Big news today!

For the last year, we’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to redesign their website. It didn’t take more than a second after meeting everyone at the Rock Hall to see that they are extremely passionate about the preservation of rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum shares an immersive, interactive experience complete with sound, video, and lights, not to mention all kinds of stuff from your favorite rock and roll artists. The music nerd in all of us wet our collective pants over Mick Jagger’s Union Jack cape (from the Stones’ 81-82 world tour), the larger than life-size photography of Jimmy Page in mid-backbend, or the phone in the Annex’s John Lennon exhibit (if it rings, answer it. Trust me). Rick’s mind was blown by the hand written lyrics to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, and David Byrne’s original polaroid artwork for the cover of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”

But all this needed some help translating to the web. That’s where we came to play.

The passion behind the “most powerful art form ever created,” to quote Greg Harris, Rock Hall’s VP of Development, wasn’t translating well in the online world. Static, informational pages dominated the landscape. Media types present in the offline experience were placed sporadically throughout the site. The mission of preservation and education of a legitimate art form wasn’t being fulfilled, and the story of rock wasn’t being told as it should be.

But today – no longer.

The experience design of the new RockHall.com shifts the focus of the site to the content that makes the Museum unique, both in the educational, historically oriented content we create, as well as the information about the museum and its programs. The Rock Hall is actively creating new educational programs, events, exhibits (and so much more), and we needed to capture and translate that online.

The best things come in eights. Hotdog rolls. Octopus legs. Sides of an octagon. Pizza slices. Cheese wedges. Loopwheeler hoodies per day. What? Oh yes…Only eight loopwheeler hoodies are made each day. Thus is the allure of the AW77 Loopwheeler, the star of the Nike Sportswear line. And now, Nike wants everyone to know just how much they care about these hoodies and how they have perfected them since their initial design in 1977. The same year that Elvis performed his last-ever concert. Coincidence? Yes, completely.

Enter AW77 Stories, our new site for NSW in conjunction with Vice. London stories serves dual purpose, much like swiffers. It showcases the AW77 along with several other products from the NSW line in situ. All products are modeled on subjects that live in a giant, interactive panorama. Further inspection unveils some beautiful shots of the products awesome details. We all really dug the two-color pocket zips.

The site also showcases several London influencers, curated and shot by Vice.

SPOILER ALERT: You can always improve on something great!

We’re now in our third year of The Barbarian Group’s collaboration with Kashi. We’re calling this release a refresh rather than a redesign. To clarify, think about the project as a house. When you do a redesign, it’s like tearing down a home to its foundation and starting fresh. That’s not what was needed here, for our foundation was already stable, our website was already successful. Think of this release like remodeling a kitchen, it’s an improvement of what was working, and an optimization of what wasn’t. So we put on our thinking caps and many months later, we’ve surprised ourselves yet again!

The countless improvements to the site are too many to list, but some of our favorites include: a redesigned navigation system, a dynamic footer showing the current community activity, a vastly improved commenting system, a simplified sign up and log in system, an improved look and feel, and of course, a ton of IA and UX refinements. And that’s just what the user see’s. The site is faster, more enjoyable, easier to use, and most importantly, easier to find what you are looking for and more likely to discover things you didn’t know were here. On top of this, we are already working on a number awesome super secret features and updates to be launched soon, so stay tuned for those in the coming months!

We love this client, and we hope you enjoy the site!

This is not a work of art, and that’s entirely the point.

I’m a designer. It’s my job to stay fresh, to keep my creative capabilities from growing tired. I love my role at The Barbarian Group, a company in which our motto is to find the bleeding edge of the internet, and see how far and how successfully we can bring out clients towards it. I am proud of every project that has gone out the door that I have worked on, but there is always room to improve. That’s where bitchin’ times that have nothing to do with a paycheck come in. Sometimes, you need to be able to step away from the task at hand and tap into something that client work cannot supply: a lack of purpose.

New rule: Take some time out of every day to step back and create a quick sketch. Experiment. Rock and roll. Open my mind. Keep it fun. Love every minute of it. It’s never going to be a work of art, but it’s always going to be worth it. Hitting reset on your brain from time to time, no matter what it is you do, can be a pretty good idea.

Interested in seeing more? Follow the rest of my daily sketches  here

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

So I had dinner with my friend Liane last night, and I realized that we never actually blogged on the site here about the amazing project we spent a good chunk of last year doing for Liane Mullin and her partner Desiree Gruber. And in talking about the project last night, and all that they’ve been accomplishing since launch, I was totally impressed, and realized that I SHOULD TOTALLY TELL YOU ABOUT IT.

So, in early 2008, we met with Desiree and Liane, who were, at the time (and still are) working at a company called Full Picture Entertainment. Full Picture is best known as the creators and producers of the hit show Project Runway. Full Picture is also a PR and marketing company, and their clients include Heidi Klum, the host of Project Runway. We also had the joy of meeting Jane Cha, the showrunner of Project Runway and another Full Picture team member. They had a vision for a new fashion and beauty site and community, as viewed through the prism of models. The top model’s inside secrets into fashion and beauty, as well as a compendium of their likes and dislikes. It would also include information about all the top models. Famous models would participate on the site.

When we met Liane and Desiree, they hadn’t gotten funding for their new startup yet, so off they went. They quickly met the people at Polaris, and they entered into a partnership. We re-bid for the work, introduced ourselves to Polaris, and got the gig. And by mid 2008, off we went.

We finished up and launched the site in time for spring fashion week in March of 2009.

Since then, the site’s been growing and the Modelinia team has expanded.They’ve built full content team, found themselves a CTO and a marketing exec. It was a joy to watch all of this, of course. As an entrepreneur, it was highly-rewarding to watch the modelinia team grow from 2 to where it is today. And it’s been fun, over the last 4 months, watching them improve the site, and the content, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Watching them acquire sponsors and grow their traffic, and improve their content. It’s been a fascinating look into online entrepreneurialism, and we’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Liane and Desiree have become great friends of ours, and we’re proud to have helped them fulfill their vision, building the initial build of the site, branding the company, designing the site, and offering a ton of flash and tech development.

They’ve brought it in house now, of course – many of our startup clients use us as a virtual team until they can get a dedicated team in place. It allows them to get going on development even before they’ve found a CTO. It’s never a perfect transition, but it allows for progress even in the face of daunting HR challeges. We think it worked pretty well here.

In any case, if fashion, beauty or beautiful models are your thing, check out Modelinia, or follow them on Twitter or any of the other social networks.

And thank you, Liane and Desiree, for letting us meet so many beautiful models. I think Toby’s stakeholder interview of Iman may be one of the best things we’ve ever done.

This morning I was passed a link to a blog dedicated to the full-time mocking of Pete Hoekstra and his dramatic tweet.

While perusing its offerings and enjoying yet another MEME it hit me. There is an unsung hero at work here. A behind-the-scenes contributor offering everything it has to the thankless job of delivering declarative humor to monitors everywhere. It is the heart and soul of the MEME genre. It is you, Impact…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the potential abuse, misuse, and overuse of push notifications on iPhone OS 3.0. I wrote about it on my site: Badge Blindness and iPhone Push Notifications.

Warning: I use a colorful word or two and disparage digital advertising. Needless to say, my views don’t necessarily represent those of my employer, colleagues, or industry. But you know I’m right.