Karen Goodman has been blogging for some time now on WordPress.com and she approached us when she wanted to switch over to a custom WordPress theme and her own domain name. We designed a modern theme that accommodated her requests for a calming color scheme and a varied selection of fonts. She recently chronicled her adventures in flipping a house professionally for the first time, and you can check out her archives to read through the whole endeavor. Add her to your reading list and follow along as she writes about her interior design and DIY addictions.

When a client knows what they want, it makes our job super easy. Jillian Gottlieb found us through some of our other websites and is actually performing in a show written by one of our clients, Carner and Gregor. She contacted us because she had a website that she didn’t really like all that much, and had lost touch with her former web designer and could no longer make updates. She sent us a very clear picture of what she wanted the site to look like, and we put together something she loves in just a few days.

In addition to being a supremely talented actress and vocalist, Jillian is also a songwriter. She has recorded a bunch of demos and has successfully sold some of her songs to pop artists for commercial release. Take a look at her media page to hear some of her tunes.

Micah Young is a Broadway musician that came to us for a website rebranding. He had previously built a site on Wix that was basically a placeholder for his social media buttons. He was struggling with being pigeon-holed in the Broadway community as either a composer or a music director and wanted to break out of the mold and show that he was more than just a guy that plays the piano.

We built him a site that functions like a WordPress blog so that he can constantly update the site with whatever projects he is working on; whether that is conducting a Broadway show or premiering an original work at a concert somewhere. We also built him a sheet music store that has an awesome automatic delivery system.

Go take a look at the site and listen to some of Micah’s music. His songs are beautiful, and I can’t wait to see one of his shows get a full production in NYC.

I came across this site yesterday and it literally blew my mind. With the recent trends of minimalism in web design, it has been a while since I have seen such a well designed layout of a site. This use of photography and scrolling are truly inspired. While I could take or leave some of the tongue in cheek parts of the site (like the domain name), you really get a sense of who this girl is and what kind of parts she wants to play. Every actor should strive to have such a comprehensive online presence.

Here are a few more of my posts over on Vivint’s The Neighborhood Blog. I’ll be doing a round-up of my contributions over there once a month, so stay tuned for tech tips, home improvement tips, and plenty of ideas on how to be a good neighbor.

Vinyl – Digitized

Home Energy Check

10 Movies That Wouldn’t Have Worked With Vivint

Garage Sale Mapping Around Earth Day

The pit of suckiness is a term my old improv teacher used to use in our rehearsals. Whenever our troupe would make some great leaps forward and get in a groove, inevitably we would crash and just do horrible work for a while. Our teacher was also a math teacher, so he chose to illustrate this particular phenomenon as a graph. As you are developing any skill, you always get better over time.  As you learn, you end up doing some terrible work while your mind or body is readjusting to a new set of skills. This sucks.

I feel like I have been in a pit of graphic design suckiness the past couple of weeks. Everything I am working on feels like a mashed up, unguided mess. I know it is because I am integrating new skills and improving, but man it is frustrating. I’ve recently switched over a lot of my initial graphic creation to illustrator instead of photoshop. It is a whole different workflow and skill set, but my graphics are cleaner and vector based and therefore so much easier to integrate into full site designs.

No matter what skill you are building, you have to work extra hard to climb out of the pit of suckiness. Don’t get too frustrated and just know you will get past the hump. It is absolutely worth it to keep improving, and each time you claw your way out of the pit you are so much better off than when you fell in.

We are so proud to announce our most recent site design for our alma mater, The University of Michigan Musical Theatre Department. Each year, the department presents an industry showcase in New York to introduce the graduating class to the casting industry. We built them a site that would advertise the date of the annual showcase and would allow for the industry to find more information about the recent graduates.

Each member of the class has their own profile page where you can view and download their headshot and resume. Soon, we will expand the site so it becomes a comprehensive information hub for all Michigan musical theatre graduates. We hope to create a full alumni database, and keep up a blog that features the most recent alumni news. Congrats to the Class of 2013! We can’t wait to see the show!

Visit michiganmusicaltheatre.com. Go Blue!