Bob Sutton knows how to spot a jerk. You might even say he wrote the book on the topic (because he did.) And he can help you spot one too, especially if that jerk is you.

You see, Bob also developed a 24 question self-exam to help the world ask themselves the right questions (i.e.: Am I a big jerk?) But the exam needed two things to give it legs. 1) promotion. 2) geekery.

As it turns out, Bob knew a guy. Actually, Bob knew the Guy. And who better to help promote the exam than master evangelist, Guy Kawasaki?

From there, the only thing left was the geekery. Enter Electric Pulp. And soon thereafter, enter the ARSE, an ajax survey built to help the world answer the right questions (i.e.: Am I big jerk?)

And, with 101,209 completions and counting, we’re ready to drop the viral label and announce that this thing has legs.

So, thanks Bob. More than 100k potential jerks are half way through their respective battles.

For those of you who’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed some changes around here. A new logo and a new, earthier site being the primary differences. We’re pretty excited about the changes and we hope you are too. I thought I’d take a moment to run through some of the thoughts we had when we decided to approach this process. First, we’ll start with the logo, which was the impetus for the whole redesign.

The new logo.

Here at EP, we’ve got a long and storied history of making tweaks to our logo over time. Most of those changes were relatively subtle. A font change here, a color change there, removing some borders, etc. This newest implementation takes our old ‘ep’ block and expands it out to include the full company name. This works well for us because we’re often tempted to use just the block for our identity, but we always wondered if people knew what an ‘ep’ was. While we’re not going to pretend like our new logo tells the whole story (We build websites.), we are at least getting the company name out there.

We’ve also changed the font to Trade Gothic, a true classic, but with a bit of tweaking (custom kerning, angled ascenders and decenders, etc.). This means the end of the road for the tired Zurich font family that I got free on my first Mac 10 years ago. Good bye Zurich. We’ll miss you. Actually, that’s a lie. We won’t miss you at all.

As for the 2-3 of you pining over the abrupt dismissal of the classic ‘ep’ block – no worries. It’ll be back soon. We’ve actually got 3 versions of the logo that will be used in different instances, and we’re cool with that. Ok, that’s probably enough about the logo. On to the site.

The new site.

This was a bit of a frightening change, to be honest. Our previous site garnered us a lot of attention and brought in bigger, better inquiries from around the globe. But that being said, the old site was fully doused in the Web 2.0 look, and while we enjoy a shiny icon and bright colors as much as anybody else, it just seemed like it was time for a change.

There’s a lot of talk in online design circles about the benefits of realigning instead of redesigning. I’m normally a huge proponent of that (assuming you have a decent site to begin with). In this case, we needed to make some pretty drastic changes in order to have the flexibility to get really creative without being subconsciously influenced by the success of the previous version. The old site was good, and we were shooting for great.

The structure.

Our work, which has always brought us our new projects, was relatively buried on the old site. We wanted to change that, so we threw out the old structure and started over. The new site is entirely based around our work. The primary content on the front of the page is our work, for the most part, with a few leadins to the other sections of the site as well. Once you get into the work section, there it is, big and bold.

We also changed the ‘about us’ section to team. We’re extremely proud of the pulpsters that we have, and we wanted to highlight them. The team section will change a bit as we continue to work on the site, but it’s much improved already.

The layout.

I’ve been intrigued by the grid layout concept and decided to try my hand, basically locking everything into columns or into blocks of content that encompass two or more columns. It was a new way of looking at layout and it worked exceptionally well for integrating some of the other interface ideas that we’ve been discussing around the water cooler. And no, we don’t have a water cooler, but we do have a fridge that we occasionally talk in front of.

The summary.

I don’t want to bore you with the details, so I’ll wrap it up. It’s been a very fun project to work on and we’re excited about where it ended up. It focuses on what we care about the most and what we’re the most proud of. But all that being said, we’d love to hear what you think of the changes, so let us know if you spot anything that’s a bit off and we’ll see what we can do. Now, off to get packed for SXSW. If you’re going, perhaps we’ll see you there.