Why Smaller is Sometimes Better

There are many cost and quality benefits to working with a smaller agency like Corvus Design Studio. Have you ever wondered why some design companies charge $20,000 for the same website that a smaller company would charge $4,000 for? It is often a difference in overhead, not quality of service. Granted, not all design studios are equal in terms of quality of service, but that’s an easy thing to determine simply by looking at their portfolio. Because the web design industry is relatively new, it’s not always clear to potential clients how these prices are derived, so often a potential client will make the assumption that higher cost = higher quality. We can’t speak for the rest of the industry, but we can describe the cost and quality benefits of working with Corvus Design Studio so that you can make a more informed decision.

Cutting out the Middleman

Because we are a smaller agency, we are able to collaborate directly with our clients. We do not have a sales department, so as a client, you would communicate directly with our lead designer, cutting out the middleman completely. Not only does this save us a small fortune in overhead, but we find that things often get lost in translation when working with a sales rep. Eliminating the middleman allows for clearer communication between us and our clients, and allows cost savings that are passed on to our clients.

Quality Work Is Our Marketing Strategy

As a smaller agency, we don’t invest in outrageous and costly advertising campaigns or marketing. We rely mainly on word of mouth marketing and referrals. Because of this, it is our main goal to ensure each client is happy and satisfied with the services we provide.

In addition, we love to submit our projects to web design award presenters. Only outstanding designs, created with valid and error-free coding are considered. Another assurance of the quality work you’d receive with us.

Small Overhead = Reasonable Prices

Like most smaller agencies, we do not work from an exorbitant downtown office building. Although that would be nice, in order to maintain a profitable business we would have to factor that cost into our prices. It’s a luxury we’re willing to sacrifice to keep our costs within reason for our targeted clientele.

We feel very fortunate to have not been severely affected by the downturn of the economy, but we realize that many businesses, our potential clients, have been hit hard. Especially at this time in America, it would be a careless decision to push the cost of expansion onto our clients. Maybe when the rest of the country is prospering again, we’ll consider that level of expansion as well. Until then, we’re content putting on hold our dream of a lavish, ultra-modern downtown sprawl (within a block of a Jamba Juice, of course).

Websites made for people, by people

We do not rely on software, such as ColdFusion, to manufacture our websites. These solutions are great for enterprise websites whose purposes are more function than form, but not for our general clientele. Although we do offer a comprehensive CMS solution (ExpressionEngine), in most cases we handcode every page, utilizing today’s web standards, valid XHTML/CSS, and organic SEO (search engine optimization).

Individualized Attention

We have a limit to the number of projects we will take on at a given time. We don’t want to be stretched too thin to properly attend to our clients, so when we’re booked up we’ll turn down additional projects.

Doesn’t sound like the best strategy to grow and succeed, right? We look at it a little differently. We work very hard for our clients and we’d like to be known as “the agency that’s worth waiting for”. We want our clients to feel special and favored, and never like just another paycheck. We would like our success to come from hard work and unparalleled quality, and not from sheer volume of projects. If that means our growth to superstardom is a bit slower, we’re okay with that.

What you see is what you get

We have no sales spiels or useless fluff to offer. We assess your project details and provide reasonable quotes for the actual work done. We have a business conscience and feel that the prices we charge for the high quality work we provide is more than reasonable. Although there are other costs involved in creating websites and print materials (namely hosting and domain name), we do not have any hidden fees. Each project is a flat fee, determined based on a comprehensive analysis of the services needed.

Source: National Geographic

Source: Flickr

“Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps.

Alex Taylor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his team presented six New Caledonian crows with a series of “trap-tube” tests.

A choice morsel of food was placed in a horizontal Perspex tube, which also featured two round holes in the underside, with Perspex traps below.

For most of the tests, one of the holes was sealed, so the food could be dragged across it with a stick and out of the tube to be eaten. The other hole was left open, trapping the food if the crows moved it the wrong way.

Three of the crows solved the task consistently, even after the team modified the appearance of the equipment. This suggested that these crows weren’t using arbitrary features – such as the colour of the rim of a hole – to guide their behaviour. Instead they seemed to understand that if they dragged food across a hole, they would lose it.

Not-so great apes

To investigate further, the team presented the crows with a wooden table, divided into two compartments. A treat was at the end of each compartment, but in one, it was positioned behind a rectangular trap hole. To get the snack, the crow had to consistently choose to retrieve food from the compartment without the hole.

A recent study of great apes found they could not transfer success at the trap-tube to success at the trap-table. The three crows could, however.

“They seem to have some kind of concept of a hole that isn’t tied to purely visual features, and they can use this concept to figure out the novel problem,” Taylor says. “This is the most conclusive evidence to date for causal reasoning in an animal.”

