Over a year has passed since my last entry. We've been busy :) Last year we helped Stevens Pass win "Best Overall Marketing Program" from the Nation Ski Areas Association. Kurt dove head first into a brand new CMS to help out a prominent design firm. We didn't deliver on that exactly as we had hoped... but I'm always looking at what we could do better...
So far in 2008 we've continued our great relationship with Stevens Pass. The Berlin office has expanded dramatically. Naming only a few, we've forged new relationships with S3 Graphics, a long-time player in the video chipset industry. As side projects, we created web sites for several businesses supporting our community. And we've been working with several startups as well.
Currently we're working on updating our own site, something that has been neglected in the past as we've been busy working. We have only added one piece to our website's portfolio in the past five years. That's really sad. So we've built a new way to update our current work.
After that, we're re-branding. Yes. The name "Giraffe Design" is over a decade old. There are multiple problems with it which I was aware of when I created it, but considering only two of our clients have not come from word-of-mouth (and that keeping us busy enough) I didn't care that much about it.
The biggest problem with our current brand is that Sven is a branding genius, and the company name I came up with (derived from a story when I was a small child) only means something to me or those I tell the story to. That's branding no-no #1 so I'm basically insulting Sven's skills.
So what's the new name? Well, we don't know yet. It will contain "GD" but as the initials, not the full words. We have one we like, but it somewhat isolates us from the delicious dev skills of Matt & Kurt.
Here's to a great year!
-Forrest
