BINGenuity.com : a look at what's on our minds at Bing Design

You’re invited! Bing Design is pleased to play a role in a few upcoming events in Yellow Springs that will make it your destination.

This Saturday, June 12th, don’t miss the bi-annual Yellow Springs Street Fair. Starting with a 5K run at 9:00, the 2010 Street Fair promises a day of great activity! Over 200 booths selling fine arts and crafts, clothing, jewelry, and an abundance of unique gifts, this all-day festival will have live entertainment from a variety of musicians and street performances throughout the day. The event is free, open to the public, and handicapped accessible, so come out, should be a gorgeous day!

Just a stone’s throw away from the Street Fair that same afternoon, take in the Inauguration Celebration of Antioch University McGregor’s second president, Michael Fishbein, Ph.D., at 1:00pm on their campus. As a proud supporter of the inauguration, there is limited seating, so check the website for availability.

If you are thinking it’s difficult to take in Yellow Springs in one day. The Yellow Springs Arts Council has the “experience” just for you.

The Yellow Springs Experience that is! Ten days – July 9-18 – that will feature workshops and events in a range of categories including performing arts, visual arts, tours, nature, and wellness. Events are for all ages and performances include a street carnivale. Events will be held at locations throughout the village and tickets will be available for purchase online on their website.

Yellow Springs is an eclectic village known for recreational attractions, unique shops, gourmet restaurants, lively arts and healthful living. If you aren’t able to make it out to any of these events, be sure to check out our best of Yellow Springs map!

We look to our achievements to our continued success as an agency. It has been shaping into another stellar year of graphic design, and it’s always great to see our work and our staff recognized.

Two great events – on the same day last week – honored our marketing communications and service towards our clients.

Nick attended the IABC Bronze Quill Awards. Like last year, the event combined both IABC Dayton and IABC Greater Cincinnati chapters. A keynote by James Czar and some lively entertainment provided an energetic award ceremony. Professionals were recognized with awards of Excellence and Merit; each category representing the highest level of accomplishment in business communications. The winning entries reflected the combined areas’ outstanding accomplishments in planning, execution and measurement.

Our work with Terrain SIM and Antioch University McGregor was recognized for the Award of Excellence in the Marketing Communications category of the Communication Management division. With the University’s goal of raising enrollment for the Fall semester, we conducted marketing research and used a variety of multimedia to execute the brand messaging. Messaging was represented graphically for the many facets of the campaign that included an email campaign, direct mail, social networks, and promotional items. With the effective marketing campaign approach, we exceeded the enrollment goal by nearly 10%.

Here’s a full list of Bronze Quill winners. Congratulations to all the entries!

That same evening Roger attended the Greater Dayton Advertising Association’s Mercury Awards. A ceremony honoring advertising professionals in sales and support roles.

Joyce Jones was nominated as the Best Print/Specialty Buyer. She’s that friendly voice you hear from Bing that takes our creative work and helps get the message out there. Without her production skills, quality assurance, and communication management, we’d have a hard time handling the efficient process and control point to deliver qualified product.

A list of the honorees and winners for this year.

Now that we tooted our own horn. Back to the daily task at hand, to produce award-winning marketing communications, with a friendly smile on our face.

One of the most painful inabilities to the Apple iPhone, is the lack of Adobe Flash support online.

As a Flash developer and animator, this has really been a personal peeve. I read recently that some are convinced that Apple is trying to push out Adobe! That bothers me more. No other industry has lent to the success of Apple more than we creatives in agencies, studios, and production houses around the globe.

When everyone was jumping on the PC/Windows bandwagon for so many years (which most still do), it was the companies who did print collateral, desktop production, illustration, graphic design, and television/movie production who were Apple through and through.

Now that the rest of the planet is now keen to what the Apple computer is good for (most everything including avoiding viruses), we see an ally turn against the very core of our business: Adobe and its Creative Suite of products.

