Why is there a fish in the header of this blog? And, come to think of it, why is it called “Running The Ladder”? I mean, seriously, it’s not smart to try to run up (or God forbid) run down a ladder. It just doesn’t make any sense, right?

It’s all about the metaphor.

This most recent redesign of the Bainbridge Studios website has been in the works for more than a year now, as we’ve circled back to work on various bits and pieces as time allowed. With our move from Seattle to Tacoma back in January of this year, we also wanted to make a concerted effort to play up a bit more of a local connection in the style of the site, giving a nod where we can to characteristics of the Pacific Northwest.

In revisiting our on-again, off-again, back-on-again company blog, we wanted to bring some of that regional flavor here as well. While past versions of the blog tended to focus a bit more of tech-related topics, this time around, we want the overall theme to focus on small business – specifically, sharing some of our trials and tribulations (as well as successes!) in navigating the waters as a tiny, two-person design practice.

Navigating the waters… there I go. With the metaphor.

Surviving as a small business is an uphill battle… a struggle. Much like (cue the horns!) a salmon struggling to return home to mate. As soon as the notion of writing about small business experiences (along with the obvious nods to design and our day-to-day minutiae), the vision of the spawning salmon came to mind.

For those unfamiliar with the path that the salmon takes, salmon are born in freshwater streams and rivers (including many throughout the coastal Pacific Northwest – Washington, Oregon and Alaska). As they develop, they migrate from their freshwater birthplaces to the ocean, where they continue to grow and reach maturity. Once ready to breed/spawn, they return to their freshwater birthplaces (sometimes traveling hundreds of miles to do so). They literally swim upstream, battling the current the entire way to reach their home, spawn and then die.

This return for spawning is known as the “salmon run”, and in certain areas, there are structures and other apparatus in place to facilitate their migration. These are known as “fish ladders“. The salmon literally move from “step to step” up these ladders to aid in their return.

Thus, the concept of “running the ladder”, battling against the current to reach a goal (in our case, the ability to sustain our business and become/remain profitable), seemed like the perfect fit for the types of experiences we hope to share as one aspect of this blog.

Hat Tip: The lovely salmon illustration above is courtesy of Canadian illustrator J. Derry and can licensed via iStockPhoto.

We may have to hire this one to do our taxes next year.

I just got my hands on a copy of Taschen’s new compendium, “Design for Obama: Posters for Change, a Grassroots Anthology”. It’s based on the website DesignforObama.org and features a poster design I put together for the project. The book, which features more than 150 poster designs that were submitted to the Design for Obama website during last year’s Presidential campaign. The selections for the book were curated by Aaron Perry-Zucker and filmmaker Spike Lee, and the book also featured a forward by Steven Heller.

My selection, “Know Hope”, was a hat tip to The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, who (despite being a lifelong conservative) took up the torch of championing Barack Obama as the best hope for progress domestically and to repair America’s image internationally. “Know Hope” was Andrew’s constant refrain.

You can check out a few sample images (posted to my Flickr account) of the book below.

Buy Taschen’s Design For Obama at Amazon »

I just wanted to take a quick moment to wish all of our clients and happy and healthy holiday season. Thank you immensely for your business here in 2008 and we look forward to hopefully providing you with even more great design services in the coming year.

A quick note on holiday scheduling: The Bainbridge Studios office will be officially closed beginning Wednesday, December 24th for the Christmas and New Year’s holiday. I’ll be checking email regularly and will be doing some minor work for a couple of ongoing projects (you know who you are), but won’t be maintaining regular office hours during that time. I will be back in the office as usual on Monday, January 5, 2009.

Happy Holidays!

In the meantime, the return of A+E is one of the first steps in a larger marketing plan for 2009. As new posts go up here over the next few weeks, you may well see noticeable differences in the site’s design. Considering it the Internet equivalent of living in your house during a renovation.

