February 3rd, 2012
Good Things Come to Those Who Wait
Hear ye, hear ye! We mark the start of this month with the glorious unveiling of the new Zuora website, carefully adorned in gorgeous shades of lemon and lime. Not only is Zuora bringing sexy back to subscription economy thanks to their newly redesigned site, but they are also bringing the gift of subscription economy to Flickerbox in the form of a gift membership to the Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club.
As the email we received proclaims, “In each shipment you will receive twelve, 12-oz. microbrewed beers showcasing four different beer styles [three bottles of each style]. And you will learn how each beer is made, what to look for when you taste each beer, and much more by reading our accompanying monthly newsletter!”
Now that is truly a gift Flickerbox can appreciate, as beer is up on the list with coffee for being one of Flickerbox’s (few) weaknesses. We are already eagerly awaiting our first shipment, due to arrive at the end of the month (so far in the future).
Many thanks to Megan and Kyle at Zuora!
Ruby Already Anticipating Her Next Drink
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January 27th, 2012
Friday, Friday, Gotta Get Down on Friday
It was a typical Friday afternoon here at the Flickerbox headquarters. Some obscure music was blaring overhead as busy fingers clicked and typed away. As the clock hit 4:20PM it was as if an invisible alarm had gone off- as one gaggle, the designers and developers headed for their daily 4:20PM exercise: hacking.
Please note, that this hacking does not involve computers or illegal activities or evil looking men sitting in the dark cackling maniacally. Rather, the hacking I’m referring to is the activity of foot-bagging. Remember back in your younger years when it was cool to just stand in a circle and kick a sand-filled sack around? Well kids, Flickerbox is bringing it back one footbag (sack) at a time. Of course, this pastime doesn’t come without dangers. Dangers of kicking it so hard that it goes into your neighbors upper-level windowsill or the roof, dangers of kicking someone in the face (on accident or not), and dangers or the bag just splitting at the seams (we may or may not be speaking from personal experience).
One of the more frequent and time-consuming dangers is kicking it to somewhere out of reach. In this case, someone- who shall not be named- kicked the newest member of our footbag collection onto the roof. Luckily (or unluckily), it happened to land right on the edge of the roof. So the boys dug out their handy-dandy reaching stick for some reaching action; except this time they took it one step further and added a hook (read: paperclip attached with tape) onto it so that they could hook the stranded footbag back to safety (did I mention that we have a group of creative, intelligent people here?!). It was sheer genius.
So now you must be wondering… how did it go? Was the rescue mission successful? Did we wreck the roof in the process?
Check out the photos below and see for yourself!
BB doing the work, everyone else there for moral support (and backseat directing)
Hooking (Slowly)
Success!!!
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January 18th, 2012
Monday I’m Caffeinated
What you usually see Monday mornings
Few things rouse the Flickerbox crew as much as the sweet aroma of freshly brewed coffee. So on this chilly, dreary Monday, the Garfield-like personas of the office melted away at an unexpected surprise from Jill Druschke at Panache:
Hot mamma! (Image courtesy of Barista Babes)
Black Cat from Intelligentsia Coffee. The beans were caressed in sleek and sexy packaging. The bag’s red and black dressing gave off a mysterious allure, and the novelty of the whole packaging had the office coffee lovers crowded in the kitchen waiting for a cup. Anticipation was at an all-time high as the grinder churned out what appeared to be pure gold (suspiciously to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger”).
The aroma had the guys swooning, a sip had them giddier than a school girl hearing her crush say her name, a mugful had the whole office humming like a factory that had found its perfect rhythm. In conclusion, we just wanted to send a huge Thank You! to Jill for a thoughtful gift that could be the key to perfect office harmony.
THANK YOU JILL!! Note: This picture does not properly capture the glee of the office coffee drinkers
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December 23rd, 2011
Tis the Season at Flickerbox
December is a month of appreciation for us here at Flickerbox. In particular, there are two clusters of people we especially appreciate (excluding family):
• Our employees whom we celebrated during our annual holiday party.
• Our clients, particularly those who modeled, with whom we shared the gift of Kühl jackets and Aperture beanies rather than fruitcakes (so last decade) this year.
