When our friends at the Chicago Architecture Foundation asked us to present at the Inaugural Association of Architecture Organizations (AAO) & Architecture + Design Education Network (A+DEN) Conference we were super stoked. Then, when they asked us to give it on emerging social media, we were like “Heck Yeah!”

We started with the basics like “What is Social Media” and expanded to “How to develop your campaign” and finished up with “How to talk to your audience” and tools for measurement of your campaign.

Rather than keep it all to ourselves (and the rest of the conference attendees), we thought we’d share it with you…after all, it’s the social thing to do! So here’s our presentation: “Build a larger audience with social media in the mix”

The session was well received at the conference, but we’d like to hear from you. Leave us any questions you have about social media or the presentation in the comments section.

It upsets us that the final week of summer has now come and gone. Fall is upon us and we’re not ready to break out the sweaters. Things will be different this year! We know that Spring is usually when things change as the world comes out of hibernation.  For us, Fall is the new Spring at Stalelife, Inc.

Things have been changing here. We’ve had some people recently come and go within the ranks. And this change has been the catalyst for us to take a step back and look at the future of the company. As a collective of innovators and artist and all-around-awesome people, we’re taking what we know is best as a foundation and amping it up a notch. Here’s what to expect in the coming months:

• We’re in the process of redesigning our site to run on Wordpress to bring out the best in our work
• We’ll be posting A LOT more blog entries
• We’re always learning and educating both ourselves and our clients
• We’ll be doing some speaking engagements and giving FREE webinars
• We’re going to bring the best practices and emerging technologies to you through FREE ideation sessions

So how would one stay on top of all of the upcoming events? Simple. We give you 3 simple ways to stay in touch:

1. Follow us on Twitter
2. Add or bookmark our RSS Feed from our blog The Sweetspot
3. Subscribe to our NEW ongoing eNewsletter here

Keep a lookout for all the awesome new things coming from your friends at Stalelife.

Thanks,

Kurt Pennypacker
Founder/President

We were honored when asked by the AIDS advocacy group, CARES (Community AIDS Resource and Education Services) located in Kalamazoo, MI, to have us redesign their website.

Our Task

To design a site that is beautiful and represents their brand and their mission.  CARES  wanted to boost online donations, gain more advocates, encourage volunteerism, and have an online store all connected to a Content Management System (CMS).

Our Solution

We chose to build their new site on WordPress. This allowed a customizable CMS that moderately web savvy staff could use. It’s easy to use,  open-source, and has plenty of plug-ins for social media. We built their template from the ground up—taking our design, coding the front-end, and hooking it up with the back-end database.One part of our design was a nice, big, colorful “Donate” button to help generate online giving from the site’s visitors. The button links directly with CARES’ Paypal account.

However, getting funding and donations is one thing, but gaining voices to spread the message and getting folks to volunteer is another. To help CARES generate a grassroots effort  we connected the site to their Flickr account and Google calendar.  This allowed them to show off their new photos and keep their advocates in the loop with upcoming events.

Finally, CARES needed the ability to run an online store within their site.  So we beefed up the layout of their store using custom code snippets that have buttons linking directly to Paypal. We educated CARES staff through a series of online classes—led by Stalielife—so they could cut and paste the snippets and edit using WordPress’ basic functions.

The site has an overall robust feel from a simple easy-to-use blogging engine. The site helped sell out a benefit show of The Full Monty and has boosted volunteerism and involvement at all of their recent events.

View the site >

As much as we love the Rodney Dangerfield classic, we at Stalelife, Inc. believe that education is always important and continuing…including for us. Yes, we’ve gone back to school, taking night classes at the wonderful School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Our first class is Object Design: Sketch and Illustration (Tumblr Blog) and is taught by our friend Craighton Berman of Gravity Tank. It’s a great class on object sketching and ideation. It’s been great to work the brain with some free-form thinking about product design and usability. The class goes beyond that with exercises on communicating your idea through various media and building concept visualization.

You may ask…how will this help your clients? Simply put, by going back to basics…forcing us to breakdown our thought process from an old perspective from our college days — one that isn’t worried about budgets, billable time and deadlines. Taking a back-to-basics approach helps to gather ideas in a loose thought environment and will spawn new solutions or designs for our clients.

With just 3 weeks under the belt, I can tell this is going to help bring new insights to all of the future Stalelife projects. Check out some sketches and work from the first few classes.

Some notes and sketches from class.

Developing muscle memory for circle drawing.

Exercise with objects in 2-point perspective.

Our good friend (and now client) Caro is a talented artist and crafter. She constantly evolves her line of hand sewn and knitted products, and this year she approached us to help design her new brand and site. 2009 is a big one for Splityarn – she’s about to launch a book and more.

Identity: Bold and Playful

How do you create a new brand when the old brand is based on a childhood toy that the client loves?

To keep a personal approach (while creating a bold and recognizable identity), we created a silhouette of the iconic sewing machine toy and added a knitting needle to the baseline to promote her two areas of expertise. The rounded font is easy to read and playful, too.

Caro even liked out alts and went with the circle version for her store and (possible) future product logos.

Website Design: Fun and Informative

To reveal her new identity, Caro also wanted a website re-design. Originally, she just has a simple TypePad powered template that featured little customization. The new site was to be a CMS website where she could post thoughts, tutorials, showcase her products and interact with friends and clients. Our overall goal with the design was showcase a wide range of content on the home page without overwhelming a visitor.

To enable a more robust set of features, the new site is built in WordPress. (See our previous post about why we love WP.) We approached the design by utilizing a ‘magazine-style’ template called Arthemia.

This magazine style layout displays a main article with thumbnails for latest news, a small side bar with the latest product info, blurbs of the latest posts, category browsing, ad space, Social Media integration with Twitter and a widget-ready area for RSS feeds. The main Splityarn site linkes to her store, RSS feeds, info about Splityarn, and her full photo gallery from Flickr. (She’s an avid photographer.)

Store Design: Powered by Big Cartel

Splityarn uses BigCartel to power online shoping. This is our first time using BigCartel and we love it – you can create you own store, upload product photos and text, set discount codes, add sale and clearance items, manage inventory and you can customize one of their templates or design your own using their API. They help integrate with Paypal to process your order payments too.

Thanks, Caro. We can’t wait to watch your brand gain even more momentum.