Viral Video Wars
At last year’s Super Bowl, one of the most buzzed about commercials was VW’s “The Force”, which featured a young boy trying to control various objects, including a Volkswagen, with his mind a la Darth Vader. Here is last year’s ad, which was viewed over 50,000,000 times on YouTube. The spot proved so popular...
Grading the GOP Presidential Candidates on Mobile
Back in the heady days of June 2011, I posted an analysis of Presidential candidates use of mobile in their campaigns. My research showed that at that time only President Obama was making much of an effort in the mobile space. With the end of the Republican primary in sight, and having recently done a...
Barack Obama and Responsive Design
There is little doubt that the 2008 Obama campaign was the most sophisticated digital operation in the history of politics. It is not really close. Given how high the bar has been set, there was a lot of hype surrounding the November release of the 2012 version www.barackobama.com, which features a responsive design. Responsive designs...
Just Say No to Splash Pages on WhiteHouse.gov
As most of you know, splash pages are those annoying introductory pages that ask you for your email address before letting you access the actual website you are trying to visit. Having worked in digital for ten years, I can make two definitive statements about splash pages: They work. A well executed email splash page...
Happy Birthday, Drupal
On January 15, 2001, University of Antwerp student Dries Buytaert released the first version of Drupal to the open source community. Dries had originally developed Drupal as a news site and message board that University of Antwerp students could use for discussion and content sharing. Drupal has grown into the most popular open source Content...
Our New Year’s Resolutions
Many people use the start of the new year as an opportunity to reflect and recalibrate. We are going through this process ourselves at the Brick Factory. As a way of holding ourselves accountable and providing a peek as to where we think digital is going, we decided to share publicly some of our goals...
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
When I worked at The Bivings Group, we always sent out traditional holiday cards. The cards were amazing due to the talent we had on staff, but it always seemed strange to me to produce a printed card. As a digital agency, it seemed to me that we should do something digital. So when we...
Five Inspirational Digital Campaigns
I’m happy to say we’ve been pretty slammed here at the Brick Factory, so there hasn’t been much time for blogging lately. But I did want to quickly share some cool digital campaigns I’ve come across the last few weeks that inspired me (or more accurately, that I want to rip off in some way). ...
Steve Jobs Meets Paul Rand
The Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson features a great anecdote about Paul Rand, the legendary designer who created logos for IBM, Enron, UPS, and ABC, among others. Jobs hired Rand to design the logo for the first company he started after leaving Apple, NeXt. Rand, who was in his 70s at the time and...
Our New Office
The last few years we’ve evolved into a largely remote workforce. It is a change that has happened organically over time. It started out with a few employees who wanted to leave DC, but didn’t want to leave their jobs. We then had a few others who had kids and wanted to work from home...
Five Common Web Development Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
As a firm that builds things online, we often talk to potential clients that are unhappy with their current development partner. Usually the break ups are amicable and there is a logical explanation for the change. Fresh ideas are needed. Requirements have evolved. Personalities just don’t fit. But sometimes the client is angry and feels...