Source: designboom

Veer is a great example of a company that exercises intelligent and effective marketing practices. Veer really gives designers what they want, not what they want you to have.Instead of forcing their message at you like many big companies, they give you fun, memorable little things that appeal to the designer within. They are consumer-oriented, and as a result their marketing efforts are exciting, and most definitely effective. Lots and lots of Kudos to Veer for their fantastic marketing efforts.

Since joining the Veer design community several years ago I’ve received a wealth of new and creative marketing promo materials from them. Yesterday, I received a very interesting poster (partiall depicted above), which is accompanied by a smart little flash application “viewer” at http://www.veer.com. Their previous promo, created an elaborate secret designer order, “The Very Secret Order of Creatives Understanding”. I found it both thought-provoking and challenging. Veer sent out these little “member handbooks” packed with subliminal imagery, cryptic design riddles and games, desktop widgets, wallpapers and much more. It was a lot of fun, and and look forward to the next promo.

Boing Boing reader Bruce Satow tells us:

“I’m a Systems Administrator at a large university and I think I may of found something important, but not sure, but I think it is worth reporting. One of my friends said that it would be a good idea maybe to post this information somewhere that is popular, like boing boing.I’m a big olympics fan so I often check the official Beijing 2008 olympics page.

One of the sections is called the “fun page.”

This page has wallpapers and screensavers for your computer. I have reason to believe that the screensavers are keystroke logging programs hidden inside the Flash animation.

On my Windows XP workstation, I run Symantec Corporate Anti-virus, Zone Alarm Pro, as well as Spybot manually. I do many scans and security checks to make sure that my computer is never infected or compromised because of the type of work that I do.

Today I put on a wallpaper and installed one of the screensaver. The one I installed is called “The Spring of Beijing”. It is a flash based screensaver.

I set my screensaver to autolock the console so when it is running, you have to type in a password to unlock the screen. I had left my workstation unattended to do some work on another computer and when I came back to my computer, the screensaver was active and running. Normally, I just hit a key or move my mouse and the screensaver stops and then the login prompt appears requesting for my password. However, this time the screensaver was still running, but I could not interrupt it. So I did a cntrl-alt-del to stop the screensaver and I noticed that my Zone Alarm had gone off. A message balloon came up saying that the FlashForge Screensaver has a keylogger type program running and it had blocked access to the internet.

Then I thought — how clever. You have to type in your password to disable the screensaver, so basically it was sending the password and other information somewhere.

I did an anti-virus scan with the latest defs and a spybot scan with the latest updates, but it did not detect anything. I am not a Flash programmer so I really can’t validate my findings. I figure there are probably thousands of people who have downloaded this screensaver, and if they are not running some type of security program such as Zone Alarm Pro, it would go completely unnoticed and undetected. I am hoping that you guys might know someone who could dissect the screensaver and validate my findings. I hope that I am wrong about this, but somehow I feel that my finding is correct. I just don’t know enough about Flash programming to investigate it further.

The detection was made by Zone Alarm Pro with advanced settings. After the screensaver ran for a while, I came back to my computer and it was still running, tried to interrupt it, it would not stop, I did a cntrl-alt-del to kill the screensaver and notice the warning and process block from my Zone Alarm Pro.

Someone with some time might be able to setup a computer on an isolated network and to monitor packets coming from a Win XP pro computer with that screensaver installed to see what the heck it is doing. I normally don’t get excited about things like this, but I thought it maybe too important to just ignore.”

Regarding Mr. Satow’s testimony here to Boing Boing, Infowar Monitor editor Greg Walton tells us:

Such tactics are not only political weapons. The start of the Beijing Olympics last week kicked off a slew of malicious internet activity. Some are relatively indiscriminate – using malicious software embedded in innocent websites, often of news organisations with audience numbers boosted by their sports coverage, which then infects the visitor’s computer. Some are more sophisticated.MessageLabs, a security company, detected a bogus email sent to at least 19 national sporting organisations that purported to be International Olympic Committee information on media plans for the Games, but was actually carrying a trojan which takes control of the PC and scans all files and networks to steal information.

See this related news story in the Independent.

Related: Update on China/Tibet cyberattacks (and Russia/Georgia), and call for testimonials.

This years Web 2.0 Summit looks very, very promising. Al Gore just joined the top notch lineup of speakers that includes Dave Girouard (Google), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Kevin Johnson (Microsoft), Kevin Kelly (Wired), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Elon Musk (Tesla Motors), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly, Inc.), Paul Otellini (Intel), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Lance Armstrong, and many, many, many more web and related experts.

“In the first four years of the Web 2.0 Summit, we’ve focused on our industry’s challenges and opportunities, highlighting in particular the business models and leaders driving the Internet economy. But as we pondered the theme for this year, one clear signal has emerged: our conversation is no longer just about the Web. Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.”

Source: Web 2.0 Summit