With the recent announcement of Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe, I’m reminded of how many of the brands I’ve created over the past 10 years that have disappeared by being bought-out and absorbed by larger companies.
Here are some of the logos I’ve designed that are either soon to be no more (e.g. Omniture) and others that only live in my portfolio:
I’ve not been active on my blog of late, but I have been active on twitter. I’m still putting together my personal opinion on twitter and formulating a blog post in my head, but it’s not ready to commit.
I’ve also been working on a total overhaul to my portfolio website. I’ve been neglecting it for much too long. (10 years to be exact!) I’m excited to get some of the work that I’ve done over the past few years out there and hear what you think. I’ve started and stopped the redesign of my portfolio site several times, and this time I’m going to make it happen.
A special thanks to those of you who regularly follow me. If you’re on twitter, I’d love to connect. (@bradmccall)
So you might have noticed that my blog postings were somewhat sparse this year (for the 2 of you who follow it on a regular basis). Beyond not having much time to present my interesting findings, I’ve been busy flipping a house I purchased in January of this year. I blogged about it through most of the process, and now it’s just time to put up all the “after” pictures to enjoy what I came up with.
I’ve got to say I learned a lot in the process about many things that apply directly to being a freelance designer. While working with contractors, sub-contractors and people who I thought were “skilled” tradesmen in their respective fields I learned valuable lessons about being on the “client” side of things. Perhaps I’ll share those in a future post. I also enjoyed being creative in a format beyond my day-to-day job of doing UI design. Picking tile, wood floors, designing window woodwork, picking carpet, tearing down walls, etc. all provided a tactile experience that the design of software lacks. From that standpoint, I’d have to say the experience was an enjoyable one.
I also wanted to mentioned that I joined Facebook recently. I had been interested in some of their use of the latest-and-greatest technologies and wanted to keep track on what changes they make overtime. (Their growth rate has been phenomenal!) I’ve already found many people I know there, and have enjoyed exchanging messages through their internal email, or their “wall” functionality.
In the blogs that I read, email newsletters I subscribe to, and info that comes across my desk, the new search engine Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) seems to have been mentioned quite a few times times. So in typical fashion, I did a vanity search for my own name (and my company’s primary product name for that matter) to see what results it would come up with compared to other searches in Google or Yahoo.
What I found, is Cuil seems to have liked my LinkedIn page best. So I did a search for my friend, and illustrator Jonathan Hull (who continually competes for search engine attention from an author with the same name.) The author guy (that “other” Jonathan Hull) seemed to control the first three pages, and then… well then… nothing else (Nope, no more results at all). So the first thing I found is the fact that Jonathan Hull’s website is named www.jonathan-hull.com or my website is www.bradmccall.com seemed to have no effect on its relevancy for the same terms searched for in Cuil. In fact, even 10 pages into Cuil’s results and I didn’t find bradmccall.com listed as any part of its results when searching for “Brad McCall”.
So I followed up with my typical rounds of search to see what showed up by typing Brad McCall Utah and while links showed up from other sites that directed to mine, the direct link didn’t show up until page 5. Seems odd, right?
So I tried another brand company. Glaceau (They make the Vitamin Water that I’ve been drinking of late – so it was a quick grab.) and voila! Their brand name appears first thing. (glaceau.com) Okay, so they got that right. So I tried “Dell”, and the search engine errored out. A search engine erroring out? More oddness. (I tried this again later and whatever didn’t work was fixed)
So at last, I tried Omniture, the company that has garnered my full-time employ, and a random bunch of links came up, many of which were a part of the Omniture website, but its corporate website was nowhere to be found in the results. If you ARE patient enough to wait, you will notice on an “Omniture” search will create a menu that has some awesome links to the corporate site as well as product links – pages that ARE MISSING from the search results.
Does anyone get how this works? What gives? And is this REALLY supposed to compete with Google?
I meant to mention this the other day when I Googled myself and found I had lost the top spot on Google’s search engine to a blog. (I question Google’s mixed relationship there, because it owns the blogging tool.), but today when I checked, I’ve even moved further down the line to be 5th. I’m talking about when you do a quote-less search for brad mccall. I’m number 4 when you add back in the quotes.
Yahoo’s still got me on top, so I’m good there, and so does MSN.
Perhaps it’s because of my lack of frequency of added material to the Daily Brad? Or my lack of mentioning my name - Brad McCall in my posts with relevant content? I’m number 2 when searching for “Daily Bread”, just beneath a site that I think has been using that phrase a lot longer than me, so that can’t be it. I’m still highly suspicious about Google’s blogs appearing on top, and then not in any of the other search engines. Conspiracy theories aside, I think Google may have it’s hands in too many pots to be unbiased any of them.
