Dave Nelson | SecretPenguin Blog

Howdy!
We have a new place where we post stuff: secretpenguin.com/culture/

Thanks! Have a fun day!

Last week at Blue Sushi, I had the honor to present during PechaKucha Night alongside Yinghua Zhu, Scott Drickey, Janghwan Cheon, Lisa Vitale, Nick Rebeck, Ophir Palmon, and Megan Hunt.

Invented in Tokyo, PechaKucha’s presentation format is where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. It was super fun!

Here’s my attempt at presenting SecretPenguin’s History with this format:

We had such a fun time working with Moylan Iceplex at Tranquility Park on their rebrand and new website!

Here’s their old logo.

For their new logo and branding, the goal was to create a style that would be Family-Friendly.

• During our research, most of the family-friendly brands we came across were either boring or too childish.
• It makes sense to have it lean on being childish, because if you go to a place as a family… it’s usually focused on the kids.
• But the problem is, what happens when the kids get a little older?
• The style needs to cross boundaries, so when high school and college aged kids come, they don’t feel dorky.

So, our goal with this is to be Family-Friendly – appeal to young kids, but also appeal to an older crowd.

At first, we did an illustrated logo with elements from different activities on ice. But they needed a general one. And they were also painting it on the side of the building – and with a hand drawn logo painted on the side of the building, it could look like the sign painting was sloppy.

So we went back to the drawing board. We started sketching figure eights and lines that were made in the ice from skates. And eventually came up with a loopy M.

I really liked the idea of incorporating ice marks into the logo to form an M. However, I soon realized this looked similar to our friend Micah Max‘s logo (above on the left). So I quickly contacted Micah, and showed him the logo and asked him if this was too similar. It had a different concept behind it, but I couldn’t deny that it had some similarities. (We’ve seen too many of our independent designer friends get ripped off by some agencies and some designers, as well as experiencing it ourselves. Even though this was a different look and idea – the last thing I wanted to do is make an amazing designer feel ripped off even in the slightest).
Here’s how he responded…

“Totally great! No worries. To tell you the truth, after I made my logo, I found like 3 or 4 other places that have similar marks. It’s just how it happens sometime :) – Micah Max

So, we had a logo – now we just needed to depend on the environment around it to create the youthful feel.
We started to illustrate things that made us think of ice to create a repeating background that will appear on the majority of Moylan’s materials, surrounding the logo.

MoylanIceplex.com
The website was built to easily share Moylan’s schedules, events, clubs, news and basic info. The hardest part was organizing it all so it’s easy to find the things you’re looking for – but that’s always the case. I think some of the best websites feel simple, even though there’s a lot going on.

I’ve been thinking about the future of SecretPenguin a lot lately.
I came up with 3 goals as we continue to grow. They may evolve as time goes on, but for now, here they are:

1.
Rid the world of misrepresented and insulting ads targeted to the youth demographic (this includes never using the word, xtreme).
(More examples in a past post about skateboarding and advertising.)

I want to give the respect that the youth demographic deserves. Not sell to them, not talk down to them, not take advantage of them or their culture/community, but create brands they can truly be proud to associate themselves with.

Hyper Martial Arts fans at the Hyper Games, an event to support and promote Martial Arts athletes. Hyper is a good example of a brand we created that people are proud of, with over 20,000 people who “like” it on Facebook in just a few short months.

2.
I want SecretPenguin to employ the best people that are submersed in their passions – skateboarding, music, biking, whatever. I’ve noticed there’s a quirky genius quality within passionate people. Sure, they may have a shaved head with a rat tail or a sunburned lightning bolt on their chest… but that type of quirkiness transfers to their work and boundaries are broken.

Jason Sawyer, SecretPenguin’s frontend developer. (Photo: Cody Peterson)

3.
I want every aspect of SecretPenguin to be honest – with our employees, our clients, and the audience we’re reaching with our design and marketing.
When everyone is honest, everything feels fair. Everyone understands their roles, expectations are met, and everyone is – in theory – happy.

3 simple goals. I believe we have done a pretty good job so far. However, there are still way too many insulting ads out there…

I like having creativity be such a big part of our business. But it’s kinda scary at times… What if we lose our creativity? What if we can’t come up with anything next time?

It’s strange to have such a big part of our business rely on these things.

But we know how important it is, and we do everything we can to keep things fresh.

Experience new things.
I’ve found it to be limiting to be in front of the computer 24 hours a day. New experiences create new inspiration.

Cody Peterson (art + interactive director) is working remotely from Canada for the next 2 months. We all stay in contact through iChat and nobody loses a step. Cody is experiencing new things and enjoying new scenery and becoming more inspired because of it.

