Following up on Samara’s Awesome Paper Folding Parties and the killer igloo notepads that are the result of said paper folding, I present you with notepad2.0.

Taking notes is great and all, especially in one of Samara’s notepads, but the only problem is you need to read through them again to remember what you or someone else had to do and if you’re at all like me (slightly scatterbrained), sometimes it’s difficult to work out what you were thinking when writing said note.

Solution: Add a to do list to your notepad pages
Only actionable items are put in this section, then when you’ve been in meetings back to back all day and your brain is fried, you can review your notes and have a clearly defined list of To Do Items for you or other team members.

There’s a whole methodology surrounding this sort of thing that I won’t really go into, but I’m finding it works well for me so I thought I’d share. I’ve put together a PDF template that breaks your pages up into, Notes, ToDo Items and Ideas for Later.

It pretty much does what it says on the tin, the only thing worth explaining is the “Ideas for later” section.  In a brainstorm, lots of ideas get thrown around, some feasible and right for the brief, some awesome but off point for the task at hand. These are worth documenting for use at some point later on. Record them here so that in the future when you think “What was that cool thing that did the thing with the other thing” you can flip back through your notebook and presto, there it is! Booom!

Also, I’ve put a nice little dot grid on the notes pages for drawing your concept sketches. Yay!

Finally, you should probably check that your printer can run paper trough it twice so that you can still use the backs of your scrap paper and save a tree before you wind up in trouble with IT for screwing up the printer.

Here’s a PDF that I made especially for you. Enjoy! Now I can tick “write igloo blog post” off my list (see it works)

Always keen to think of ways to make the planet a tad cleaner and get together over lunch, Samara created igloo’s awesome paper recycling project. Yep, if you are going to change the world, start with your own backyard. Disgusted with amount of paper our printer was churning out we thought why not re-use, before we recycle. So packed with reusable awesomeness, we held Samara’s awesome paper folding party, to fold the A4 scrap paper to A5, bind between two pieces of discarded strawboard, bind and stamp with our brand. There you have it, boxes of sketch pads. Can we say the word awesome any more?

No, it’s just Samara hanging her marvellous creation. igloo’s very own soy sauce fish chandelier™.

Or as we in the biz call it, a soyfishdelier™.

Yesterday was one of the sunniest day we’ve had since a long time. And so the creative team decided to head out and conduct a very, very complex, deep and philosophical experiment called… the igloo creative font.

It all came about from one creative brainstorm when somebody pondered upon the idea of what would happen if you upload a photo of yourself to WhatTheFont! – what font would you be? The initial idea was to upload a portrait photo of yourself and thus the project was once upon a time called ‘The Face Font’ – sadly the system failed to pick up just about everyone’s face (except for Pete’s cause of his awesome glasses and brows)

But the sun was out yesterday and we thought Aha! what about human shadow fonts?

It wasn’t as easy as we thought getting into those alphabets either. Maybe the proposed weekly yoga session at igloo would have helped (alphabet yoga anyone? how about a z or a v?) Nevertheless – here i present the results, the fonts that (apparently) represent the creative team here at igloo…let’s hope nobody will get too upset at the fact that none of us got Helvetica.

As we emerge victorious from a huge website build, complete with everything you can cram into a website – Interactivity, Social Media, Flash, Javascript, etc. all built on top of Sitecore – we feel that we have so much information to share with the world. I had a brief chat with some of the many key people involved in our latest project mazda.com.au and asked them, “what was the most important lesson to take away from the project”. I’ve tried to elaborate on these concise points and hopefully there is something in this for everyone.

Staffing a digital agency is very similar to casting for a movie. There are plenty of people that will fill the role, but it’s in the critical scene that the real star shows their value. Similarly, when selecting the right staff in an agency its easy enough to employ people who are ‘good enough’, but it’s not until your company’s flagship project is on the precipice of failure that the real guns will step up and prove their worth.

Make sure you know your culture and staff to suit that culture. A dev shop will be more inclined to find people who can grind it out from 9-5 and who are less creatively inclined as they can get easily distracted, however if you’re at a creative agency you may lean towards staff who are lateral thinkers and more outgoing but can be a little harder to control. Maybe you need a mix of the two? If you don’t understand your culture you will never recruit the right people.

As much as I want to avoid using another pun, here it is. You can’t choose your family, just like a digital agency can’t choose it’s clients’ partners.

You need to develop your relationship with these third parties as it could be all that stands between you and missing your deadlines. Think of ways to improve the relationship whilst respecting the boundaries you both have in your prospective markets. At igloo we work very closely with all of our clients’ suppliers and maintaining a beneficial relationship is of the utmost importance. Treating them as a competitor will only serve to make your job impossible when you are relying on them at the last minute.

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So what is Trés Bon Tuesday?

Trés Bon Tuesday is about Igloo staff having time away from their computer screens and enjoying all things Good. In this weeks instalment we watched a group of shorts showcasing the uniqueness of California.

Check out California Is a Place for more vids.

For me, there are few things more motivating than being told I won’t be able achieve something that I set my mind to. So it was with a strong sense of pride and satisfaction that I sat as part of a very dedicated team of digital designers and developers while we put finishing touches to the new Mazda Australia website last night. We’d been told many times that we’d never deliver the site in the timeframe we committed to and a number of times during the development it looked like this would be correct. But a Herculean effort from our team has ensured we got there in the end and definitely feels good.

Over the past 6 months, as we’ve scoped, designed and built this site, at times I’ve felt like a bit of a surrogate mother. So much time and effort is invested in effectively nurturing the development the website that it almost seems strange handing over responsibility for it’s ‘real life’.

The site was born, as is the way with website launches, in the wee hours of this morning. And just like the beginning of human life the first few hours will be filled with lots of tests and poking and prodding to ensure the vital signs are OK. So far so good.

The most satisfying part of this whole process, however, has been the team spirit that everyone involved in the project have built. Many people have sacrificed enormous amounts of their personal time in order to achieve this great result and I can’t thank our team enough for their effort and attitude from start to finish. We’ve learned a lot about each other along the way. Some can’t eat chilli, some have mad soccer skills, some have awesome collections of 80s French dance tunes and some had never seen UFC until this project exposed them to the likes of Brock Lesner and Rashad Evans.

Now is the time to reacquaint ourselves with our partners and families and figure out how to deliver a web development project within business hours. Someone told me it can’t be done. We’ll see …

To see the new Mazda Australia website, go to www.mazda.com.au.

By Adam Leys – igloo Client Service Director

AG Ideas has come and gone for 2010. 41 Inspirational Designers. 12 countries. 3 Days.

Were you inspired? I certainly was. I had the chance to “take a day off” to attend DAY ONE of the conference. It was a great treat – not sitting in front of the computer and be surrounded with young design blood and inspirational speakers. The atmosphere was great, the Magnation stand was filled with cool magazines and the lunch at the NGV was superb!

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As part of the monthly igloo Pitsop we often like to throw interesting physical and mental challenges at the eskimos. This months challenge is a great collaborative exercise, that was developed at TED and is called the Marshmallow Challenge. The challenge works like this. Teams of 4 are given the following items:

20 strands of spaghetti
1 metre of string
1 metre of masking tape
1 marshmallow

Using these ingredients the team then have 18 minutes to build the highest freestanding structure that can support a marshmallow.

So how did they go?…

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