Remember when you did your first professional freelance job? You did everything from beginning to end including the design, printing and management? I was thinking about that mixture of excitement and nervousness as I sent it off to press followed by the sure satisfaction that followed when the client loved the way it looked.
Now I look back at my work in 1996 and say - wow, I could have done so much better. But it’s 12 years later and there’s been a heck of a lot of design I’ve cranked out between now and then.
My first true freelance project was for one of my friends from High School, well actually for one her family’s businesses. Her name was Amy Kelly, the job was a postcard for tourist hotel card slots, and the business was Red Garter Ice Cream Saloon in Vale, Oregon. After inheriting land and moving to Vale, OR, Amy’s parents had started several small businesses to cater to the tourists coming through town following on the Oregon Trail. This was one of them and they needed to get their name out there.
Here’s the results (these are two up).
I haven’t had that same feeling about a project for a while and I I don’t know if it’s the medium I work in (100% Internet), or the fact that I work as an in-house designer for the client (Omniture), or that the projects I work on are mostly team-plays with shared responsibilities and rewards.
Do you remember your first “professional” freelance experience?
Another first happened for me at the Omniture holiday party last month. While the party itself was another great event filled with awards, music, dancing, food and general merryment, I think one of my favorite parts was seeing my handy-work on ice.
At the entry doors to the party stood an ice sculpture of Omniture’s logo, flanked in the rear by green lights. Since this was a Brad McCall first (Having a logo I designed carved in ice), I thought I’d mention it in my blog and put up a couple photos.
Watch Omniture this year… it’s going to continue to great things! (Meanwhile, I’ve been feverishly working on the next iteration of my online portfolio. If you think that having the same portfolio online for over 6 years is a shame, well, I’d have to agree with you.)
The other day I had a co-worker looking at my LinkedIn profile, and said “Wow, you have so many Recommendations”, and after explaining how they came to be there, I thought of blogging about it.
Early last year I had a friend who had just laid off send me a request to write him a Recommendation on LinkedIn. Knowing full-well his talent and the work that he did when we worked together, I was happy to. That was when I learned about LinkedIn’s built-in ability to request Recommendations.
At first I thought it silly to ask someone to say something nice about me in writing. But as I began to request Recommendations from a few of my former colleges and contract clients, I found it was an excellent way find out from others just how good a job I do/have done as well as let potential clients or employers know what it’s like to work with me. It was testimonial, or validation of my work.
The LinkedIn feature of Recommendations - and how you used these Recommendations in gaining new business or obtaining a job - can be just as valuable an asset to your portfolio as the designs you put in there. Sure, your design work is excellent, but how is it to work with you?
Here are a couple excerpts from the recommendations others have given me:
“Having hired and managed several large, national agencies when I worked on the Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Blockbuster brands, I was surprised (and impressed) that I was getting top agency results from a team of only one person, Brad McCall…”
“…He is extremely versatile, delivering best-in-class results for every project he took up…”
“…It’s hard to believe so much talent can fit in one person…”
“…I give Brad my highest recommendation and look forward to any project that I can collaborate together with him on again.”
“…The first version [of the product user-interface] started winning awards before it was even out of beta, and the feedback on the second major version has been every bit as positive, even though the degree of complexity was much higher. Excellent to work with, good business sense, and creative work that is second to none.”
“…He is easy to work with, insightful and very good at what he does. His knowledge of color, layout, and visual impact are incredible. Though his work speaks for itself, I gladly endorse Brad as well.â€
“…Brad is a valuable asset to any project he is a part of.”
“…Brad has a built-in desire to add value to every project and company he is involved in…”
“Brad is the most effective person I have worked with at communicating through design…”
“…Brad has an amazing capacity to do it all, in copious amounts with consistency, quality and with a great attitude…”
“Brad’s work was some of the best I’ve seen. It was creative, artistic, and professional.â€
I’ve had several people over the years ask me if I did illustration. Most often I’ll say “I’m not an illustrator, but what do you need?” And several times I’ve been able to pitch in and contribute few illustrations to the cause on some projects. Since most of these never end up in my official portfolio, I thought I’d throw a few in my blog post.
As this is the first day of the new year, I wanted to use it as a chance to send out a big thank-you to those who read my blog on a regular basis and take the time to comment. I also wanted to list the top 5 most read blog posts that I wrote in 2006 and a little snippet from the post:
Top 5 Posts of 2006 by Traffic
Good things are going to happen in 2007, so stay tuned to The Daily Brad for more changes.