we’ve come a long way in our first year here at the design studio.  we’ve established our style of artistic and creative website design on a growing list of websites.  so now it’s time to apply that same attitude of uniqueness and not playing by the rules to our brand.  i hate using that word, but it fits — we do something different, we make websites into art, and finding us should not be a challenge.  so in january, you will start seeing some changes around here:  thinktank studios will be exclusively our clothing and various physical products.  we are changing the name of our design studio to Arcane Palette Creative Design.  we feel like this name speaks to what we do and the types of things we create and are interested in.  arcane, like a lost artifact, a one-of-a-kind treasure.  palette, which can either refer to the tools used by an artist or the range of techniques used  to create art.  we’re excited about our new name and about being easier to name and to find, and we feel like this will only benefit our clients.

we’ve been making changes and improvements since moving the site to a more robust host.  one of those additions is an official theme gallery, where we are showcasing our free and premium themes, in addition to the different looks for the thinktank site.  (this is instead of the theme switcher which seemed to be causing some page caching issues on the old site.)  we’ve got a couple themes up there now and we will be adding more, so stay tuned!

the other new development is our new line of products.  clothing — particularly tshirts — is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and zazzle makes it easy to set up shop and start printing your designs on a variety of surfaces, which we’re excited about.

It’s time.  As much as I like the freedom of being able to manipulate the server environment directly, having the server about a foot away from where I type this, it’s time to move the site to a new home.  Our feeble internet connection isn’t nearly sufficient enough to support our burgeoning business.  Maybe someday someone will lay fiber-optic cable and we can again host our site on our own dedicated server, but until then, faster and more stable is better.  We are using 1and1 which has flexible plans and options for just about any kind of website or webmaster, including low price dedicated servers.  These guys are good, they have huge 2 page ads in Wired Magazine and my experience with them has been flawless.  What you really want in a web host is for them to be invisible — you want to do your own thing and never even know they’re there.  1and1 has given me that, and so, in my book, they’re up there with some of the best hosts I’ve dealt with.

There’s a few things that will be missing with this move.  I had a lot of development and test and sandbox environments on the old site and I don’t think I’ll be moving those over.  However, for theme development, I’m planning on using WordpressMU and giving each theme it’s own blog — which will include themes we build for clients.

The other thing that will be making the move (although it may be down for a bit) is erin’s sketchbook, which I’m really trying to push as a way to showcase her art.  My own blog and domain, jazzsequence, will stay on our local server for the time being, but eventually I’ll move that, too.

Welcome to the world of freelancing:  one week we’re struggling, with no projects on the horizon.  Reality chose that week for my monitor of 8 years to finally die, and I’ve been using the MacBook for designing since (which isn’t ideal since the color isn’t as good and changes depending on what angle the monitor is at), and we don’t really have the resources to get a new monitor yet.  But lo, this week we scored a few really exciting projects.  So look for the sites we made to expand over the next couple of weeks.

I changed the portfolio to use a really awesome gallery by Airtight Interactive, so you should head over to their site and give them lots of business and money because they deserve it.

I added the “Metallic” theme which was ported from the old site and I’ve added in a pretty titles wp plugin (ttftitles) that makes an image from the text using fonts you upload — i like it a lot.  I have one more theme I need to port over and then I think we may be done with the redesign — we might do two more themes, one from each of us…we’ll see…

It was getting a bit insane trying to manage all of our projects, so I deployed a project manager application powered by WebCollab.  I’m really impressed.  It’s got a smooth, easy-to-use interface and will make managing project easier for us, and allow us to share our progress with our clients.  You can take a look (at the login page…) here: ThinkTank Studio Project Tracker — if you are a client and want access, let us know.

In other news, I added some more stuff to the portfolio.  Some cd covers, book covers, and real art, as well as business cards we’ve done.

we had some downtime last night due to a power outage.  luckily it was sunday night at about 10 and after some fiddling i was able to get the server back up this morning at 6:30-ish mst.  i’m kind of disappointed, anyway, though because we had a pretty good run of uptime — 180 days or something.  oh well.