We’re now being represented by Executive Producer Amy Miranda of lunch inc.  Amy has worked extensively in the digital space.  She’s worked as an editor, designer, technology manager, technical services director, project manager and interactive consultant.  She’s been at companies including iXL, CNN, U8TV/Alliance Atlantis, Activate, Henderson Bas and TAXI.

Not only are we working with Amy now, but we’re a part of the Lunch family.  The roster is made up of incredibly talented group designers, production and post production companies, developers and artists.  These folks have mad skill sets ranging from web to motion design to technical services to illustration and sound design.

The digital media's version of the Brady Bunch

You should definitely check out the work of our lunch mates:

Alchemy – http://www.helloalchemy.com
Alex McLeod – http://www.alxclub.com
Bijou – http://www.bijoueditorial.com
Broader Than Broadway – http://www.broader.com
Element – http://www.el-e-ment.ca
Fatbox – http://www.fatbox.ca
Mark Gervais – http://www.markgervais.com
Nick Goso – http://www.planetgoso.com
Imported Artists – http://www.importedartists.com
Indusblue – http://www.indusblue.com
Magic Pony – http://www.magic-pony.com
Narwhal – http://www.narwhalartprojects.com
PixelPusher – http://www.pixelpusher.ca
The Radke Film Group – http://www.radke.tv
Six Degrees – http://www.sixdegrees.ca
sociMedia – http://www.socimedia.com
STEM – http://stemlimited.com
Studio Dialog – http://www.studiodialog.com
Tool of North America – http://www.toolofna.com

That should keep you busy for a while… you should definitely eat Lunch at your desk today…

The talented folks at Airbag have recently launched this little web application (see a video demo) as a way for them to gather the brief but necessary details from a prospective client who’s considering hiring Airbag to work on a project.  I think the execution is pretty flawless — design and layout are top shelf.  No surprise there.

But I wonder about the usefulness or practicality of a tool like this. It kind of reminds me of those “We are now accepting projects in January 2009″ messages you occasionally see on agency sites.  51% of me thinks that they’re complete assclowns for actually putting that on their site and the other 49% of me thinks it’s kind of cool.  Whether the message is accurate or not is anybody’s guess.  But in any case it does add to the agency’s air of boutique-yness… like, they’re so busy you’d be lucky to work with them.  Nothing wrong with trying to maintain that image.

But I digress… back to Airbag’s RFP tool. As a guy who works at an agency I see most clients falling into one of two categories: a) ones who you’ve worked with many times and will just call you up for a quote and b) ones you’ve never met and find you by word-of-mouth or just surfing.  I can’t imagine the former being too impressed at being redirected to a web app rather than talking to you and the latter group would even think to look for a tool like this (unless you dedicated like 75% of your home page to it). And even if they did find it I suspect they wouldn’t be too jazzed at the prospect of filling out a multi-page form the way YOU want them to after they’ve most likely written an RFP or some kind of similar document themselves.  They just want to send a quick email to the company’s general email box with the RFP attached.

I don’t want to be all Captain Buzzkill on this idea.  I think Airbag’s heart is in the right place.  They’re frustrated with the lack of education a lot of clients have when dealing with interactive shops.  They’re not blaming the clients because it’s us as agency folk who need to educate them.  Maybe this whole application is intentionally labourious for clients as a way to educate those that aren’t able to provide the basic info (timeline, scope, budget) and force them to either figure those details out or contact the agency directly and know that their are some “gaps” in the information they’re supplying.

I think most of the folks reading this blog are in the interactive agency business.  What do you think?

The only thing we don’t know as fine makers of web sites is when exactly we can safely stop supporting the stellar Internet Explorer 6 in the work we do (i.e. when it will piss off an acceptably low portion of the audience).  I don’t think Relish is quite there yet, but it looks like 37signals is as they’ve announced they’ll stop supporting IE6 in all their products in August.

We’re big fans of 37signals’ flagship product Basecamp.  We use it for just about every project we work on and a lot of our clients end up using it to review and discuss deliverables and timelines as we go. If Basecamp starts acting funky IE6 and forces a few more people to upgrade to a browser made in the last 5 years then I’m all for it. Hopefully it’s a sign that IE6-free days are closer than we think… trust me, every one who makes web sites is counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Poetic Prophet (aka the SEO Rapper) and his jammy jam, Design Coding…

This past year was a fun ride. We started off small, working in the back of a grocery store along with all our other favourite condiments. Since then we’ve moved into some sweet digs and slowly grown into a really solid team of web geeks with a pretty diverse skill set. Don’t know all of us yet? Just rollover the heads in the top right to find out more and see our individual posts.

This blog will be the place for you to come and get your regular updates on Relish life — what we’re working on, what we’re playing with and anything else we’re thinking about. Maybe you could even throw in a comment or two so that we know what you’re up to.That’s it for me. I’m off to relish the day. Hopefully I’ll bump into you somewhere on the Information SuperHighway.