Marshall Mcluhan

A godfather to the ideas of digital communication and information surfing is Marshall McLuhan. While I was studying communications in college I found myself totally enthralled by McLuhan’s book “The Medium is The Mesage.” After watching him debate other intellectuals of his time it was clear that his premise would be an important thing to review and study as someone who wants to communicate online.

The idea that my words, images, videos and websites would become a medium by which others learn and interact with me would be something that McLuhan would adopt if he were alive today. It’s amazing to think that McLuhan advocated TV’s in the class room and discussed the idea that in a few years books would be an antiquated form of research and reference because visual learning is so much faster and effective. I personally don’t think that we will ever eliminate books as a form of communication or record keeping. The instability of digital memory is far to great to ever totally eliminate paper records of information.

Reading this book is a good way for designers and developers to get an honest idea of what this communication medium should be doing.

Let me know what you think,

Zach “attack” Meyer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Moving and Improving

Attention followers of our blog, we moved!

On Friday September 11th we had an opportunity to finally start transitioning away from the old single page site and allow WordPress to do all of the heavy lifting from now on. Or at least until something flashier and faster comes along to replace it.

There is sort of a strange paradigm in web development and design, you have time to work for everyone accept yourself. This issue often causes company websites to sort of languish in a mire of never progressive soup. Great examples of people who don’t upgrade and don’t really care are cameronmoll and happycog. Both represent amazing minds in the web community and neither one has really changed the theme of their websites in well over 3 years.

This constant self-deprecation can be a sweet kiss of death for many companies. I can personally attest to my constant busy-ness as being the primary cause for my lack of change to the core site. I sincerely wish that I had more time to develop the ideas that have to a slightly more inviting polish. But perhaps my recent move from spineless entrepreneur to full-time web wrangler will grant me some real time to brush my site up.

The other part of the web that is always chasing me is the feeling that my best work is done for clients and not for me. It always feels like my concepts for other people are more well rounded than what I end up assembling for myself. I know that I have a hundred good ideas a day but they are always for others. Perhaps it is my future to be a muse for others and never for myself.

Thank you all for coming by and reading my white noise from time to time.

Launching 2 Sites

Just a quick announcement,

We recently finished production on 2 new websites. They are now launched and swimming in the wild.

Joynt Search Marketing – http://joyntsearchmarketing.com

Zach Meyer, website designer and co-owner of cognizant-design.com has finished a new design for joyntsearchmarketing.com. The new website design is focused on the concept of design following functionality. The design is clean and seamless. There is plenty of room to focus on the main attraction, which is the content. Many blog designs today are overcrowded and the designers are clearly trying to incorporate too much which ends up distracting the reader from the content.

With this design, the reader is guided through the content with minimal interruption. At the bottom, they are greeted with options to contact the blog owner and read additional posts. This frees the reader from having to scroll back to the top for additional information. Beautiful font selections, and complimentary colors help make the site esthetically pleasing and warm.

10 Thousand Things – http://10kthings.com

Developed on WordPress, this design and layout was designed to include a mini form in the column as well as a home page that would serve up decent CTAs that can be managed by the client. Dave Winget is another member of the extended Cog family and has a lot to offer in the ways of full featured web marketing services. He has a great library of resources, including us , that he calls upon from project to project. He has a great blog too.