Work with people you respect and trust.
I respect and appreciate everyone at SecretPenguin. The things they do bring each job to a higher level. When everyone has the same goal to constantly better the projects, it makes it fun and easy to bounce creative ideas off each other.

And lastly, have fun.
We like to skateboard, do a little archery, ride bikes, and whatever else we think of that might be fun.

Bryan Findell (Visual Effects Editor + Producer) and I playing a game of S.K.A.T.E. Rematch next week. Bryan was sitting all day, and didn’t get a chance to warm up!

Matt Helt (account director) likes to balance things on his chin.

Jason Sawyer (Developer) and Cody Peterson shooting arrows.

No more archery indoors though…

We have a simple policy at SecretPenguin – It doesn’t matter what your creative process is, as long as the work is high quality and gets done on time! …and no more windows break.

We had a great time working with the city on Mayor Suttle’s new website. Here’s a little bit of our thought process behind the project…

THE GOALS OF THE WEBSITE:

• Bridge communication between the Mayor’s office and the community.
• Help organize all of the content in a visual way for users to find information.

ORGANIZATION:
News Categories
We created categories that address the different issues that Mayor Suttle talked about during his campaign that link up to the relating posts… Public Safety, Green Initiatives, Economic Development, etc.

Slideshow
A slideshow is on the homepage that features important posts. This will help keep the needed news from being pushed to the bottom by new posts.

CONNECTING:
Mayor’s Hotline

Mayor’s Hotline is always available as a tab on each page on the left for easy communication.

Links to Social Media and other sites
Links to Mayor Suttle’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as other city related sites throughout the pages.

Twitter Feed

Mayor Suttle’s Twitter Feed is pulled in directly at the top of each page.

USER-INTERFACE:
Visual Indicators

Drop downs replaced with whole section dropping down to reveal all of the links. Once you visit one, a visual indicator checks off of where you’ve been. Links to PDFs are shown with a PDF icon next to it that turns gray if you’ve already been there. Little arrows are also next to links that take you away from the site.

Some of the pages are so long, so as soon as you scroll down a bit, a TOP button appears in the bottom right corner that can scroll you back up to the top. We utilized scrolling, rather than jumping so users can have a visual for where they’re going.

UPDATABLE

The site will always be evolving, so we built it to have dynamic content with the ability to update on the backend by Suttle’s administration.

We had a great time working on this project with the administration, DotComm and everyone else involved. We love Omaha, and we are so proud to work with the city!

Earlier this year in March, HDR and the City of Omaha hosted a series of meetings to involve the community to get input for the new Downtown 30 Year Master Plan. It was a great idea, however not everyone could make it.

Beth Katz thought there could be another way for those people to give input that can’t make it to the meetings (prior engagements, work nights, night class, have kids, etc.).

OmahaDowntownPlan.com
So that following morning, we developed a quick website in time for the next meeting. This site offered the community a way to leave comments and watch the presentations as they’re happening or at a later date.

Over 200 people tuned in to watch the live video.
Over 300 people have watched the videos at a later date.
And 114 comments were left on the website.

Omaha World Herald did an article on what we had done.
(Check out the photo! Perhaps it should have been a photo of Beth Katz or the website, but I like that they used a photo of our penguin. ha!)

Our hope was to help the city utilize technology and design as a way to be more inclusive and have more community members involved.

And they have!

Beth Katz, Craig Moody and I met with Jed Moulton (Manager of Urban Design) and Steve Jensen (Director of City Planning) from the city to talk more about the next steps.

Since then, we helped Environment Omaha set up a Ustream account and they streamed a presentation live for people that couldn’t make it.

And last night was the Presentation of the Master Plan, and the city had set up their own website with a public forum and streamed the meeting live.

Yay!

Through skateboarding and being a part of Divvy (the design co-working space), I learned a lot about community vs. competition.

At Divvy, we were a community. We all learned a ton from working and sharing with each other, and all of our businesses grew. We didn’t leave anyone behind.

On the flipside with cut-throat competition, people suffer. There’s some shop rivalry among skateboard shops in Omaha. With this cut-throat attitude, I’ve seen skateboard shops talk poorly about other shops and their riders and it hurts themselves (some have put themselves out of business), hurts the skateboarders involved and makes it hard to put on large events together. All in all, it makes the skateboard community suffer.

I believe when we can all get along, we can all work together to build a better community as a whole… come together on events, educate the importance of design and it’s process, and simply learn from each other.

Matt mentioned a good point in his BIGOmaha post a while back,

“Cut-throat competition is dead. Undermining your competition is a disservice to your community. We can all benefit if we commit to helping each other thrive.”

