Advancing W/ Bamboo

Switching professions isn't always the easiest thing to do, but using that drive to do what you were made to do is worth it! This is my account of growth in a rewarding profession.

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

It is done.

It's always a strange day when you've completed a long engagement and know that your work is finished. Today marked the period of completion and the last part of the branding and marketing process as interns at Bamboo Creative. Although I was unable to attend the final unveiling of the finished website due to school starting back up, my web dev. partner was able to complete the final meeting with positive feedback. This was a great experience, I learned a lot about myself and networked some cool friends along the way. And for anyone reading this, I encourage you to get out their and stretch yourself in something you're not familiar with. I struggle with code and I came out of this with more experience than I had before. Now go do something awesome!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Sucker-Punch!

Over Labor Day weekend, I got sucker-punched in the FACE when approaching Sass through Compass and CodeKit. I thought this was supposed to make styling easier? I'm sure it does, it just takes a moment to adjust to something new in your workflow.

For those who don't know what Sass or any of the things I mentioned are, "Sass" (Symantically Awesome StyleSheets), in short, is a cleaner and more time-efficient way of styling websites. CodeKit is an awesome tool that compiles style into a clean format. And Compass is a library extension to Sass with a plethora of variables to select from.

Back to laboring a new workflow into my already new workflow… "Round 2, Fight!"

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

The end is near

Wow! Since August 14th through the 30th, my web dev. partner/WordPress ninja—Kelsey and I have been fighting our way through the WP jungle with our super-trusty, summer-long friend—Tony, dropping off meticulously designed care packages on our quest to tame this beast.

During this time, our friends that made up the marketing side of our team not only produced a job well done to our client by crafting them a "how-to" guide on their marketing strategies, but the time also came for them to take their experience back to school and share the adventures they faced, all the while creating new ones. They will be missed!

Meanwhile, back in the WP jungle, Kelsey, Tony and I see the light through  the thick bitmapped brush, vector chaos and heavy code fog.

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Keeping Up

Since July 29th to Aug. 12th, It's been busy time. Everything that's happened between these dates has been a whirlwind, specifically in web development through iterations of failures in trial and error.

One of the most significant things worth noting is being broken into Twitter's Bootstrap framework. This has been a challenging learning curve, but absolutely love what it does. To give you a brief and short synopsis, Twitter's Bootstrap is a front-end framework designed to make web development quicker and easier.

Progress on our clients website has been a bit of crawl but after a few tips from Bamboo's front-end web dev. rockstar Garrett Boatman, I'm confident we'll have this show up and running in no time!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

All About Balance

The common thing we all do in our everyday life is start tasks. 
However, understanding how to balance these tasks is an important skill to maintain.

Today, we had the chance to break away from our main client to make room for breathing, and work on a side project that involved educating local churches in the area about common issues that are current among the church web community and things that they can do to enhance their web presence.

The important aspect to understanding how balancing these projects works is crucial in that it makes room for a fresh view when it is revisited and it allows us to keep moving forward with progress.

Push forward!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Know your peep's!

Getting to know the people in our clients target audience has been an insightful experience.

Interviewing members of their audience, gives us the opportunity to understand what they experience and to see through their eyes.

What we do with this information is develop individual personas that represent specific types of personalities in their target audience. That way, we build a campaign that stimulates specific action triggers to gain awareness from their audience and from which platforms to reach them through.