Below we share some of outstanding beauty shots of our clients modeling their favorite holiday gifts.
Check out this hot orange Flickerbox logo! LOVE IT. - Jeff, Marketo
Hey there, just posing here in my awesome new jacket... How you doin'? - Patrick, New Relic
I look good AND feel good in this Flickerbox jacket. - Andrew, Okta
A++++ This jacket will go great with my entire wardrobe! I highly recommend it. - Lori, SlideRocket
Look at the quality of this jacket. A-mazing! - Nat, AppDirect
Fashionable enough to make all the ladies at the book club jealous! - Luanne, Pure Storage
Two Thumbs Up (even if I only showed one)! - Matt, Pure Storage
This hat has shown me a whole new world of looking good. - Christian, Sumo Logic
Stylish and chic, this jacket makes me feel like I could take over the world! - Carol, Crowded Ocean
Happy holidays and merry new year, everyone!
*Disclaimer: All captions may actually be the views of Flickerbox and not necessarily that of the person pictured.
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March 30th, 2011
Q1 2011 Movie Night – 300 and SuckerPunch
If you look carefully, Todd and Hunter are holding 22 tickets making this our largest movie night to date. Thanks to everyone for coming out and having a great time with us!
That's a lot of Sucker Punch tickets
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March 24th, 2011
Abominable Chrome Theme
Check out our new Abominable Chrome theme up on the Google Chrome APP store. We have taken our winter mascot and given him his own little home on the web. Since we have a lot of iMacs in the office we gave him a max background image size of 2560×1440 to go full screen if needed.
Posted by Tom Risse | Filed in Uncategorized | No Comments »
March 16th, 2011
Flickerbox PDX Two Year Anniversary
It’s been two years since we opened our PDX office! A little know fact is that the Portland office is both our quietest and most productive location.
Tom and Roger celebrating in Portland.
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January 21st, 2011
Anchor Brewing Tour
To celebrate the start of 2011 we took a tour of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco. It was our second visit and it’s amazing how much you can learn about true San Francisco beer in a short afternoon. The tasting at the end of the tour is a great opportunity to relax, ask questions, and sample six excellent beers. Afterwards we headed off to 21st Amendment for food, and a bit more beer. Rumor has it that there was a third hop taken to Tres Agaves but I didn’t see anything in the logs confirming this report.
Muchas gracias to EB for planning a fun day out!
Flickerbox at Anchor Brewing
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January 4th, 2011
Our Mantis Bug Dashboard
One of the things that we look at a lot is the amount of current bugs in the system for our clients. These can be open projects with many child bugs attached or they can be a simple bug asking someone to make a simple text change in the footer. Ben and Todd designed and built this Bug Dashboard so that everyone could have visibility into open issues from a single place.
Take a look!
https://github.com/flickerbox/dashboard
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November 22nd, 2010
Is “Above the Fold” Relevant in Web Design Anymore?
As web designers and programmers we are always cognizant of the “fold” which is a term carried over from newspapers where people would fold the newspaper to make it easier to read. This term was carried over to the web when it became apparent in the early days of the web that since people had monitors that only saw a screen of 640×480 or 800×600, some of the content on the webpage would be out of view and would have to be scrolled to in order to view it.
This rule started the inevitable arms race of trying to fit as much as possible above this magic “fold” in order get it in front of the users eyes. I have personally witness arguments that looked like they would come to blows because of someones content being pushed below the magic line.
Here is a great webmonkey article that goes into some detail about what people who use the web have been feeling for a while.
The Fold doesn’t matter.
People will scroll.
A few of the keys for helping people see and scroll to things further down in the page is:
- avoiding hard horizontal rules, like large blocks of color
- adding whitespace to elements to give them a chance to breath
- Avoiding iframe content or frames that may add additional scroll bars in the page that may confuse users.
Of course, if this old school rule is crumbling, does that mean that the 1024 pixel site width is also up in the air? Current default pixel dimensions of most current monitors on the market is well above 1024×768. (Wikipedia)
How big is your browser window? How much do you need to scroll?
Posted by Tom Risse | Filed in Uncategorized | No Comments »