As a web / flash designer it’s not often that I venture into the real physical world to make things … mostly because I have no patience and largely because I inevitably cock it up.

Sure we at Martian can and do provide a range of print services but, to be honest, these don’t normally involve much more than a great design translated into ink onto some flat surface … usually a business card or a promotional piece. Just what your typical design house does really.

That’s why Tony and I love Ponoko.

We can use the same tools that we would for digital design and make real world physical products.

Now the great part here is that we don’t need to know how to use power tools, we don’t have to worry about ruling straight lines or cutting things just so. We don’t have to go to the hardware shop and be told “I’m sorry, you can’t buy a sheet of translucent green plastic here”. Ponoko takes away all of these barriers.

Ponoko gives me, a web designer that has never made anything other than a money box at wood work class when I was about 12 and a wonky shelf for my stereo about 3 years ago, the ability to make physical real world objects with the press of a button. It’s absolutely fantastic!

So how does Ponoko work for a graphic designer or web designer?

It’s pretty simple really.

1. As a designer you already know how to use Adobe Illustrator.

2. As a designer you can’t help but get excited about new technology and new ways to make cool stuff from your mac (or pc).

3. As a designer you already have the perfect client base. People that need creative solutions.

Here’s an example.

We had a client that came to us to put together a series of illustrations for a workbook they were creating. The client’s logo had a certain tear drop shape and along with the workbook the client wanted to distribute a tear dropped shaped whiteboard as part of the package.

Now, we weren’t in the mood to take a set of french curves and hacksaw to a set of whiteboards from warehouse stationery … and we really didn’t want to get some white cardboard laminated (how cheap is that). This would have been something that most designers would have put into the “too hard” basket.

But not for us. Lets custom make a whiteboard for our client with Ponoko! … and while we’re at it, lets etch their logo into the whiteboard for that added “Wow I can’t believe you did that” factor.

The process was so simple.

Just download the starter kit from ponoko,
set up artwork in Adobe Illustrator,
export from Illustrator as an EPS,
upload EPS to Ponoko,
choose the material (whiteboard),
press ‘Make’.

A few days late a perfectly cut and etched custom built tear dropped shaped whiteboard arrived on our doorstep. It was just so easy. Later that week a nice cheque arrived from our very happy client.

I truly believe that Ponoko has brought a revolutionary capability to designers in much the same way that Apple did in 1985 with the introduction of the Laserwriter. Instead of settling for our real word products as printed peices of paper we can now make them quicky and painlessly out of stainless steel or bamboo or acrylics or aluminium or pretty much anything else that we can imagine.

To learn more about Ponoko check out this video from TV3 News, New Zealand or just visit www.ponoko.com

We’ve always been a little different from your average web design or graphic design agency. We have an unusual name for a start and we’re very much into making cool stuff.

2008 saw us working with an Auckland company, Mintshot, that was also into making cool stuff. We were fortunate enough to be offered the job of redesigning their web site as well as being offered the opportunity to develop a range of interactive games for them.

The first few games were variants of a popular “Find the prize and win it” theme. While the last two involved guessing a boarding pass number to win a flight to the gold coast and disarming a bomb to stop your prize from being blown to kingdom come (we really enjoyed this one ;)

All of these games were integrated into a live scoring system managed by a remote service that monitored to see if a user had won the prize. Basically, every time a user had an attempt, that attempt was checked to see if it was the lucky one … and a success or try again signal was returned (no cheeky random number generation stuff here).

Martian made all the graphics, the flash components, the animation, the visual effects, the 3d imagery and even the odd sound effect here and there … great fun indeed and truly a great way for us to push our boundaries.

I’ve updated our portfolio to include some of the flash interactive work that we’ve created and you can get to it right here.

You don’t know where your next job will come from and while you should always strive to gain new clients the ones you have are a potential goldmine of repeat sales.  But, you need to remind them that you appreciate their business and that you would like to do even more with them.

Traditionally this has been accomplished through old fashioned phone calls or printed mailers.  But these forms of communication have high costs both financially and in the amount of time they take - time that could be better spent on your business.  Mailers are expensive to print and we all know they end up in the rubbish bin.  You may as well save time and just poor your money into your own bin.

Ringing your clients is great, you cannot get any more personal than that.  But think about it.  Do you really ring them?  How often?  How many of them? I bet you don’t ring them all.  And what are those calls costing you in time?  Even if you have only have 100 clients in your database and you take the time to ring 5 a day, which will take about an hour, that equates to 12.5% of your work time per month on the phone!

In this current economic climate it is essential to market to your clients but you have to be sure you are not wasting  time and more importantly, money.  So what is the answer? Read more »

Now I have never been one to buy into the gimmicky cleverness of techy gizmo’s.  When Mark bought an iPhone I laughed at him.  I called him a sheep and a slave to marketing.  I chortled over how he had just piddled away money on a shiny new toy that, by all accounts, was not even a very good phone.

Then a few months ago, while I was berating myself for not having a map in the car Mark introduced me to the Google maps feature on the iPhone.

This was the first time I had really considered the flashy iPhone as any sort of realistic business tool.  Mark showed me how it updated his contact lists, his to do lists, the internet access and the business application you could download to make life and work just a little bit easier.

I immediately went out and bought one.