On a side note, this is simply fun—in that everyone's created a personality to interact with at some point in their life growing up, whether you were naming your dolls (alternatively action-figures if your too cool for dolls), or playing a game. This will prove to be a fun experimental process as we build out the campaign. Can't wait to start with a fresh view!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

It's the middle of the week and we've packaged out our progress to present to our client. I always think it's a great idea to do a presentation trial run before the product gets delivered and I was right to make such an assumption. Practice makes perfect and by perfecting your pitch, it leaves room for adding a touch of personality to make it more believable and relatable. If you tell a story blandly and make terrible use of a persons time, they're less likely to believe that you're genuinely "PUMPED" about their product and what they're doing. And worse, you'll loose their attention and trust. On that note, it's our job as the "Story Teller" to excite the client about what they're doing and where they're going. If we don't deliver with confidence and a sense of excitement, why should we expect the listener to really believe what we're saying. The same is true for the pitch, and just like everything else, practicing your pitch will perfect your delivery and make an impact. With that being said, our initial pitch to the Boo-crew's experts was a nice start, but needed less mud and more salt. With a little more flavor this time, our pitch was successful in that we delivered solid progress to one of the Owners and their Marketing Director. The brand brief will serve as a go-to resource to ensure that any and most decisions are made with this information in mind, as well as to ensure that our client and our team are on the same page.

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

What's my Name

Continuing along in our path to help our client understand their business and clearly define who they are and what exactly it is they do, it gave us a great sense of satisfaction to conclude the wrap-up of the first round of the brand brief. From a design and development standpoint, my colleagues and I decided to take advantage of the time to start experimenting with the idea of consolidating the clients website information to make way-finding more user-friendly. This also led us to start building out personas of our clients target audience to bring us closer to wrapping up our brief and to help us understand what each persona might experience as they use our clients website. The importance of constructing a persona is that it helps our client to practically understand what each individual from their specific target audience core needs, personality types, and action triggers are—which make them actively respond, and how to channel that interaction effectively.

This is always my favorite part because it reminds me of my daughter building out tons of characters for fun on the Wii, and that the joy we get for creatively molding and developing a character. So just remember, every time you create something, it has a purpose. Whether it's to help a client understand how to reach their audience, if you're simply creating a story, or if it's just for plain ol' fun—it's purpose proves to give us satisfaction and great sense of joy.

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Progress and Farewell

Today was more digging in and getting to the point as we built out our brand brief. We must've word-smithed the mess out of every word you could think of. This process proved to be efficient in that it serves as a rough first to ensure clarity of our clients direction and what they are. Although it was a mind stretching day, our festive colored wardrobe lightened the atmosphere and made for a fun working environment. It was originally started in honor of Bamboo's Emily Sidnam. Our hats go off to Emily for being such a wonderful mentor and a great leader, cheers Emily!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Upon further analysis…

In today's episode of "Core Value" research, my talented team and I dug a little deeper to make sense of what it was that our client wanted to express to the world. If my team hasn't given it away already, I'll include what it is, in my post, when we conclude our findings. On a different note, I thought it would be a great idea to get ahead of the curve by looking into WordPress and how it may be a great resource to implement into our deliverables. The internet is a powerful tool and is currently one of the best people connectors today, second to "in-person to person interaction." At this point, the primary stakeholders must be thrilled to have this posted all over blogs, creating community, and strengthening networks! To get the motivation ball rolling and to keep the spirits high, I hope tomorrow is "Hawaiian shirt Thursday!" If it's not, and I'm the only mullet that shows up in tropical gear, I won't feel so bad—because at least I'll look like I'm on vacation. Good day ya'll!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

What DO you DO?

Today was a day of making clear sense of the chaos in notes that we've accumulated from last meeting, and regurgitated it up onto our IdeaPaint wall. Creating a mind-map to organize these key components into easily understandable, descriptive, and consumable terms that best describe our clients mission and purpose.

How this will help us in the big picture, is that by next meeting with our client, we'll be able to present our findings and what we've come up with based on the content we've collected. This collection of information should be able to describe who they are, what they are, and why you should be interested in them. At this point, we're more than half way through the research process.

