Welcome to Circle Six Design

It’s been a while since we had an update here, so I’m making time to refresh the page. Things have been busy at Circle Six and we’ve restructured our workflow to be able to provide a consistently high quality product in less time. In fact–with tri-weekly brainstorming sessions and the tearing down of department divisions–we’re providing better production and creative than ever.

We currently have four interns, one carryover and three soon to be added to the people page. Hopefully we’ll find the time to do that before the semester is over :). Laura is still with us and doing some great market research. Rory, Samantha and Ali are all turning out to be great workers. We seem to have pretty good luck with getting highly motivated interns…

We’ve also just started a marketing campaign, this time for ourselves. We’ll see if our ground-level approach to marketing works as well for us as it has for our clients. If you’re visiting us after receiving our first mailer, feel free to use the contact form to set up an appointment to see more work and discuss what we can do for you!

So it’s almost Christmas, and then New Years, but you probably knew that. I suggested to the crew that we have some kind of party, and Peter asked, “How would that be any different from a normal day?”

January 1st, 2008 represents the end of our second year as Circle Six. And true to form, we’re shaking things up. We’ve rewritten our internal manifesto, revised our philosophy, and are putting out our best work ever. We’ve developed a new working strategy that lets us provide the absolute best creative energy for each and every client, and new measures have been instituted to ensure that every file, print, concept or project that leaves Circle Six will be something that everyone involved can be proud of. We’re working together as a team like never before and I, for one, have never been more excited about what we do.

So here’s wishing you all a happy holiday season. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your special Holiday Treat.

Wow, our interns never want to leave. Our current interns have decided to stay on, and we’re welcoming two new interns, Laura and Lindsay, who will be working with Christy on the marketing side of Circle Six. We’re excited to have them on board, and happy that AJ and Mike continue to throw themselves into harms way by showing up multiple times a week to do our dirty work. I’ll post revised descriptions and photos on the people page shortly!

We’re also working with illustrator/graphic designer Scott Gray-Burlingame right now. He’s currently helping us get out from underneath an excessive workload and we’re hoping that he’s going to become a permanent part of the team.

Our recent agency-wide upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2 and the addition of Apple Shake means that we’ve expanded our capabilities to include more 3d, video color correction and visual effects. We’re putting some new tricks to use already, as you can see in the new commercial for Adventure Cycle and Ski, which features a 3d camera pan on the intro and some fun lighting effects.

But that’s just the beginning! With our digital workflow and our brand new photo studio with a full size sweep, we can create video and photo-based productions that rival the best of them. And our sweep has a green screen, which means we can do weather forecasts! Just kidding. We can, however, use it to put anything or anyone in front of any kind of video or photo background. Good times. Just don’t ask Peter what we did with his test footage.

We’re looking forward to having more chances to put our considerable talent and excellent tools to work!

We’ve added quite a few new features to the website since it went live just two days ago…

In essence, we started with a design we liked and added some special effects. Now we’re making sure that the user experience and overall accessibility is up to par with our high standards. It’s a little backwards from our usual development strategy, but everyone has to try something new now and then. This site is based on Wordpress 2.2, with a lot of handcrafted PHP and javascript. Every page on this site should validate, both XHTML and CSS.

On the “Work” page, you’ll find that the back button now functions within the tabs, so as you go through the portfolio, hitting the back button won’t unexpectedly jump you out of the portfolio, but rather will take you back to the previous tab as expected. Unfortunately, this behavior is not supported in Safari, but it works well in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Leaving the Work page and returning to it will restore the tab you were last on. It also allows for bookmarking or emailing a link to a specific tab.

Within an individual portfolio piece, you can now access the five latest pieces from each of the three categories in a mini-tab pane on the left side. This just allows for more exploration of the site.

The “lightbox” effect when you expand an image from a portfolio thumbnail now preloads the image for less wait time after the background overlay loads. That should offer a smoother experience.

We’ve also fixed up the 404 (not found) page, and made it so that it will break your url apart into keywords and search the site for pages you might have been looking for. This was necessary because the addresses of a lot of our portfolio pieces have changed and we broke a lot of links. Shame on us.

That’s just the beginning… we’ve put days into coding this website and hope you enjoy the experience!

That’s right, we get bored too. We’ve redesigned again and launched a new website in a style we’re calling Victorian-Noire. It features some javascript goodness and semantic code, and it has a new section: People! We hope you enjoy getting to know the personalities behind C6 and, of course, that you absolutely adore the new design ;).