Now I cannot be without it.  It wakes me up in the morning and tells me what I have to do that day.  If I have a few minutes to wait I no longer twiddle my thumbs, I update my to do lists, check website updates, email clients or plot routes for my next meeting.  The screen makes the interaction with the phone so much easier than the conventional cursor key/text key functions of regular phones.

So for anyone out there who, like me, poo-pooed the iPhone, I say “don’t knock it till you try it”.  It’s not the gimmick you may think it is.  It’s a real business tool.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to feed my virtual iPhone pet, “flossy the sheep”.

A lot of people have been asking “how did you lose your broadband?”.   Once I explain it they are shocked to realise how easily it could happen to them.  So here is the story and a few things you aught to know if you’re attached to your broadband or hoping to get it….

The Story:
Martian was moving office.  The last filing cabinet was going into the back of the truck.  It’s 8.00pm and all is well.  Cue the the Telecom Rep…. I receive a call to confirm that the technician will be around the next day to hook up all the business lines and our service will be transferred across - we just won’t have any broadband…. Read more »

We after about 6 weeks of having the internet dribble down at dial-up speeds the Martians are finally back on broadband!

It’s was amazing to see the difference between dial-up and broadband.  Dial-up is not just slow and annoying but a lot of the time you are unable to establish a firm grip on the web.

In today’s super fast internet world using dial up is like trying to lassoo a racecar with a wet noodle.  It was an interesting, and infuriating, lesson in how the internet has grown over the last few years.  I remember dial-up when the web first made an appearance - and sure it was a bit slow but there was not a lot of data heavy content on sites.

Now websites have more content, and more complex context at that.  The simple flash banner or video is common place these days and the code behind the scenes is crammed full of extra functions that were merely a twinkle in a web developers eye a few years ago.  This is to be expected.  With faster connections and better browsers more can be crammed into a site without affecting download speeds - on broadband.

I found a lot of the time that dial-up would drop off, stall or the browser would simply give up due to insufficient data being received.  This worked both ways.  Uploading a couple of hundred kb of file to our mail system turned into an hour long game which involved a lot of finger crossing and fervant praying.  This is the sort of stuff that we take for granted these days.  Click, done!

So come on Telecom!  Get the hardware in place so NZ can catch up with the web.  Dial-up is not an option in this day and age….

I’m not a huge fan of golf, but I do love flash and I do love seeing flash being put to great use.

The World Golf Tour experience allows golf enthusiasts to play the world’s most challenging and exclusive courses with HD graphics on a PC or Mac platform for free. WGT’s online community allows friends, families and golf fans to play a round of golf simultaneously, competing in tournaments for prizes, sharing scores, testing out the newest equipment and reading the latest news in the golfing world.

Go for a round here.

Martian Design & Interactive now offer a fantastic system for running email marketing campaigns!

it’s really simple to use. We just design you an email template, integrate it into our email marketing platform. You provide us names and email addresses of your customers and we deliver your marketing messages via email to them.

After the campaign has run you can log in to our system and and see stats for how many people opened your email, how many of those clicked on a link, how many unsubscribed etc etc. Its a HUGELY powerful and cost effective form of marketing with truly trackable results.

If you have a web site already then we can supply you with some code so that you can add a “subscribe to our newsletter” form directly onto your site … or if you don’t have a web site as yet then we can certainly build a brilliant one for you.

Next time you are thinking about a marketing campaign then get in touch and we’ll work some email marketing magic for you.

Well its been a busy Christmas / New Year period culminating in a temporary move of office for Martian HQ.

Telecom, in their infinite cleverness, have so far been unable to connect up our DSL (despite our new location already having DSL the week prior to us moving in) so things are a little bit hectic at the moment while we sort that out.

Our telephone number remains the same (07) 544 9851 and Telecom have actually managed to hook that up. In the meantime, we’re working from home or other locations where we can access the internet, with Telecom firmly on redial.

In other rather fantastic news, we’re investigating a brand new product that will enable small to medium sized business to operate stunningly powerful online businesses. We can immediately see the value this can add to a lot of our existing clients so after we thrash out the last few nuts and bolts we’ll be in touch to plan your online business domination.

The Carver One is the incredible, 3 wheeled wonder that steers like a car but corners like a motorbike. It’s insane and it’s also no secret that we quite like it. We have a nicely rendered photoshop version of our ideal Carver One in all its metallic green goodness as a constant reminder of how much closer the real thing is getting.

Peter James is the chap that manages Carver New Zealand and Australia and fortunately for us he is local .. which means he pops over from time to time and enlists our help in any design work he may need and takes us for the occasional fly/ride/drive in the Carver.

We created a new site for Peter a few months ago, www.carverexperience.co.nz to help him get the word out on some of the great tourist packages that he is offering as well as promoting the Carver in general. We decided that it would be a good idea to try and give people a bit of a feel as to what its like piloting the Carver so we created a Flash application that lets people get a feel for how it behaves when you go around corners.

We pieced together the interior cockpit, created the ’tilt indicators’, steering wheel etc and with some photos from Peter’s travels in the background and some actionscript to tie everything together we had a fun little simulator. Click here to see what its like from inside the Carver.

We also built a page to show some promotional videos as well as a bookings page where you can book and pay for your experience online. So what are you waiting for? Go and experience the Carver One!