The Horizon

I found out on Friday that my company (ARC Design) had won 2 more awards; both silver Horizon Interactive Awards. The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers.

(Basically most of the sites we produce has a little bit of flash, these sites have more than the usual.)

 The folks at ARC have worked very hard and even though we did not have the Addy’s this year we have won Graphic Design USA awards, a Summit award and these two Horizon awards. I am very happy with my team, however I know we are capable of even better work in the future. Plus we can win all the awards in the world if we are not making our clients money then we have failed.Congratulations go out to my team and to our clients.

The Summit

My company, (ARC Design) was recently awarded a bronze Summit Award. The Summit awards are an international awards council who hold a contest every year to find the best design in the world, the judging criteria is based on the true purpose of marketing communications; to change, influence, or reinforce the consumer’s knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs.  Over the last decade, the competition has established itself as the premier arbiter of creative excellence for the worlds top design firms.

We were chosen from the thousands of submissions for our work with DK Enterprises. They supply goods to the military and government contractors.  Check out the website, you cannot see all the goods because you have to be a government contractor to see them, but you can see the design and delivery which was key in winning this award.

We are also up for a few more awards from other competitions; winners for those awards will be announced on Friday May 2nd.

Congratulations are in order for the folks of ARC Design for their hard work and dedication.

Simple Update

It has been a while since I posted on my blog, I will try not to bore you to tears with all of the stuff going on right now but I do have a few things that are worth mentioning.

Jennifer and I had our first child, Madeline Grace on January 31st 2008. You can see pictures of her on my myspace; (http://www.myspace.com/ryanharrell) and it is awesome. She looks just like me, at least that is what everyone tells me and my wife. But when people tell my wife this it is like they are telling her some bad news. They say, like jennifer I hate to tell you this but she looks just like her daddy. So i’m thinking sure I know im no Fabio but good lord I’m no Popeye Jones, do you have to be so blatant?

Also ARC Design my company has finished its first large branding campaign, sure we have completed branding campaigns for companies like Spell Construction and Highland Paving but a campaign for a county is huge. We worked closely with the Duplin County Tourism board to expand on a theme that they had created, “Uncork Duplin.”  As you may or may not know Duplin county used to be a big tabacco county, but when people stopped smoking so much they had to do something with all those acres of land. So they started making wine, lots of it. Today it is the major draw to the county, however they are a lot of other things to do in this history rich small county in NC. ARC Design created the design and look for the campaign that covers billboards, booklets, brochures, businesscards, the website, the logo and letterhead. My hats off to my design team, very nice job guys.

 With over 45 projects on our wall ARC Design is very busy. We have had a very busy two months and with more work we need more help. We have added 4 new faces to ARC Design over the past few months, two web designers, a project manager and an assistant. Things are starting to work like clockwork and we have gotten our turnaround time down, which was in the the 4-5 month range to the 2-4 range. I am interested to see how we would rank compared to other agencies our size. I know we are the largest in the area by far but maybe on a state level how effecient we are, so I have been trying to track things like turnaround time on sites, customer contact and other cool things that I think would help ARC. If you are not continually trying to get better at what you do and how you do it then someone is going to come along and do what you do better and that’s how you get left behind. ARC will always strive to be one step ahead of everyone else, hopefully this will help.

That’s all I have for now.

Davey Awards

Thursday my company ARC Design received its Davey Award. It is a Oscar like statue that is cool to get because the judges are so well known in the industry.

“The Davey Awards may be for smaller organizations, but the judges have big reputations. The Davey is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. “

Hopefully I can get a picture or two up on my site here soon, because it is a cool statuette. Thanks to all the designers and staff at ARC Design because your hard work is the reason we have this award. Thanks also to the folks at Docks for allowing us to do thier site. ARC Design won a silver Davey for the Docks at the Capitol website.

4d time is now

As some may or may not know my wife and I are pregnant, well OK she is pregnant and I just fetch everything for her. In any event we are going to do this 4D ultrasound thing where you can see the baby (kinda) before the baby is actually here. It is very exciting because I have seen some pictures from these before and it really does look like a baby. So up until now all we have seen is fuzzy TV static pictures of the outline of little Madeline’s (thats going to be her name) head and body on the regular ultrasound. This is going to be really cool to check out what she is going to look like before she is even born. My best friend Peo and his wife Kelly are coming with us, they are pregnant with twin girls. Peo and Kelly already have a beautiful little girl named Ava who is a little over a year now. This takes the ARC Design baby total to 5, 4 Girls and Rick’s boy.

Everything is about done in her room, we have painted, put up crown molding (I don’t like to talk about this time in my life), put together most of the furniture and all. So hopefully before to long we will be 100% done and ready, we will see.

For more information about 4d ultrasound’s check out Baby & Me // www.babyandmenc.com

Party Time

Last year ARC Design moved into a new space, an 1800 square ft office over looking market circle in historic downtown Fayetteville. When we first moved in we had a ribbon cutting open house type of get together. We invited all of our clients, friends and family. The party was a huge success, clients came, mingled, and had a great time. We had a great time also and figured this would be a nice thing to do every year.

We have enlisted the help of Chef Mei again to create an awesome spread as tasty as last year. (You can learn more about Chef Mei and http://www.chefmeipcs.com). We are doing all the last minute things like vacuming the cubicles and dusting. I am trying to get some of the 8 Graphic Design Awards we won back and hung up, they are getting framed right now and we have at least 5 done so I will go pick them up today so we can display them for everyone to see. Its cool to do something for the folks who help you keep the doors open and help pay the people working here at ARC.

Everyone is invited, and if you did not get a eCard invitation from us don’t fret, just come on over, have some food, a glass of wine and unwind before the holidays! If you need directions to our downtown Fayetteville location you can find them here. See you there!

Holiday Slowdown

“During the holiday season most design agencies come to a slowdown once the Christmas advertising has been finished. While business is picking up now I expect it to slow down soon. During this slowdown Adam and I have decided that we are going to work on our new ARC website. The ARC Design site you see now is one that I designed in about 2 hours, then showed it to Adam, and he made a few tweaks to it. We published it over our holding page when we first opened our doors. We had to get something up quick because Adam was already selling websites. Imagine that, Adam sold websites for us, a web design company only having a holding page.

Almost three years later we feel like it is time to show off what we can do. We are building award winning sites every week and we need a website for ARC Design that showcases our talents. The new website will have a dynamic flash area and we are going to use ourselves as the prime example of how powerful video can be on a website. Hopefully we can get this site live by February. Launching 2-3 sites a week puts a strain on doing work for ourselves but we have to do it.

If you are looking to redesign your page yourself please at least consult a professional to learn a few things that you can do to help your search engine positioning. I have seen websites fall off searches completely after a website redesign. Or you can come to ARC and we will handle it all for you, all you have to do is sit back and relax.”