tossed it together to see what it may look like as a concept. I wasn’t against shifting the idea on the fly to make a better project.
So here we are. We had bondo’d the tops of the caps and sanded most of them in the process to apply a nice vinyl sticker to the final tops. Then I popped the crazy question to the Kru…..”What can we do to take these over the edge?” The idea sprung up to machine out the “B” and backlight it. This meant getting acrylic, line sanding it and gluing cut out pieces to it. We also started cutting the centers out of the bottle caps, prepping the tops/bases and painting the foam to look like wood. We also applied a wood banding to look like steel and match the rusted bar tops.
It was a large amount of work. The final product is display below, take note of the lighting the lights run under the lip and behind the “B”. We also built a carrier for the bars they weigh around 400lbs each.
I want to thank absolutely everyone who had a part in helping to put these together. They’ve truly exceeded our own expectations.
Whenever I see that company doesn’t post anything on their blog for a while – I think that they’ve just not made it a priority or they just don’t have anything to say. We at Kruhu has so very much to say. I want to first say thanks to all of those that have contributed to to the projects of last month. We’ve called in favors, asked friends to pull a last night or two and put stress on our families due to the incredible amount of work that May 2010 contained. How can we say thanks? We can’t possibly say it to the degree that your endurance, patience and friendships have displayed. We are just starting to get back to the normal and promise that so very much of it will be shared with you.
Basic Search Engine Optimization. I get asked this time to time so I’ll talk about it. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t supposed to be. The truth is – exactly what google is trying to see. Your website’s credibility is ranked based on your honesty, your relevance and your popularity. All three, not one or two.
Masking your content, jamming keywords, hiding links, these little tricks don’t work anymore. Any black hat trick that you try to use in the search engines can be adjusted and corrected within the algorithms of google. If it hasn’t yet, still don’t use it, because some super computer scientist over at the big G will simply ruin your day with a couple of quick clicks. It’s not worth the work or the gamble.
So what’s my point? My point is that success on the internet begins with being honest about your service and your product. Success then ends with a successful internet business plan. SEO will help you get there if its where you plan to be.
Since Augusta is rather small, many small markets in Augusta are very easy to the get to the top of google. This can be done with keywords, regular updating, a relevant to your content – page title and description.
So, how in the flying elephants are you supposed to accomplish all of that? Good point. It’s easy said than done. First regular updating. You need a website that can be really seen well by google (unfortunately this method don’t work well for flash base sites) then you need some type of content manager that allows you to edit or add to your website easily. I would pace myself in the changes, google will not return to your website immediately. It bases how often it returns to how often you update (no point in wasting resources eh?). Writing and changing content should be based around what your are wanting to be found in google for, but be smart. Google know if you are trying insert that subject word too many times. Try words associated to that word. Once this is done, go on to step 2.
Correct titles and page descriptions – For the this part you may need a little help from a web person, but having the titles and descriptions are very important. These two tags are not only read by google, but they become the visible result for search results in google. That bold title is your title tag, the description is your description tag. Mentioning your subject once to twice in both of them, surely will help when it is relative to your content.
In the recent months, we’ve had the pleasure of designing for the music business. A business that I have wanted to dive into since the days of perusing the local record store for hours in search of new music – only to buy the album based on the cover art. In those days I didn’t have the resources that I take for granted now, and the thrill of the hunt was intoxicating.
One of the biggest scores I had was back in 1989 when I snagged a copy of Toad The Wet Sprocket’s “Bread and Circus” album based solely on the album art. To this day, it is one of my favorite albums, and a little over a year ago, I was approached by the band to use one of my designs as a tour t-shirt – a crazy story of chance, opportunity, and fanaticism. I can’t begin to describe range of emotions, memories, and excitement I had during that time. To be in correspondence with the band that I “found” on the rack – the band that my girlfriend, now wife, refer to when reminiscing the “remember when we were dating?” years — only to be front stage at a show where Glen Phillips, the lead singer, stopped the show to ask if I had a request, and he serenaded my wife and I with a song that was the theme song to our college-dating-crazy-good time chapter in our lives. The shear magnitude of of that moment was surreally staggering. He even waited until my wife, who was taking a call from the sitter, came back to join the show. No words.