That said, I’m really excited about where this blog (and the site as a whole) is headed in the coming year. I want A+E to provide a unique perspective on the small business experience, alongside design happenings, updates on our latest work, and more. I hope you’ll find what we’ll be offering of value.

Cheers,

Tom Carmony
Principal/Lead Designer

I’ve got all three up now on eBay, along with the XO laptop we acquired from the One Laptop Per Child program’s “Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop” program back in December.

If you’re interested in any of these items, you can check them out now on eBay:

15″ MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD
30″ Apple Cinema Display
BookEndz Docking Station for 15″ MacBook Pro
OLPC XO Laptop

Update (5/28/08 – 10:15am PDT): The 30″ Cinema Display has sold, but bidding is open on the MacBook Pro and the BookEndz, and the Buy It Now is still in place for the XO.

Update (5/30/08 – 11:30am PDT): The OLPC XO Laptop has now sold.

We’re continuing to expand our footprint in the online travel sector with the launch of the newly redesigned RideFlyReservations.com. We’ve been working with the fine folks at RideFly for the past two months on developing the site’s front-end/user interface, which was then coded by their in-house development team for deployment. Click here to check out the newly redesigned site.

We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the new official website for television personality Vanessa Minnillo. Ms. Minnillo, the former host of MTV’s TRL and a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, has been working with Bainbridge Studios over the past year on developing a new online presence, which is now live. We’ll be working with Ms. Minnillo over the coming weeks and months on expanding the site and its content.

At the moment, most of the buzz coming out of this morning’s presentation is surrounding the new MacBook Air, Apple’s almost-but-not-quite-ultra-portable notebook computer. Weighing in at less than three pounds and barely 3/4″ inch, it’s clearly one sexy machine, and one that I’m sure will sell like crazy.

Sitting back and digesting this year’s event, I’m focusing on today’s announcements from the perspective of a small business owner; what did Steve Jobs unveil that we can really incorporate into our workflow to help us work better, faster and more efficiently for our clients?

For what it’s worth, the MacBook Air doesn’t really fit that bill for Bainbridge Studios. Would I love to have one sitting on my desk right now? Absolutely! Would it be the right fit for our technology needs at the moment? Not really. With it’s fixed amount of RAM (2GB, built into the Logic Board), small hard drive capacities (80 GB HDD or 64 GB SSD), it doesn’t have the horsepower to really serve as a workhorse or desktop replacement.

It would make a hell of a portable for traveling and for client pitches and presentations, no question. Heads will turn the moment you open one of those bad boys on the office conference table. Plus it light weight and svelte dimensions would make it easy to travel with. Definite selling points for the heavy duty business traveler, but at a starting price of $1,799, it just doesn’t offer the degree of power and functionality that would make it a good investment for our office.

So what did catch my eye during the Stevenote? Time Capsule. Time Capsule is essentially a new version of Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless base station with a built-in server-grade hard drive. It’s offered in two flavors (500 GB for $299 and 1 TB for $499) and is designed to work seemlessly with OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature (Time Machine is an automated back-up program that incrementally backs up your Mac every hour to a network drive).

We will be picking up Time Capsule and configuring it as our primary backup here on our office network. Currently, we’ve got Time Machine functioning on our two primary machines, backing up regularly (when docked) to a Firewire 800 and USB 2 external drives. Time Machine works pretty seamlessly when you’re connected to your computer’s selected external drive, but (as of today) doesn’t offer wireless backup.

Just the ability to have incremental backups constantly done here in the office, for all machines, is a huge time-saver and a great safety net to have in place. Previously, we’ve gone through a number of backup utilities, including our previous favorite, SuperDuper!, but all of them required an additional degree of interactivity that Time Machine does not.

In the words of the great Ron Popeil, we hope to use Time Machine and Time Capsule to “set it and forget it.”

We’re proud to announce the launch of a new website for Crossbeam Capital, LLC, a Bethesda, MD-based real estate investment firm. We partnered with one of our regular collaborators, Crossbow Group, to design and code the site, which went live earlier today.