Bullseye Creative Blog

No this post does not have anything to do with Bullseye Creative implementing pre-employment drug testing. It does however have to do with some of our design work making it into the hit show Weeds (season 6, episode 2). This episode features the Botwin’s deciding its time to invent new identities, in doing so they find themselves in the bedroom of the moody teenage fake ID peddler “The Chinaman”. While in the Chinaman’s bedroom there’s a poster on his wall from the Emerald City Comicon with the logo and other designs by Bullseye Creative.

Overall we’ve been proud of the work we did for the Emerald City Comicon, it’s creative, within an industry we’re passionate about and the work helped make the 2010 show be the highest attended in the history of the event. Seeing the poster in the background of a Weeds episode is just icing on the cake.

Below are some additional samples of work Bullseye Creative designed and produced for the Emerald City Comicon:

Emerald City Comicon Logo

Emerald City Comicon Pass

Inall the work Bullseye Creative executed for this event included brand development, campaign creative, poster design, event program design, signage, Internet banner ads, print ads, bus ads, as well as TV and radio creative. Currently Bullseye is getting busy on the 2011 Emerald City Comicon design work, we’ve got a few new ideas up our selves…stay tuned.

MRJ Constructors had outgrown its original web site, the technology and design were outdated. The core objective of MRJ Constructors’ new web site was to demonstrate their capabilities for large commercial construction projects. Secondary objectives included streamlining updates to the web site through a content management system and featuring photography throughout the site.

Bullseye Creative designed a new web site for MRJ Constructors that featured full screen background images of large commercial construction projects. Without reading a word of the text, the web site imagery defines the capabilities. The content management system needed to be developed with special features such as photo resizing and cropping to effectively handle the portfolio photo galleries. Organization of projects and project types was also an important feature of the content management system and future web site growth. In over a year now, MRJ Constructors has been able to make all the required web site updates through the content management system.

MRJ Constructors' Homepage

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To encourage students of the on-line educational program Insight Schools to check in with the platform regularly, Bullseye Creative worked with partner, Team Soapbox, to develop and deliver a frequency participation program. The campaign awarded students for logging into their schooling system on a daily basis. Bullseye designed and developed a custom “Build a Band” Flash game where students would be able to interact with a progressively expanding collection of musicians, instruments, backgrounds, special effects, and more. In the end, an accumulating point total also rewarded the students with fun gifts and prizes. The “Insight Rocks” campaign was a smashing success with the students as the participation was high and the post-campaign feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Bullseye Creative developed a mini version of the overall game to be used as a demo. Elements of the game have been changed to make a quick demo possible, visit http://buildabandgame.bullseyeclient.net for a sample of the game interaction.

Screenshot From the Build a Band Game

Interactive online games continue to grow, Facebook has effectively leveraged this phenomenon. In Aug of 2009 Facebook had over 11 million daily users of Farmville (Source mashable.com). Last week Myspace announced they think (hope) gaming can save its platform.

Online interactive games can have objectives that range from advertising (advergaming info),  pay-to-play models or even education. One thing’s for sure, consumers spend a lot of time interacting with online games, that could be time spent interacting with your company’s brand.

With a quick run through the posts here on our blog its obvious we cover a wide…WIDE range of topics. I think that’s actually one of the things I like most about blogs, the opportunity for flexibility that is sometimes missing in traditional web sites. This blog post is really going to go outside the lines & cover the review of a Seattle laundry service.

The back-story, for the first time in my 35+ years I have an apartment without a washer or dryer in the unit. Its true…I have to walk outside, down two short flights of stairs to an on site coin operated machine. All the other pro’s for the apartment made up for this one con. As it turns out doing laundry has been a bigger thorn in my side than I expected. In the past I had tried taking my laundry to a dry cleaner to be done by the pound. It was kind of a hassle to drop-off/pickup & was way too expensive (close to $90).

Back in December I ran across a review on Yelp for a laundry service called Laundry Shark. The reviews were pretty consistent that the service was topnotch, reasonably priced & very fast. The only negative I came across was the confusing online ordering interface.

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I love AMC’s series Madmen. It goes back to a golden yet seedy time in the history of advertising. Overall it may be accurate to say it goes back to a golden yet seedy time in American culture. Having worked in Advertising & at a creative firm for a number of years relating to the show is fun however I get funny looks when I light up in my office or hit the scotch at 10 am. The only thing I dislike about the show is how short the season is. It seems like its over far too quickly.

Thanks to NETFLIX I got a great Madmen fix by watching Lover Come Back (1961). It starred Rock Hudson, Doris Day & Tony Randal. The movie included all the great elements of Madmen as well as a ton of the seedy ones…

Top ten highlights (or low lights) of working in the advertising/creative business during the 1960’s as witnessed on Madmen and Lover Come Back:

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Disclaimer: I received this app free of charge. However everyone can do the same, the app currently retails for free. (Possibly only for a limited time)

When I downloaded the Dragon dictation app I didn’t have very high expectations but the price was right…FREE. At best I was hoping for about a 75% accuracy and I figured I’d play around with it a bit then delete it. The user interface is clean and simple, the app doesn’t try to do too much.

With my first try I spoke 12 words and it got 11 out of 12 correct. The word that was dictated wrong was easy to correct with a drop down menu or opening the keyboard. My next test was to include some, well how should I put this…adult language. Dragon handled it like a champ and got 100% accuracy while included one “*” in each word. These tests were done in my (somewhat quiet) office, I figured the real test was while driving home. I was impressed that in a noisier environment the dictation was surprisingly accurate missing only 1 out of 10 words.

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Disclaimer: I’m a pretty big fan of Apple and the iPhone. That being said I was letdown when the iPhone launched without a way to sync tasks to & from iCal. When third-party apps were added to the iPhone OS there were some options available to fill this void however they were lacking in the notification department.  Finally the introduction of “push” technology addressed the lacking notification issue.

For the past few months I was (happily) using Todo developed by Appigo. The user-interface is good, the synchronization between the app and iCal was effective & push notifications worked most of the time. A couple of times I contacted Appigo customer service and got prompt/helpful feedback. Todo retails for $9.99 and has a four star average rating.

After using Todo for awhile I didn’t really think I was in the market for a similar app, especially for another paid app but then came 2Do…

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Persona (Per-so-na) -n

A fictional character created to represent a particular market segment

Inspiring designers or developers to create new products and services can be challenging. Frequently I find “new ideas” are really just reinventing existing ones. An example of this is I routinely meet with clients that think they have the next “Facebook”, in actuality they just have “Facebook” with a minor twist or spin. Who whats to be a member of Facepage?!?!

Most companies have in-depth demographic & physcographic information on their target customers. This information is useful but has the opportunity to be a much more effective tool for inspiring new products or services. Developing  personas that show the day in the life of target customers can be instrumental in hatching new ideas.

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