Our next goal is to complete our findings and research, then finally move into the fun part—To build it!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

After the teams meeting with one of the primary stake-holders, we were able to see what the mapping out/whiteboard process of it looked like. Part of todays success couldn't' have happened without the help of our mentors—Ginny and Emily, for guiding us through the process and actually seeing what goes into this process and what it looks like on a pro-level. At this point, we were able to categorize and list data under each main topic to answer some of our big questions. From here we connected key words from one category to another that made the picture a little more clearer. Finally, after analyzing the big-picture, we came to a point where it's best to step back and let it "decant," until we meet up again to discuss our findings with fresh, new eyes. Executing this information on a practical level, puts it much more into perspective because the action of doing is far more useful than just observing. Our progress looks like this: 'Progress'

[kelseygracebond]

today was an extremely productive and insightful day, in so many ways. we dug deep into our clients’ brain to find the what, how, and why of the business. in the process we gathered so much valuable nuggets of information that i know we can turn into a great new brand for stand out talent.

...

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

This is a repost from my colleague, which briefly explains the experience we had upon gaining information from our client. I must say, the notes were great!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

It's much more beneficial to work as a team than ride solo.

Today was very interesting. After an initial meeting with the Intern Boo-Crew, I had the opportunity to see my team in action and all the wonderful qualities they each literally brought to the table! Kelsey brings a strong, take-charge and yet very likable type of personality to the team. Good 'ol Alle brings endless ideas and charm to keep things alive, and Tony is great when it comes to silently analyzing the big picture, then shooting it out in one clear, concise, and easily understandable sentence. Tony's process becomes extremely helpful when it comes to our very organized side-kick—Melissa. Although this poor girl fell ill before the start of the meeting, Melissa definitely brings clarity and motion to our team. I feel like I couldn't have landed a better crew. The team analysis above helps us to understand what roles each of us excel at and where we naturally lead. Although it would be ideal for each of us to strengthen all of these qualities, we should all maintain and live in that "Sweet-Spot."  My take-away from meeting with the Marketing-Director from Standout Talent, is that it makes the job much more easier to be excited about if the stakeholders themselves are excited about their brand. Not only that, but it takes a little pressure off having completed an action such as meeting with a client in person for the first time with a full team. Being able to obtain details about who, what, and why they do what they do, has proven to be very helpful to the design content body. Aside from learning that one of our sweet mentor's final day is this Friday, I'd have to say "It was a good day!" Boo-Yaka' team—and cheers to Emily!

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

It's all about the details.

To begin with, if you're trying to learn a language, you have to know where it's coming from and the purpose for using it. In my case, using JQuery won't work correctly if you don't have it linked properly while writing it up in Javascript.  Furthermore, it's not all about just designing something for a client just for design-sake, but rather solving a problem. Usually how we solve that problem is by tuning into the details.

Happy fourth ya'll! "America!" …and I'm out.

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Mondays are now "Bamdays!"

I knew our greeting message to our three non-profit selections were finalized and was on schedule to be sent out since my last post, however I didn't realize any of them would respond within an hour of our message. This was good thing due to the fact that our selections were becoming even fewer and more specific. To begin with, Tower Of Youth made it almost impossible to make contact with. Next, Standout Talent delightfully responds to our message within an hour of sending out our message. And today, 916 ink responded with disinterest—which singles out our final selection! This part of the process is nice due to the fact that we now have somebody to work with, as opposed to having imaginary friends to make "drawrings" for. The only down-side to all this is that our little wing-man Millz is out this week. Although this changes the team dynamic a little bit, I'm pretty confident we'll continue to progress forward because every member of our team brings something awesome to the table. By the time our wayward fedora returns, we'll have everything on track for her to jump back into. Only thing left to be said is, Bamboo better watch out 'cause the office is going to be on fi-ya! (Hopefully not because of the weather.)

[beingcreativewithbamboo]

Rise & Shine

There's nothing better than getting up earlier than the sun rises and breathing that fresh air to get out there and support a group of people you know are out there trying to change the world! This morning we all came in @ 530am to prep the office for a morning spot on Good Day Sacramento. It's been awhile since I last foto-bombed the media. Being apart of a community is far better and more impactful than flying solo. Learning more and more about the team I work with each day!