ERA404 recently had the privilege at working with the branding gurus at CO-OP Branding to develop the site for DKLB BKLN, a new luxury Brooklyn property. The site features specifications about the units and amenities, an urban exploration of Fort Greene and a host of pictures, renderings and data about the property and surrounding area.
I’m a big fan of daily snippets of wisdom such as Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day and Wikipedia’s Daily Random Article. However the former, today, threw me for a loop. The word, pronunciation, examples and etymology are all correct, but take a look at the definition they included for “sommelier”:
sommelier \suhm-uhl-YEY; Fr. saw-muh-LYEY\, noun:
To involuntarily repeat a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus, usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder.
If the wine list is not online, drop by the restaurant in advance, look over the list and talk with the sommelier. It’s a small investment in time that will pay big dividends.
— Ernest Hemmingway, The Sun Also Rises
In the restaurant we ordered hors d’oeuvres and beer. The sommelier brought the beer, tall, beaded on the outside of the steins, and cold. There were a dozen different dishes of hors d’oeuvres.
— Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, “Ordering for a Business Meal”, Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2009
Sommelier derives from French, from Old French, “officer in charge of provisions, pack-animal driver,” alteration of sommerier, from sommier,” beast of burden,” from Vulgar Latin saum?rius.
This is hands-down the coolest video I’ve seen in a long, long time. The last video I remember liking was the one for “Bedshaped” by Keane. Watch it and love it as I do.
By the way, don’t forget to fall back this weekend!
ERA404, who has worked with author, Jonathan Safran Foer, on The Project Museum (his personal site) and Who is Augustine? (the exploratory site for Everything is Illuminated) just launched the site for Foer’s much anticipated third book, Eating Animals (Little, Brown and Company, 11/2009). This book, though focused on the same audiences as his fiction, departs from his traditional work in that it is an exploration on his paternal concerns for meat consumption. Watch the trailer, learn about the book and author and interact in the Eating Animals forums.
Be careful, though. He has already converted Natalie Portman. You could be next…
I’ve been following the success of UMapper (formerly GMap, provided by the good folks at AFComponents.com) since a client of mine asked ERA404 to build a dating search with results based on proximity around a geographic area. And while the site has taken a slightly different direction since then, UMapper piqued my interest. In their latest newsletter, they cited creating Google Maps-style widgets from any image. And sure enough, it works!
I started to think of all the useful applications this could have for my companies and clients. For instance, Lyrek CEMS, which manages our clients’ contacts, events and venues, could plot their contacts on a world map. Clients seeking geographic searches (such as the dating site, previously mentioned) could now brand and custom design their national or global maps. Game developers and Facebook Application developers could use this functionality for GeoDart Games and MapWikis. And who is to say that the map has to be a geographical representation of land? Any application where a user would want to plot points of interest/note on a 2D plane would work: It could be a hi-rez scan of an organ or anatomical figure for physician studies, or a zoomed micro electron slide of pond water for biological research. The possibilities are endless.
And with AFComponents/UMapper’s analytics tools, you can also create surveys, questionnaires, tests/quizzes, census studies and a whole host of other information-gathering applications.
Watch their video, here:
In 2005, Sharon Haskell contacted ERA404 to work with her on developing the portfolio site for Lorne Michaels‘ production company, Broadway Video. ERA404 previously worked with Ms. Haskell on the site for her motion, still-life and collage work, sharonhaskell.com. The site enjoyed four years of steady traffic until Broadway Video updated their branding and marketing campaign.
This is when Creative Director, Katherine Burke, returned to ERA404 to develop a new site that was in-line with the production facility’s new image. This morning, nearly four years to the day, the new site launched.
The site incorporates 80+ streaming videos in entirely dynamically loaded content, deep-linking through SWFAddress, daily news/press updates with advanced searching and RSS feeds, archival footage and information about the production facility’s legacy over the last 35 years.
Thanks to SwissMiss for pointing this story to my attention. From Smashing Magazine, learn tips and tricks for working with: The Passive-Aggressive, The Family Friend, The Under-Valuer, The Nit-Picker, The Scornful Saver, The ‘I-Could-Do-This-Myself’-er, The Control Freak and The Dream Client.
Of course, all MY clients are “Dream Clients”, however some of you may have to deal with these other types.