The Brewhouse

The Butcher’s Brother is under construction

Derek — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:34:57 +0000

As we wrap up our work for the Butcher’s Brother BBQ with Whole Foods we are anxiously checking in on the production of all of the signage and graphic assets. Security Signs has been great with all of our custom signage needs. They didn’t even shrug a shoulder when it came time to hand paint some of the interior assets.

Watercolor Portraits

Brian — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:54:27 +0000

Youn Hee took advantage of our portraits from a recent photo shoot and made us beautiful. Our album art is in place, now we need to schedule our recording session. And write some music. And learn an instrument.

More Screens than You

Brian — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:42:58 +0000

Derek decided to turn it up to 11 today and overwhelm us one-screen schmucks with what he calls “Riding the Pixel Pony”. Nerd.

Photo Management Pt.2 : Metadata

Brian — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:29:48 +0000

This is the second article in a three part series. Read part 1.

Not attaching metadata (simple definition = searchable text) to the files in your image library will cost you, accumulatively over a lifetime, 22.7 days of brain-numbing clicking on little blue folders to see what’s inside. Use metadata and you can spend that free time throwing a ball for your dog, knitting a scarf for your mom, or planting heirloom tomatoes in your garden. Good stuff.

Our software of choice for adding metadata, as for batch renaming, is Photo Mechanic. Lightroom, Photoshop, iPhoto, and several other applications all allow for various levels of control over adding metadata. Choose your system and make it part of your workflow.

Here is a screen shot (from Photo Mechanic) of the basic fields you will find when adding metadata to your images.

Check out a definition of each field here. You don’t need to use all the fields, but fill in the ones that are most important to you or your company. Working for an architecture firm for example, you might want to add the name of the project relevant to the image. Or if the image is to be used in your firm’s marketing efforts, apply an appropriate keyword such as “regional PR”. To keep track of how an image has been used, make sure that people who have access to your company’s archive note how they have used the image. Remembering how and where an image has been used keeps you from overusing an image or submitting it twice for the same purpose.

Our favorite tool in helping us assign good keywords is found at Yuri Arcurs Photography. Using a large base of stock imagery, this tool will generate a list of recommended keywords based on your image. You can then copy and paste the list into your metadata. Little brain work required.

The final part of this series will cover where to store your archive so that it is safe and accessible.

Kenny and Younhee

Youn — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:32:14 +0000

Kenny and Younhee at dMob being awesome! Thanks for the photo Christian.

Williams & Dame Signage

Brian — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:22:10 +0000

Our friends at Williams and Dame Development can now welcome their visitors with a new sign. Youn Hee worked her magic on typography modifications to the existing logo and Jason from I Can Do It installed it perfectly.

Thinking about optimizing for retina displays

Derek — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:30:03 +0000

We have been exploring different methods and workflows for optimizing our projects for retina displays. I came across this link today which I found interesting.

Great clients are hard to come by

Derek — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:27:18 +0000

We think we are truly blessed that we get to do what we love for a living and we wouldn’t be able to do any of it without our clients. We have been very fortunate to work with such great clientele who have enabled us to get our hands dirty on some really exciting projects. Simply put, we wouldn’t be here today without our clients and we wanted to take a moment to reflect on that idea and thank our clients for being great. Therefore we took some time out of our busy schedule this month to develop a custom thank you card to send out to our current clients to let them know how special they are and how much we value our relationships. We’ve included some snapshots of how they turned out. We are pretty smitten with them. What do you think?

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum Screenshots

Derek — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:16:53 +0000

Last week we were working on a proposal for some new potential work it was fun to reflect back on some of the great work we’ve completed recently. Here are a few fun detailed examples highlighting some of custom front end and backend work we did for the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum Website

Fremont Whole Foods Mural

Brian — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 22:51:46 +0000

This spring, Whole Foods asked us to design a community mural for the entrance of their Fremont store. It’s complete! The dedication is tomorrow (Saturday, June 9, 2012) at 3535 NE 15th Ave.

It was a unique project for Brewhouse because to make the magic happen we called in the talents of 90 elementary and middle school students from Sabin School. They were wonderful. The energy they brought to the project gave it a personality and life beyond what we adults could have produced by ourselves. We are all proud of the group effort.