While the conflict may be limited to Flash Shockwave files specifically, the entire suite suffers for the fact that the iPhone and iPad will not allow SWF files to work on their Safari browser! And rumor has it that Adobe may take this to the court system.

I’m no dummy! I know that a lot of abuse of Flash files online has been wrought by banner ads bouncing, moving, re-sizing on pages. As a web developer, I understand that user overload of Flash ads can occur. But looking at how efficient they are, and how clear they look, how smoothly they behave, it is hard to not like them. No one likes a slow-loading page, and Flash made ads and websites run more efficiently. A lot of talk about Web 2.0 is in regard to AJAX. AJAX is just a mix of JavaScript, HTML, Flash, and XML. Take Flash out of that and the very power and quality of modern web usage is hindered.

Use a computer, and the world is normal. Even use most mobile devices with web access, and Flash is fine. But take the trendy and popular Apple iPhone/iPad and try to see anything with a Flash backbone, and you might be looking at nothing.

When so much is dependent on Flash these days for efficiency, and quality, I am stunned that Apple has not incorporated Flash at the launch of either product. Odd, it seems that the iPhone’s own function is built on very similar technology as Flash and SWF files. Have they adopted the benefits and then put a big X on Flash because they didn’t make it different enough to protect the system software? I wonder….

Meanwhile, something that brings life to the web, and makes getting information and entertainment easy, and is very efficient (usually) is being blocked by my career-long partner: Apple. STOP IT!

Got gripes about iProducts vs. Flash too? The comment line is open!

Portable, wireless reading devices, or ebook readers, have been fast approaching main stream adoption since 2007 when Amazon introduced the Kindle to the most recent release of the Apple iPad. Dedicated devices for reading digital books are developing the future in the publication industry. Book readers no longer need to handle a big bound book to read their favorite novel, paperback, magazine, or any document for that matter.

We have been doing some extensive “hands-on” research with our own Kindle and Nick’s recent acquisition of an Apple iPad. Angela has learned how to convert basic HTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) into ebook format. She has been formatting documents ranging from a few-hundred-page paperback books to magazine articles to white papers and PowerPoint presentations with complex content, which may consist of images, tables, and graphs.

For the consumers there are many benefits for converting or using ebook readers. Here we highlight a few below:

1. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on your device!
2. The user can get instant access to scores of ebooks just by downloading it from the internet without waiting days and days for delivery of the book.
3. The price of ebooks is much less than any of the paper books as the costs of printing, shipping and distribution is almost eliminated.
4. The feature of hyperlinks gives the user the ability to shift to any section of ebook they want.
5. The user has the ability to choose the font that they like. From adjusting the font size to margin size to line spacing.
6. Ebooks are searchable. You can quickly find anything inside the book. Ebooks are globally searchable.
7. Ebooks make reading accessible to persons with disabilities. Text can be re-sized for the visually impaired. And for the hearing impaired, ebooks are capable of a text-to-speech option.

From Angela’s perspective, there is a lot on the back end to get familiar with. Since an intuitive workflow for converting layout files into ebook format has not yet been developed, much of the process involves trial and error and researching methods from many different sources online. A working knowledge of HTML programming also goes a long way. Although a rudimentary ebook can be created without too much effort, a well-designed ebook takes quite a bit more programming know-how, time and patience.

It is having said that, ebook readers will have a larger need for a market that has seen the closing of several library branches across America. For the future of the publication industry, there will be a need for design agencies to create and optimize formats for the affluent readers.

What a worthwhile cause! Please consider dining at Max and Erma’s in Springboro on Thursday, March 25th (anytime) for dine-in or carry out…

20% of the food sales will benefit the American Cancer Society Relay For Life in Springboro.

You must have THIS COUPON in order for the Shooting Stars group to get credit. And if you have plans that day, please pass along the coupon to friends and family. Tell ‘em Julie sent you!

Thank you!!!