Over the years, Stumptown’s become a central haven for independent thinkers with a quirk and a twist, producing some of the most darkly observant and refreshingly honest talents of our time.

That is what the Cut&Paste website says about Portland. And while I'd have to concur, tonight's competition will certainly be telling.

If you are unfamiliar with Cut&Paste, it is a digital design tournament taking place in 16 cities this year ending with a global championship in New York City. New this year are 3D and Motion competitions, in addition to the legacy 2D competition.

I kicked myself for not attending last year, especially once Tim May, the winner of last year's 2D competition joined us at XPLANE as Senior Interactive Designer.

If you can't make it to the competition tonight, you can watch the live webcast on the Cut and Paste website.

Yes indeed, "this nook in the Northwest, the City of Roses, is the new bohemia." Looking forward to seeing it tonight.

XPLANE Corporate Website

URL:

http://www.xplane.com

Synopsis:

XPLANE is an information design consultancy that drives better results for many of the world’s leading corporations including Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, U.S. Department of National Intelligence, U.S. Marines, Nike and BP through visual thinking and design.

Working with the internal marketing and design teams at XPLANE, the entire website was built on the WordPress platform utilizing a custom developed theme to match XPLANE's branding. Content highlights include project case studies, company news, and an online store.

The internal marketing team handles all day-to-day updates utilizing the content management features of WordPress, allowing them to eaisly add, edit and remove all content on the website. Since the site launch XPLANE has also seen significant increase in search engine optimization (SEO) and daily unique page views.

The site is listed in the WordPress Showcase, an honor since only a relatively small number of submissions are added to the showcase.

The XPLANE e-store:

Case studies:

Company news:

To see the full site, visit http://www.xplane.com.

The project is called "A Website Named Desire" and we at XPLANE created a poster (note: not the related website built in Silverlight) of the entire process a typical agency would go through to create a large website. While the poster does not directly mention the Microsoft suite of tools, it does do an amazing job of showing the whole ecosystem in an engaging, visual storytelling manner. Fairly humorous, too -- be sure to spend some time checking out all the various little details.

If you'd like to check out the whole poster, you can download a PDF of it (6 MB) here, or visit Microsoft at one of the upcoming conferences where they will be presenting it. You can find a list of those conferences on the supporting website.

If you plan on attending Flash on the Beach, shoot me an email (info [at] jonnymac [dot] com) and we'll meet up for a drink.

¡adiós!

I had previously posted about working with Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod on this project at XPLANE, and I'm very excited about the new version. In fact, Scott has already previewed the video at several large lectures to rave reviews.

As this video is meant to be a launching point for more discussions on the topics within, I suggest you visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com and join the conversation. Scott McLeod has posted more information on his blog, Karl Fisch has his thoughts on his blog, and Dave Gray (founder of XPLANE) is also looking for feedback on his blog.

[Update: After the first two days the video has already been viewed over 5000 times!]
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pMcfrLYDm2U" height="350" width="425" /]

We're taking what was a PowerPoint presentation (turned video), updating the content with new stats and thoughts as provided by Karl and Scott with some consulting help from us, and then redoing the graphics/design. Instead of limiting ourselves with PowerPoint we're designing in Illustrator, animating in Flash, then exporting to QuickTime. That said, I'm excited to have a project that will allow me to try out several parts of the new CS3 workflow so quickly.

I believe the original video has been accepted to a film festival in Telluride, Colorado, and the organizers will be taking a look at the new one once completed and possibly presenting it. So keep your eyes peeled to Karl and Scott's blog, YouTube, and of course here for more information as we wrap up this sequel.

This is an exciting project, and I'm glad to be a part of it!

Mordy Golding, a former Product Manager for Illustrator during the CS and CS2 revs, has posted a new video tour podcast of Illustrator CS3 over on his blog Real World Illustrator. The video does a great job of explaining the new features in a way that even makes sense to non-expert Illustrator users such as myself.

At XPLANE our designers and concept developers use Illustrator almost exclusively, so I've had to become a lot more familiar with the program. With the current CS2 version getting artwork from Illustrator to Flash is a pain, and I spend roughly 15-20% of my time just manhandling graphics before I can even begin to think about ActionScripting.

I can't explain how happy I am to have pre-ordered my copy of the CS3 suite so I can spend my time doing what I do best: code. Flash Developers, we owe Adobe big for this release.

[podcast link found via John Nack's blog]

Mike Downey has more information and a quick-and-dirty feature listing on his website:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/md/archives/2007/03/announcing_flas.cfm

We try to eat our own dog food at XPLANE as often as possible, and thus a visual map of our culture was created for internal use. Not only does the map describe all the core values of the company in a clear and concise manner, but by making it visual it is also remembered with ease.

More information is available on Dave Gray's blog (Dave is the CEO and founder of XPLANE):
http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2007/01/xplane-culture-map.html

and a marked up and larger version with Dave's notes is available here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/355002597/