Shameless self promotion
One of the 2009 MediaPost Online All-Stars
I found out last night that I have been chosen by the editors of MediaPost and OMMA magazine as one of their Online All-Stars for 2009. There are nine total recipients broken into groups of threes for Media, Creative and Marketing. It is a true honor to be included in the company of current winners like Colleen DeCourcy the Chief Digital Officer of TBWA and Simon Waterfall the Co-Founder / Creative Director of Poke as well as previous winners like Michael Lebowitz Found / CEO of Big Spaceship, Nick Law the EVP / Chief Creative Officer or RGA and Jeff Benjamin the Interactive Creative Director at Crispin Porter. The award will be presented at a luncheon on September 22nd during the OMMA Global Conference here in New York and inn keeping with my belief that God has a dark sense of humor I will, of course, be out of the country that week and unable to attend this event. Non the less and you can still see my goofy mug in the October issue of OMMA magazine.
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Making a change – New platform, design, URL, Atom feed and mobile version
First, I want to apologize for the lack of new content on the site over the past few weeks. It has partial ben due to the fact that I have been up to my eye balls in work but mainly because I reached the end of my rope with my constant problems with Blogger. I have been using Blogger as the backend platform for my blog for 4 1/2 years and lately I have been spending way too much time going back in to fix my site ever time they make a change in the code base that screws up my layout, keeps me from posting photos or content or both. So I have know for a while that I needed to make a change and those problems pushed me over the edge and I bite the bullet.
New URL
I have wanted to change the URL for the blog for a while and this seems like as good as any time to do it. The original URL of www.stephengates.com/blog will still work but it will be a redirect to blog.stephengates.com. I think less typing and no slash in the address is always a good thing.
Same great content now with that new design smell
With the URl and hosting squared away I took some time to test drive some new blog platforms and settled on WordPress. Right now I have migrated the 4 1/2 years and 700+ postings over to the new site but some of them still need some love to get them looking their best. The new design keeps with my recent design look which is an upgrade from the more basic and slightly dated look I had on the old blog.
RSS and Atom Feeds
The only change that may effect you is that with the change of URL and backend platform the old Atom and RSS feeds that were being pulled directly from my from my server without going through Feedburner are going to need to be changed. If you are reading this through your RSS reader or email then you don’t need to do anything because the Feedburner feed was already updated with the new RSS and you are good to go. If you are reading this on my site then make sure that you RSS or Atom reader is pointed to blog.stephengates.com/feed/ or just pull up the home page and re-subscribe.
Mobile/iPhone
I think the best addition is that I have added mobile and iPhone specific versions of my blog so it is easier to read on the go. All you have to do is go to blog.stephengates.com and the site automatically detect the mobile device and serve up the appropriate version. If you are looking to create your own mobile version with not a lot of work check out MoFuse.com. It is what I used and it has a good amount of customization and analytics to get the look you want and see how it is performing.
This is still a work in progress to get it back up and running 100% the way I want it but I think in the end it will be worth the work and sorry again for the delays and any changes that needed to be made on your end.
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CoolHomePages.com Site of the Week
I wanted to say thank you to the good folks over at CoolHomePages.com for picking my new portfolio site as one of six sites that got their Site of the Week award with the write up of “Stephen Gates’ online portfolio is a great example of how clean design, flash, and animation can all work together to create one phenomenal homepage.”.
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Sheraton does G.O.O.D. tomorrow in Central Park and around the world
Sheraton recently launched a new initiative called The Link which is a new communication and business hub created with Microsoft that will roll out to the brands 408 hotels across 75 countries. About a year ago I was asked to attend a brainstorm to figure out how we could do to promote the launch and I came up with the concept of Global Out of Office Day (G.O.O.D.) which is a one day event that recolonizes that successful people can work outside of the office and be productive from anywhere when they are able to use The Link. That concept of being productive anywhere will be brought to life tomorrow as Starwood’s corporate offices along with Pepsi and Microsoft here in New York will be doing business from a giant pop-up Link at Mineral Springs in Central Park. To kick off the day we will have the first ever ‘out of the office’ remote ringing of the New York Stock Exchange opening bell and will continue with speakers like Seth Godin and Mike Gamson from LinkedIn. G.O.O.D. will then move globally to also take place in Lisbon, Shanghai and Sydney. I am excited abut it all because I have never had one of my concepts come to life in such a large and global way so if you are in the area tomorrow stop by and see us.
