The new Currant Briar candle from Tatine has been burning bright in our office. I was immediately drawn to it’s exquisite packaging - letterpress on GMund’s faux bois paper. Gorgeous! And the scent is absolutely heavenly too. I could work forever with this baby burning by my side.
Here are a couple of shots from in and around the Kymera office. It’s always good to surround yourself by things that inspire you.
Our clients ask us all the time if we offer any Search Engine Optimization services. We follow, as most good designers do, best practices (proper linking, headlines, image tags, etc.). Beyond that, we’ve found no need for it. As is often said, “content is king” when it comes to your site. So many SEO practices sacrifice the brand integrity and usability of the site for that top position in Google. So sure, you may have the most high-profile location, but do you have the best quality content and value for your customers?
Here’s a great metaphor and article on the subject:
People often use the metaphor of positioning yourself on a high-street in the center of a city when comparing SEO to a retail premises location. The most important thing to remember is that it really doesn’t matter if your store is on a gorgeous marble shopping street nestled in between Gucci and Prada… If it’s a shack with rusty metal racks and a rude shop assistant, nobody is going to go in, and if they do go in then they’ll leave again immediately.
-from “Create Great Websites, Without Any SEO”
There are worse problems than being too busy to create new blog posts. That said, we’ve been incredible busy this year, working with clients from a number of different industries to create compelling designs across all media. We’re very excited to showcase some of these new projects in our portfolio. We’ll be adding a lot more soon…we also plan to release a new version of the site that makes it easier to navigate our different projects. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, check out our portfolio of work to see what we’ve been up to!
-Kymera
Saw these awesome posters at the Museum of San Diego History (come for the history, stay for the mystery of Bum the Dog’s missing paw!) this weekend. Really beautiful, large-scale movie posters from the Howard Hughes era of filmmaking.
AS BROTHER EYE DEMANDS.
If I was in World War II, they'd call me Spitfire ('cause you know that I can).
Awesome title. Also, this was done in all colored pencils and it's gorgeous.
An oldie but goodie. We put this together while we were in college and had access to some equipment, and a weekend with apparently nothing better to do. It’s truly a coming-of-age tale…one of a poor sap who learns that if you want to teleport, perhaps your bottom line shouldn’t be the only thing you’re concerned about. That’s me getting teleported, and Josef in the creepy glasses and fake paunch.
Any excuse to play with some special effects…
Came across this when working on a video render the other day. It’s been a while since I taught it, or worked in video, so I forgot some of the hidden joys of working with super-large (multi-gigabyte files). If you’re rendering/capturing video files with After Effects, Premiere, or Final Cut Pro you may come across an error that essentially says “cannot add to file” or “cannot write to file”.
When you look at the file you rendered out, you’ll see that the file is exactly 4GB in size. The problem, most likely, is that you’re trying to write to a FAT32 encoded hard drive. FAT32 file systems are great for sharing between Mac OS X and Windows, as both can read them native. However, they limit file sizes to 4GB, which means you can’t write files larger than that, hence the error.
Make sure you render out to an NTFS (for Windows) or HFS (for Mac OS X) to write those ginormous files you get when working with video. Problem Solved!
Now, if only I had remembered that before re-starting a 30 minute render 5 times…
Since we’re all iPhone lovers (figuratively) here, we figured we might as well start playing around with the platform. Josef downloaded the Apple SDK and we’ve started on some cool ideas that we’ll be rolling out as we finish them.
The first of the apps that Kymera is putting together is Alias – The Random Name Generator. It’s a cool little name generator that randomly selects a name using the information from census data. This essentially means that you will probably never see a repeat, as there are about 500 million combinations it can make. Check out more information, and a link to download, here.
With the purchase of an iPhone, I am now officially a Mac convert. I’ve been handed my Kool-Aid, fitted for my Keds, and had the plugs inserted into the back of my skull that convert my life force into energy that powers Steve Jobs’ 150-foot robot that protects Cupertino from alien attacks.
It didn’t take long for me to warm up to the expensive little device. Much like the brain of a woman who just gives birth relieves her of the memory of the horrific pain of pushing a squirming infant out into the world, I immediately forgot the wallet-destroying task of signing up for the plan when it took me 30 seconds to sync my email and calendars up. With Google Sync, instant access was achieved and, shockingly, everything simply worked.
After years of dealing with Microsoft products that sputter and wheeze when performing basic tasks, using Apple products has been a dream. Naturally, entropy sets in to anything, and nothing works perfectly always, but you’re willing to forgive the occasional annoyance when the general experience is 90% smooth and steady.
I’m actually looking forward to using the thing, and it’s hard now to not look at my previous cellphone as some kind of prehistoric cave tool.
Barking up the wrong tree, buddy.
Check it out. One of the posters we did a while back. Don’t get to do them as much as we’d like, but they’re always fun.
Have a project? Click here to fill out our handy Request for Proposal
Phone:619-947-4229. Mail: hello|kymerastudio:com. Location: San Diego, CA.
Copyright © 2005-2012 Kymera. All Rights Reserved.