With all that said – designing in the business that has taken a few licks in the recent years with social media and pro-tools in the hands of every “budding musician”, I am still triggered by the same unscathed enzyme to seek out and envelope myself in the “outer-body, outer-sonic” quality that music provides. I dive in full force – absorbing the gap between ocular, olfactory, and auditory with a sponge of imagination and literal awareness. Yes, it’s the “fun stuff”, but to me it is a glimpse into intimacy and abstraction – a collage of ideas, collaboration, and emotional barriers. To me, it’s more than drumming up a cool design. It’s an investment into my passion and the avenue to inspire and grab the attention of the person blindly attracted to the “vision”.
A special thanks to Joe and Emily for unselfishly shoving my primitive printout in front of the band, and to Andy and the Sixthman warriors for allowing me fulfill my passion for music – grateful beyond words.
In the world of marketing, our existence is based on relevance. You go forward with your career or your go backward with your career. Our skill set is a constant evolution. This is utterly awesome and absolutely terrifying. You’ll find that any design firm that wasn’t on the front edge of its craft, no longer exists. It’s a wave of creativity and if you fall of your board, you’ll be crushed… or you end up working for someone else.
There are some ways that we stay channeled on the pipe dream of originality and I’d like to share a little bit on the effort in takes. For those of us that aren’t lazy, we read books, have subscriptions to design heavy magazines, focus time on inspiration and bounce ideas off one another. I’d say this was the proper way. Then there are folks like me. I’ve never had a design subscription. I don’t frequent any books on design, nor have bought one since college. It’s terrible. I depend on lack of influence to produce originality. This can result in chaos. I’ve come up with things that look dated or so far into left field that everyone was clueless on what I was trying to achieve. Most of the time, an idea mixed with caffeine arrives while i’m driving or many times in the shower. Note that I said “can” lead to chaos, but many times it leads to something the client never imagined was even possible.
My personal inspiration many times will derive from a client that I’m working with. If I can understand their dreams and put myself in the shoes of someone I’m working with, then I can try to align myself with their vision of a particular company. Once I really know what the vision is, it becomes a lot easier to accomplish the goal. Actually, I see the success of the companies outcome determining the success of the project. We don’t design to win awards. We design to win businesses. For me personally it takes on the form of becoming a solution database for any sort of situation. In multiple cases, I’ve lead a client to another company who offered a solution that met their goal more accurately for less money. In the end, we end up a company known for trust and in a service based industry – trust is most valuable thing we can have.
Most days when I come home from work my husband asks the standard, “What did you do today?” Obviously this isn’t meant to be a trick question, but there are days when it takes me a few minutes to rewind to the morning and think of all that was accomplished in one day. It gets really ugly if he asks what the guys were working on.
So anyways, today I decided that I would actually try to keep track of everything that was accomplished and how many different hats we wear throughout the day. For me, the day was started by hammering out a few kinks in two different sites that we are very excited to launch, Wings of Eagles and Neapolitan Gifts. These sites are both painfully close to being finished, so with each new tweak of the code the excitement between the kru and the client grows. It’s nice to see what can be accomplished by a morning of coding and clicking.
After lunch, the focus shifted to producing a set for our favorite new friends, Bawby and Rawtny. They are very excited to officially announce to the world the details for Papa Joe’s Banjo-B-Que at their press conference tomorrow morning at 11:30 on CBS News 12 and others. Switching quickly from web site designer, I threw on my “colorer” hat and dove into the project at hand, putting the finishing touches on a proper background for the pigs. The goal was to give these pigs a pad that matched their incredible attitude and I think they will approve.
Switch to after dinner, back to the space to let the real work begin, power tools! Making easels and a stand for our backdrop was the task at hand. Crank on the power saw and fire up the drills. With the tunes cranking and the wood chips flying, the 2X4′s seemed to put themselves together.
All in all, it is incredible to look back at how many hats we wear throughout the day. Keep in mind that this was only my day, an outline of everyone’s accomplishments for the day could take up a small novel. Combine four workaholics and all of their different skills and the possibilities are endless. Moral of the story; no job is too big or too small, too abstract or too simple, we treat them all the same. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have a job that has the ability to take someone’s business to the next level, whether it be by coding, cutting, clicking, or “coloring”.
