A few months back, we made re-thinking our web site a top priority. We needed a better way to organize, display and sell our videos. At the same time, we saw an opportunity for our website to feel like a Common Craft video. Today is the official launch of the new CommonCraft.com and we can barely contain ourselves.
A few things:
1. We need your help. As with anything new, bugs, typos, and issues of all sorts are expected. Please contact us, or leave a comment here if you see anything out of place, or have feedback of any sort.
2. We're using a video player that may require you to upgrade to Flash 10 (the technology that makes sure the videos load fast, etc.). Please let us know your experience with watching the videos.
3. Ten of our videos can now be viewed and purchased with audio in 5 languages, including English. If you're bi-lingual, we would love it if you could watch the videos and let us know what feedback you have.
4. We now offer a newsletter service called "Common Craft Video Updates." If you sign up, we'll send you a short email each time we publish a new video. We don't expect to send more then two per month. You can always sign up at the bottom of every page.
Overall, I hope you'll take a look at the site. It's truly a new way for us to present our work and business - something of which we're very proud (but not too proud to hear feedback!)
We'll talk more about them later, but we worked with two small companies to make it happen. Jay and Anastasia at Juxtaprose helped us re-imagine the site's design and structure while Lyal, Alexa and Vince at Outcome3 turned that design into a incredibly manageable, SEO friendly and purpose-built Drupal site. I can't say enough about the hard work and integrity of these folks - both companies are class-acts.
A few months ago, we spent an afternoon with Jamie Friddle, a writer for Seattle Magazine, who was putting together a story on Common Craft. We were so excited. A few weeks later a photographer came to take pictures.
As Sachi will tell you, the process added a layer of anxiety to her day over the next few months. What would the article say? What photos would they use? I'm happy to report that the anxiety was all for naught. The 4 page feature appears in the May 2009 issue of Seattle Magazine and we love it. Jamie's writing captured, in a compelling and interesting way, what we're all about.
I really love the effect of shadow of the previous image that is left on the chalkboard. I wonder what would happen if we tried this on the whiteboard? I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly as cool.
A few months ago I was contacted by AdLounge, an organization in Toronto, about an event they are hosting on June 16th called "Art from the Unexpected." The idea is to have 20 leaders, not formally known as artists, create pieces to be auctioned for charity. In this case, the charity is SKETCH, an organization that works with homeless and street-involved youth to engage in the arts.
The idea sounded fun and I was happy that I could contribute to a charity event. So, I began work on my "Unexpected Art" piece - something that came to be known as "the art project" here at Common Craft HQ. I had been thinking about a way to take the style of our videos and apply it to something static and came up with a way to use foam board to create depth and texture.
Here's my contribution to the event.
Toronto in Paper
It comes framed in a deep, 3 inch frame and is made from paper and layered foamboard.
I'm so excited to see how the piece does in the auction. If you live in Toronto, or plan to be there on June 16th, I hope that you'll attend the event and take something unexpected home with you.
It's true. Two years ago today, we posted our very first video, RSS in Plain English. We had no idea what we were doing, or how that video would transform our lives.
We had a tripod, camera and a whiteboard, and that was about. The video was lit with bedroom lamps and I was speaking directly into the microphone on the camera as I moved around the pieces of paper. The video was edited with Windows Movie Maker. It was inspired by a blog post from 2004 with the title "RSS Described in Plain English."
Of course, the technical quality of the video clearly shows that we had many, um, many opportunities to improve:
We posted it about 10pm on the night of the 23rd and by noon the next day it hit the front page of Digg, partially thanks to our first comment by Rob Cottingham, minutes after it was posted. We were both blown away by its popularity. Here are a couple of tweets from that day:
This blog post (which makes me smile) captured some of the initial buzz:
It's been 24 hours since the video was posted and we've seen 15,000+ page views, 800 Diggs , 350 Delicious bookmarks and 50 comments.
Of course, the big question for us became, can we do it again? Soon after we started work on our second video, Wikis in Plain English. Once that was complete, we started to feel confident that this was something we could do.
Looking back at the RSS video, it's a bit painful to see how rough it is compared to our work now. However, I'm struck that the roughness didn't matter. It was the message, the script, the communication that mattered far more than the bad lighting and sound. While we feel good about technical quality now, we still focus the majority of our attention on what made that first RSS video work: a simple and clear explanation.
