Drew Schug Industries

Managing your brand in a community of followers, fans, friends and your relationship with them can be a difficult task. @jaffejuice offers up a great post about managing your brand and how you should and should not handle it with your community.

If you’re still thinking of your consumers as spoiled, obstreperous, immature and demanding children, you’re probably setting yourself up for a visit from SOCIAL (media) SERVICES.

Saturday morning Rachelle delivered our beautiful baby girl Hazel. Born at 8:07am March 27th and weighing 7 lbs 6 oz. Mom is healthy. Hazel is getting a few extra tests but doing well. We think she is one of the most beautiful people we have ever met.

Notice I left out the word statement in the headline. When a person or business creates a mission statement it should mean they are on a mission. It means they are doing. All to often the written words and the actions are different. Businesses sometimes take for granted the mission and put out some great fluff that sounds good from the legal team and corporate heads but the staff doesn’t take the time to even read. Or worse the customer doesn’t know who you are. When you decide to put your mission into a statement make sure:

• It is simple and easy to understand. Simplicity is best and while you can have a page of mission, the simpler you can make it – the more easy it is for your team to get it.
• You can commit to it every day and not merely words that sound good. All to often you come to a website where the company’s mission is to provide the best business product at the least expensive in the cleanest environment. Is this true? If not, maybe rethink this to cover one thing, and one thing well. The clean environment and the least expensive are all part of the one thing. Is it the best service? Is it the best product? What do you want your customers walking away and saying? That’s your mission.
• The mission is ingrained in your company’s culture and that the highest, lowest on the corporate ladder and all family members or employee’s in between can help achieve the mission and feel a part of it.
• Reflect your mission in your brand’s online and offline presence and it will become part of your brand. If you want to provide the best customer service for widgets, how does your website reflect that? Does it?

If you can enforce a good mission from within you probably won’t need an over-fluffed outward-facing mission statement. Customers will know and respect you by your actions. Your employees, website and marketing materials will show this. Having a mission isn’t about writing. Missions are about actions. Missions are about doing.

I recently purchased the Macheist nano bundle. It seems well worth the money so far, but it’s tough to tell if I will ever use some of the software again. Clippings, RipIt and MacJournal all seem to have some promise. I think my wife will enjoy the games once they are ulocked. As for blogging – this was written with Mac Journal, mainly as a test and also to see if it helps focus my blogging efforts. The bundle is only $19.95 and a portion of proceeds go to the charity of your choice. I specifically sent mine to the Prevent Cancer Fund in honor of Karen Proff, the mother of a good friend of mine who lost her battle with cancer last week. She will be missed.

If you get a chance check out the bundle, seems like you always find one or two gems that make the purchase worth while.

An excellent, timely post by Richard Leggett about HTML 5, Flash and the evolving web. This covers a lot of the emerging struggles and is extremely relevant to anyone designing and developing websites or rich internet applications. It will certainly be interesting to see how the rich media space evolves over the next 6-12 months.

The world will move to HTML X when Flash X is not needed, it is a non-argument, no amount of insane zealous preaching from within the idealist world of either side will make this happen in the real world. The market will use whatever tools provide the best solutions for the best return on investment.

The World is Moving to HTML5

Drew Schug Industries is not affiliated with Richard Leggett or Adobe.

On February 2, 2010 MacKenzie River is hosting a scholarship drive for the MSU School of Art. 20% of the proceeds will go to a scholarship. And you get a tasty pizza for lunch or dinner.

Here is the note from Jeffrey Conger

Hey everyone,

Come into the downtown MacKenzie River Pizza location for lunch or dinner on Tuesday February 2nd to support the MSU Graphic Design Scholarship Fund. On this special day any purchase you make between the hours of 11:00 am and 10:00 pm will contribute 20% or more to the scholarship fund. Enjoy hot, delicious pizza covered in cheese with delectable and savory sauce bubbling beneath the crispy and scrumptious toppings and or any other menu item. What could be better, something as fantastic as a delicious meal with friends can only be improved by the warm feeling of helping others.

It’s easy, all you have to do is skitter down to MacKenzie River on Main Street anytime on February 2nd and purchase a satisfying and savory repast. Once you have finished your delightful meal, present your waitperson with the special coupon, and voila! You have just contributed to the support of scholastic artistry! The more business brought into MacKenzie River, the more cheddar flowing into the scholarship fund. So gather up a posse of friends and come down on Tuesday.

Remember it’s a simple goal, to increase the amount of funding for undergraduate scholarships, thus keeping the best and brightest right here in Montana. It’s so easy we have attached the coupons to this email. Just print, eat and support the scholarship fund. The coupons are good for dine-in as well as take-out food during the special fundraising day.

Please forward this to all your friends. Hope to see you there!

MacKenzie River Pizza is located at 232 East Main Street, Bozeman MT. For take out orders call (406) 587-0055.
Special Fundraiser Tuesday February 2nd from 11 am to 10 pm.

You may have noticed, but 2 years later, I finally updated my website. Please leave a critique in the comments below if you feel so inclined. This revision has been in the works for some time. So much has changed over the course of two years time personally and professionally. It is exciting to work with all the wonderful people

Personal thanks to Kira Stoops at Flying Bicycle for helping line me out on some of the writing. If you need a talented content writer who is professional, intelligent and great to work with, I highly recommend her.

I’m still working out some of the design and content details and feel strongly that I can make some improvements to my own site as time allows. Hopefully this gives me a flexible platform to start adding some more interesting features, but for now, it is what it is and feel it is a great improvement over my prior website.

With all the talk at this year’s CES about Natural User Interfaces, Apple’s iPhone, Magic Mouse and the seemingly recent mass adaptation of multi-touch interfaces, it might be time that the computer mouse finally comes to it’s demise. After all even the most environmentally protected field mice only live to be 4 years old. The personal computer’s mouse has had a long and glorious life and may have an even shorter life span with the launch of technological predators that have appeared.

So is this the year that the computer mouse dies? It makes me wonder how these technological advances in touch screens will effect user interfaces, the design of them and how people will adapt to the emerging technologies.

What will become of the GUI and are designers incorporating new usability into the designs in which they create?

Please note that the feed for my blog has been updated. Use the subscribe on the right hand side to get the latest updates. Or have it delivered via email. Thanks for your support.

Recommended for my Art 366 design class and for any print designer looking to make a change to web design.
Oh yeah and it’s free. Thank you Mr. Zeldman.

Taking Your Talents To The Web by Jeffery Zeldman