Media is our vice. We are all strapped to it and bombarded with it on a day to day basis. Whether we watch TV every night, update our facebook wall on our mobile phone, or visit a website. You name it media is anywhere and everywhere. We cast our lives online, rush home for a new season of Entourage or play video games all night long. We are media junkies, strapped to it like never before in our history. Media gives me a career so I’m all for it, but do we really need to be so media centric?

I’ve been to a couple different countries in my travels and I’ve never seen another country so focused on entertainment and media as much as the United States. Movie stars are the highest paid people in our culture, not doctors or scientists, which is seemingly odd. In media’s defense, when you look at your day to day life, you’ll notice how much your life revolves around entertainment. The more money that is made of people clicking an ad or paying 12 bucks for a movie, the more those overpaid stars and entertainment companies get. Don’t get me wrong here, I love technology but I think we need to take the time to disconnect more.

Put your phone down, don’t update your status today, or shut off that TV for a night and just talk to someone face to face. We so easily fall into the outlets and social easements that many companies exploit everyday, why not fight the man and un-strap yourself once in a while. Life tends to slow down a bit when you take yourself away from all of what technology and media has provided for us.

Media advertising works. They taunt you to click, explore and buy. They put ads in video games, in you iPhone apps, over your videos, and who know where else. As time progresses more and more advertisers are finding new and unique ways to advertise. Although not all are are bad and can be useful, most are misleading or obtrusive. So say fight the man, turn off your phone, get off facebook for 10 minutes and try something more basic. Plain old conversation with no bells and whistles.

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OK, your reading the headline and thinking to yourself, “this is just some advertising ploy to get business for Vectorloft”. Honestly, I don’t care where you get your logo done, but please don’t use an online builder or clip art.

There are lots of sites out there that boast that you can get a logo for 200 bucks. Some people would say thats a great deal, but your wrong. These companies are constantly cranking out logos for tons of companies. Use these types of cheap-o design sites and your asking for normality. You live in New York? Well someone in Texas could potentially have the same exact logo for you.

Not to mention an important part of the design process is guiding a client into a specific look customized for your location, industry, and overall spirit of your company. Logos and branding is important. They are a visual representation of your company. So spend that extra 2-300 bucks to get something thats fine tuned to your business. In the long run you’ll be glad you did. Or if you live on Long Island you could always just plop a picture of the island behind the name of your business and call it a day. Hey at least they will know where you are.

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I’m a big fan of an attention to detail and coding things in the most efficient manner. Lately I’ve been working on newsday.com and exploreli.com coordinating all of the css for the two sites, and have been complete deluged in CSS. So I’ve become somewhat of an expert on coding it and the best ways to execute a given look and feel. I’ll have to say, the rounded corner feature in the new CSS3 has been a life saver. Even though IE has still not accepted these standards, lots of people are in Firefox or Safari which are constantly gaining more and more ground as top of the line browsers. So if you don’t mind having square corners in IE and rounded everywhere else, take a look at the below link and forget about creating tables and slicing up a bunch of small images, its a thing of the past my friends.

http://www.css3.info/preview/rounded-border/

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Social media sites are the shizzle. Everyone is typing away their lives on the internet. It has become commonplace to life cast all of your activities, feelings, and desires to everyone. We all have a facebook account, wait you don’t? Some of us are twitterers and some are on both or on some other social media site with a collective of people. For some reason, people just love to tell all of their friends, and enemies what they are doing, watching, or liking at the moment.

When we think about the different ways people can find out what your up to, where you are, or how your feeling… its pretty scary. If you were asked “Would you like a stalker?” what would you say? Guess its easier nowadays to become one, but if you stop tweeting for a second and step back. Think about what your saying and how your saying it. You don’t want to air all your dirty laundry to the world.

Your creating a running dialogue of your life. An online diary of everything that is you with no lock and key. Anyone that is linked to you can access all of the information on you at any given moment. So when your having a bad day and hate your boss, wait and don’t tell the world. As part of a new generation of the internet we are given a great privilege. We are documenting millions of lives in a cloud of information in our history. So make it count! When the world burns up due to global warming, do you want some alien race, millions of years in the future to read how you ate too much taco bell and was sitting on the bowl for hours? I think not.

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I have had this post in my queue for almost 2 years now, but felt at that time it was a bit harsh since my experience at this firm was quite short. But I feel that if there is anyone out there thinking of employment with this business, I owe them this gratitude to post my experience and my disgust with the way this business is run.

In all of my experience I have never been in contact with a company that had no compassion for their employees. After a offer for employment I was brought on to assist in the design and development of creative projects for the company. As with any employment, the beginning of my experience was great. Collaborative projects and creative brainstorming the company had potential to be a long term home for my career. As time passed the company stated receiving more RFPs for a larger set of clientèle but the management of such projects was a more on the privative side. With any growing business the advancement of project management and team work is something that needs constant attention. Some of these key character flaws stemmed into a constant distrust and animosity towards any ideas for advancement I came up with.

Although I understand the concerns with monitoring employees actions while working, my performance in my designated position was alway to highest caliber. Ken Braun felt the need to monitor my personal email regardless of my performance. My emails were seen as malicious in nature and for some reason a threat to his company. As a prelude to this, we had made an agreement that any business I brought in I would receive a percentage. If I wasn’t to contact clients via email, how would I drum up new business…

An addition to the ideology and un-trusting nature of the owner of the business is his wife’s role in the company. I was not aware when I started at this company that the “Project Manager” was in fact Ken Braun’s wife. Working 2 days a week, and half days, Sharon thought that in some way she would be able to manage all projects coming into the company. Trying to help out I made advancements and suggestions to assist in the project management of the company. This was my biggest mistake. Like a Hen protecting her eggs she lashed out at my ideas and proceeded to shun me out of any company meetings or progress reports.

In short this firm is filled with a bunch of washed up designers with large egos. If it wasn’t for its freelance staff, the company would have no original ideas or the resources to create good work. The short time I spent at this firm my ideals were put down as not good enough, my work was never “good enough” even though the creative director had a style that is stuck in the early 90’s and mine was refined.

If you get an offer from this place deny it. If Ken doesn’t like you you’ll be out in a month. And if you value your ideas, and want to work with a team, you should definitely look into other firms on Long Island.

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