Notes from Electric Pulp

I’m pretty sure the GTD experts and lifehacking luminaries would all agree that having a climate-controlled office environment is the first step to finding / maintaining optimal workflow. I don’t think processing quickly in our 89 degree cookbox is possible.

So, if you’re trying to catch us for the next few hours, we’ll be finding our work ch’i in mobile office fashion. And if you’d like to find us, email’s your huckleberry. Unless you’re reading this, right now, in a coffee shop. We might be sitting next to you, stealin’ ur bandwidth.

Pulp showed up late to the lolcats party, so we thought we’d catch up by posting a few of our own…

thx 4 ur bandwit. kthxbai

The following table is meant as a quick translation guide for novice to intermediate surfers attempting to “grok” the new Web 2.0 terminology. It is meant to be cut out and laminated and is guaranteed to make your next barcamp, meetup, or geek dinner more productive and good. This guide is provided as a courtesy to friends and strangers alike – we’re just happy for the opportunity to make the world a less awkward place to mingle.

Based out of Los Angeles, Arkitip is a supercool independent magazine promoting art accessibility and freedom of expression. Last night the new version of the Arkitip Intelligence blog was pushed live, and it’s pushing boundaries as well (Electric Pulp provided the design and development behind the project).

Here’s the rundown.

Modern tech meets Lo-Fi look and feel
Arkitip started as a magazine in 1999 with a small run of 50 hand-stapled copies of their first issue. That same simplicity, combined with the existing Arkitip product site, was the inspiration for the new approach to Arkitip Intelligence. The Lo-Fi look and feel hides the modern technologies that make the site oh-so-sweet and easy to explore.

Blog, specialized feed reader, or both?
Because the site is basically a collective of different authors, it was important to let users customize their reading experience and manage the bulk. The new site includes the ability to mark specific authors as favorites, helping readers access their favorite authors easily in a river of news format, while still allowing them to access to other authors when they’re feeling rambunctious. We’ve even gone so far as to allow you to build and subscribe to your own customized RSS feed of just your favorite authors. We’re pretty pumped about it all, actually.

Street spirit, fade out.
It should be pointed out that Arkitip Intelligence holds great promise for a very unique and varied perspective on the world. The collection of authors is amazingly diverse, sourced from many different backgrounds. Post frequency is varied as well, requiring a unique solution to keep readers from clicking around randomly to try to find fresh content: as each author’s content ages, their photo on the front page will fade out, drawing additional attention to the most recent posts and most active authors.

That’s it, I guess.
Thanks for reading. Go check it out and be sure to come back and let us know what you think.

In order to make time for sophisticated follow through on incoming leads, we’re having to be selective on where we’re focusing our time. The following list represents a few that didn’t make the cut (with minor details changed to protect the innocent.) Think of it as our own little Gong Show.

1. I wanted to give you the opportunity to become a reseller of my…
2. Now that it’s already built, what’s the discount rate for my own truemors?
3. We need help getting our .NET app to…(work?)
4. I’d like to launch my site in 3 weeks and have a design/development budget of $600. Can you provide me with a .PSD mockup of your ideas to help me make my decision?
5. You probably already know who I am based on my previous innovations…
6. I have a revolutionary new idea to discuss with you once you’ve signed my NDA. In preparation, please familiarize yourself with http://digg.com. I want a site just like that and have a budget of $2,000.
7. We manufacture approximately 85,000 industrial truck parts and need an ecommerce outlet available in four weeks. I need your help convincing the company to spend more than $1,000. How quickly can you come out?
8. … In lieu of payment, I could add you to my advertiser list once the site launches.
9. I’m starting my own development business and would like to learn more about how you price your projects. Can you tell me how you’d respond to the following RFP?
10. My paintball team is looking for a…
11. We contracted the design and programming of our site through Elance but can’t seem to get it to work. Our budget has run out, but we need help getting it launched later this week. Can you…
12. How much to build a YouTube?

No offense if you made the list. We’re still flattered that you’d consider us to build your idea, for free or otherwise.

We used to talk at length about the number of inquires we felt we could field in a day. You couldn’t get near the water cooler without getting pulled into the debates. I think one of the Michael’s even wrote an equation to figure it out once.

And then Guy Kawasaki good-gamed us on his blog and set an emergency experiment into motion.

Long story short, we found our number. Actually, I think we lapped it a few times.

So, if it took / is taking us longer than a few minutes to get back to you, it isn’t you, it’s us. We’re working hard to get our [response] groove back. In the meantime, just know that we sincerely appreciate the time people are taking to tell us about their ideas. It looks like we’ll be working on awesome projects for the foreseeable future.

Electric Pulp has signed up to sponsor the Giant Piano in the Washington Pavilion Imagination Studio, and we just got a few photos from Chris Rossing over at the Pavilion showing that our signage is up. We’re going to have to plan a day trip over there and see if we can all work together to pound out a little Piano Concerto No. 3 by Rachmaninoff.

So, why the sponsorship? It’s for the kids, man, the kids. That, and we’re huge fans of the movie “Big”.

Some days you’re surfing around the internets, and you spot your company logo.

Guy Kawasaki is enlisting help from rumor mongerers.

I need some help from people who are in the flow of interesting and true rumors. They would be folks who can provide “scoops” that begin with a phrase like, “Did you hear that…?”

I wonder what he’s up to. … …

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.