Author Ben Visser

New Work – Joe Ledbetter

We had a blast working with Joe Ledbetter on his spankin’ new website joeledbetter.com. Joe came to us looking for a clean, colorful and fun look that synced up with his own style. Joe has the ability to update every bit of content, from the store all the way down to the fun facts in the footer. His new site gives his fans an extensive back catalog of every toy he’s produced —  a rare treat in the vinyl industry.

Here’s a little about Joe:

Joe Ledbetter (aka: J.Led) is an artist, illustrator and toy designer based in Los Angeles, CA.

His distinctive style is deeply influenced by classic animation, underground comics, skateboarding and 1980′s video games. Over the years, Ledbetter has created an incredible cast of creatures used to anthropomorphize the human condition. With crisp bold lines and a vibrant palette, he mixes irony, social criticism and mischief making his work universal and unmistakable.

As always, it’s humbling to work with such immensely talented artists who are so respected in their field. Take a look at his art, buy some J.Led gear or just enjoy his cast of characters who are bound to put a smile on your face.

joeledbetter.com

 

Make My Password

Everybody needs a strong password, so we made it super easy to generate your very own. Social has been using makemypassword.com  to create secure passwords for our databases, hosting accounts, email accounts and more for a little over a year now and wanted to share the love.

Visit makemypassword.com and be sure to add it to your bookmarks bar to help make your digital life a little more secure.

Follow @makemypassword on twitter for feature updates and password related news.

Making the Office Mobile

We love our studio, we really do, but sometimes a change in location and atmosphere can keep the ideas fresh and the attitudes positive. A few months ago we sat down and talked about how we could make our office more accessible.

Over the past 3 years, we’ve relied on a static/standard setup that looked like this:

Any work that needed to be done outside of the office had to be copied to our local computers or downloaded via ftp and replaced upon return to the office. As you would expect, there were issues with files not updated on the server and local files not matching live sites.

With the addition of another designer and developer to the workflow, we started thinking of ways to make our entire setup more mobile and conducive to collaboration, no matter where we were.

Here’s what our new setup looks like:

  • Dropbox for teams provides the cloud storage and syncing for our main design files, fonts, etc.
  • The Mac-Mini is the primary storage account for our Dropbox for teams
  • When we are in the office, we work directly from the mini to reduce over the air lag
  • If we’re out of the office, in Tahiti for 2 months for example, we choose the folders we need to share from the Dropbox web interface and start working
  • Shared files are automatically updated to our Mac-Mini server and anyone else sharing that folder
  • For our website source, we now create local Git repositories and push updates to Beanstalk
  • Beanstalk acts as our central repository in the sky and allows us to see commits made by the entire team as well as pull the most recent versions no matter where they were made
  • We have a development server set up for each site we work on, and, once code is stable, deployments are pushed via Beanstalk to avoid forgotten files or versioning issues
  • For communication, we use a Campfire to share thoughts, commit logs and amazing animated gifs

So far so good with the new setup. We’ve enjoyed working from home, the porch, the coffee shop and beyond.

Let us know if you have any other ideas to make our setup more seamless or if you have questions about how something works. Here’s to Freedom!

New Work – Reaching Quiet

Social had the pleasure of teaming up with Reaching Quiet to design and build a new website that shows off their beautiful work, services and accolades. Here’s a little about who Reaching Quiet is, straight from the source:

Reaching Quiet is a design + build firm renowned for artisan work with concrete, steel and wood. We shape modern environments that are both timeless and sustainable.

Visit the site and get you some concrete goodness at reachingquiet.com.

We also did some on site photo shoots to capture the Reaching Quiet team in all of their glory.