This is one of the reasons we put out The Paper Family for anyone to use. It has helped us stay organized as we continue to grow, and we were hoping it can be useful to help others grow.

We’ll be posting more of the family soon. We would love to hear any feedback… suggestions, if it’s helped you, etc. Leave a comment below, or email us at [email protected]

Thanks everyone! We love being a part of this community.

A while back I agreed to do an interview for former Mayor, Hal Daub about his support of Robert’s Skatepark for the upcoming election of Mayor.

I later found out that it was a bit controversial if he really supported it in the first place, and this concerned me since the reason I agreed to do it was because I’ve always vowed to help anyone out that has helped support skateboarding in Omaha… especially during a time when skateboarding wasn’t widely accepted.

I wanted to know the full story, so Hal invited me up to his office to talk about it. He was quick to give the credit to Marc Kraft, which was nice to see. We worked a lot with Marc, and the skatepark would not have happened without him.

Hal ended by basically saying it was passed while he was in office. If he was really against it, it wouldn’t have passed. He was very kind, very respectful and surprisingly down to earth when we met.
I was impressed.

His campaign talked with us at SecretPenguin about doing their design work, but they continued to want spec work and we decided to pull out. They then went with hiring an out of town agency.

This was a bit odd to me. Why hire a non-local agency for a local election? I’m not concerned that they didn’t hire us, I’m more concerned that they outsourced the work.

I later met up with my friend, Gary Di Silvestro. Without his help as well, there would be no skatepark in Omaha. He worked side by side with all the skateboarders, and helped organize us and get us in contact with the people of the city.

I found out he was helping with Jim Suttle’s campaign, and I had the opportunity to meet with Suttle and he was a very nice guy. I was impressed with his hard work on getting the venues to be able to stay open for people under 21 to enjoy live music.

Music is one of the many things that makes Omaha such a great place to live, and I really liked his approach on this issue.

Suttle already had branding and a website, but they needed some help on a separate website about Suttle’s vision for the future of Omaha and how the local election effects you, and after talking and learning more about what Jim Suttle is about, we were happy to work with them.

It just makes sense for a candidate for Mayor to hire local businesses for a local campaign. That’s something I can definitely support.

Jim Suttle, you have my vote.

Here’s the website we created, OmahaNext.com

The PLAY page is my favorite, with the skateboarder rolling across and doing a kickflip.

Looks like our friends at Silicon Prairie News are making some headway of a coworking space of their own.

Around 2004/2005, Ryan Sorensen (art director at Bozell) called me up and started talking to me about a shared space concept for Omaha.
It sounded interesting, and I knew I had to get out of the house and be around people. I was going crazy not interacting with people outside of the internet during the working day.

I ran the idea by Adam Nielsen (owner of Good Twin) and John Henry Muller (owner of What Cheer), and they both seemed very interested.
John Henry was currently working as Art Director at Sacco, and was planning on doing his own thing. He wanted to use the shared space as a legitimate place to work and bring clients, and felt it was essential to have to start his business.

Ryan Sorensen, Adam Nielsen and John Henry Muller.

We started meeting every Thursday for almost 6 months. We kept it just the four of us to make it easy. We wanted to do this on our own without going into debt and owing any loans.

We covered every topic in planning… finances, ethics, times, cleaning, etc.
Ethics was a huge topic… we were essentially competitors working in the same space. We had a lot of things to hash out.

We got everything worked out, and finally found a space that seemed perfect. Cheap rent, great location, open area for everyone to work, a meeting room and space to expand, however it needed A LOT of work.

John Henry scraping the tile off the wood floors. (I think this was Adam’s idea. I remember being annoyed that he wanted to scrape all of this, but in the end the wood floors were beautiful. Thanks Adam!)

Divvy Collective all cleaned up!

Check out more photos of Divvy on Flickr.

John Henry came up with the name Divvy.
And we all worked on logos and taglines for it, as well as the website, divvycollective.com

We summed it up as,

“We are not an advertising agency or a design firm. We are a group of creatives that have come together to share space.”

Overall, it was a huge success. We started out with 4 people sharing space, and ended with 8 people all coworking together (Shannon Wall, Matt Linder, Chris Kollars and Cody Peterson). It was a great time.

We all learned a ton from each other. Tips on how to run your business, different brainstorming methods, working in a team environment where everyone has different goals, and so much more.

At the end, everyone’s business had at least doubled, and we walked away with Divvy making a profit.

I’m excited to see the guys at Silicon Prairie News revisit this idea and create another coworking space in Omaha. Keep it up guys!