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It runs in the family…
If you find yourself in Pittsburgh in the next few weeks I highly recommend dropping by the Society for Contemporary Crafts gallery space at One Melon Center to check out the new “Out of the Box” exhibition by David Gates. I think the work is awesome but then again I am biased – he’s my dad.
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SG.com Blog lands in the Junta42
I got an email over the weekend that my blog had landed on the new Junta42.com Top Blog ranking for this year at #30. The total ranking is actually for 172 sites but as the name of site indicates the top 42 get top billing. For me the best part of all of it is that part of the score comes readers voting on the site. So go, join up and vote now to keep it heading up the list!
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LuxuryCollection.com wins Adobe Site of the Day
Got an email tonight from Adobe that the new LuxuryCollection.com has won the Adobe Site of the Day and will be featured this weekend and Mondy on Adobe.com. Huge thanks to everyone at Starwood, Atmosphere BBDO and Electric Artists who put their heart and sole into bringing this site to life.
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The new LuxuryCollection.com
Through the course of my careers I have been faced with the challenge of how to create a branding system that would support multiple sub-brands but have those brands roll up to a master brand. It is a lot harder than it sounds. In the case of The Luxury Collection it is made up of 69 of the world’s most iconic and award-winning properties that each have historical importance and are completely unique. As such they all have their own unique style, logo, and brand equity. The design of LuxuryCollection.com was the first step and design work that was done in trying to solve this problem.
The redesign, which was done in collaboration with BBDO Atmosphere and their phenomenally talented creative director Arturo Aranda, was the first step in their re-branding and the creation of the brand’s new global visual language. The strategy and inspiration for the site came from the world of art museums and galleries where you can see unique and varied works of art from across history that are bound by the curation of the museum that brought them together and made them into a collection.
Explore the Collection
Explore the Collection brings this strategy to life with the properties displayed as slivered works of art against a large white background like the works lining the walls of a museum. You can either explore the slivers by rolling over them or search interactively by Destination or Pursuit which will narrow down the numbers of slivers displayed.
Global Cultural Calendar
The Cultural Calendar so that consumers would have access to the international collection of upcoming unforgettable events curated by each region. The visual design was created to mirror the visual language that uses a similar system of square to form the property logos in to the collection that makes up the brand. Any region that has an upcoming event will be filled in with colored squares so consumers can learn about and book experiences from Chinese New Year in Mauritius to the Bali Arts Festival in Indonesia to the International Aegean Sailing Rally in Greece.
Here is a sample of the final visual language work that was created out of the web site design work. This simple visual system allows for each property to retain it’s own unique logo and color while the consistent formatting creates the curation system that makes them all into the Luxury Collection. In print and online advertising this is re-arranged into one long line so the colors form a visual mnemonic so that the collection is always represented in every communication.
The site design and resulting visual language is one a body of work that I am really proud of as it as able to solve a number of complex branding and design problems in a visually strong and elegant way.
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Ego 2.0 – the new StephenGates.com finally live.
So it has been just over a month since my promise that I would finally get my new portfolio site out the door. So while work has been nuts it is amazing how having your wife’s in-laws in town for two weeks can give you a laser like focus on getting work like this done. So last night I finally pulled the trigger and pushed the new site live. The final work tally for launch was 35 clients, 73 projects, 203 designs, 35 videos and over 35 pages of copy. I am not kidding myself that this is some great design achievement but it is certainly a lot better than the 10 year old site I hadn’t updated in 8 months. It’s the first step in the vision I have for the site and I have a lot more work that is going to be added, more functionality and the open source section will be coming back with a lot of new code.
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SG Blog lands on the AdAge Power 150
I know the Power 150 sounds like a classic rock FM Radio station from Detroit, but it is instead AdAge magazine’s ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world. When you go there you notice that right now the list on the AdAge 150 is more like 646 and it grows and shrinks every every week depending on who gets listed and taken off. The list uses an algorithm to create the rankings based on the sum of eight sources. Seven of sources come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati with whe last as the editors own personal subjective measure.
My blog landed on it’s first listing at a respectable #512 and them promptly dropped three places. I can already tell that ranking number is going to be something I am not going to be able to watch everyday or it will drive me crazy. I do encourage you to cruise through the list because I did find a lot of new blogs that did have some really good content and a few that completely boggled my mind as why they were ranked ahead of me. So get out there, tell your friends, link to my site, favorite it on Technorati and save my sanity.
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