After 4+ years Be A Design Group would like to say thank you and good bye. We couldn’t have done it with out everyone’s input and support. We are putting BADG into cryogenic freeze, but unlike Walt Disney, there is the technology to reanimate us.

If you missed the retirement announcement, read here. We will make one more post on this site that we will update with news of our plans, announcements and updates. Look for something big from Adrian in the next month. He won’t even tell me what it is about.

A few weeks ago, Donovan and I had an off-air conversation about careers at Pentagram. Sure, you get work with some of the most amazing people in the industry, in really cool offices, for really cool clients, but how far can you go? You know you’ll never make Partner, because Pentagram partners all come from outside of the company. So in the end, we decided you just kind of languish in the Land of Super-great.

We must not have been too far off, because I opened up SpeakUp today to see that founder Armin Vit gave Pentagram his walkin’ papers as has left to handle Under Consideration full time. He notes it’s a little scary, and I’m sure it is, what with the ad revenues from SpeakUp, BrandNew (best site evar!), Quips, and Design Encyclopedia, plus a few book deals and being on good terms with 95% of the entire design industry, it probably looks like an uphill battle.

Well, from all of us here at BA, who have not quit our jobs to do this full time (yet), we say “good luck” and if anyone in NY has any freelance or overflow work, dude could probably use a hand-out.

The students at the W+K 12 school just released their own blog. It is brand new, so there isn’t much content yet. Our good friend Curtis Pachunka (a former BADCast interviewee) is one of the selected 12 err I mean 13.

Here is to hoping that W+K 12 gives us a peak into their world and that they will upgrade to something a little more custom than a Blogger blog.

This list is automatically generated, so check back to see your rank change. I didn’t give links to these names because I want that to be an honor reserved for the top ten. Also, if you are on the list and would like to be removed, please let me know.

This is probably a good time to mention that I strongly recommend that you sign up for a TypeKey account. If you are signed in through TypeKey your comments will bypass our spam filters and automatically get published to the site. Plus your name will have a cute little icon on it that will make you look important.

And since we are talking about comments, feel free to brush up on our comment policy.

This is the part where I pass the torch onto the next four people. I’m setting my sites high. Lets see if our fellow Battle of the Ad Blogs nominees will answer the call. Design Observer, Speak Up, Cameron Moll and Core 77 … I would like to see your unique perspective on this list of questions. I dare them to put this random and viral material on their coveted and highly thought-out blogs. If Kottke can do it, why can’t they?

Four jobs that we (today’s designers) do regularly:
1. Typographer
2. Photographer
3. Customer Service Rep
4. Salesperson

Four movies designers can watch over and over:
1. Fight Club (men) Moulin Rouge (women) . . . I apologize in advance for the vast generalization
2. The Matrix
3. 12 Monkeys
4. Office Space

Four places in the US where designers “should” live (I’ve never lived in any of these cities):
1. New York
2. San Francisco
3. Chicago
4. Seattle

Four places designers should visit /four places I want to visit:

1. Cooper Hewitt Museum
2. Hamilton Wood Type Printing Museum
3. Hatch Show Print
4. AIGA Headquarters

Four of the best food/edible products to design packaging for:
1. Wine
2. Coffee product
3. anything Italian
4. Soda

Four sites designers visit daily (besides SU & DO):
1. Google Image Search
2. Flickr
3. Photos.com (except no one will admit it)
4. AIGA Job Listings

Four TV shows designers love:
1. The Office (British version)
2. The Office (American version)
3. Curb Your Enthusiam
4. Battlestar Galactica (according to Debbie Millman, Adrian Hanft and Chris)

Four clients we would rather be working for:
1. Target
2. Apple
3. Any Paper Company
4. Non-profit that will change the world

Four bloggers I am passing the torch to (four other blogs nominated for battle of the ad blogs):
1. Design Observer
2. Speak Up
3. Cameron Moll
4. Core 77

Be A Design Group was recently nominated in the “Best Design Discussion Blog” category in the Battle of the Ad Blogs. Looking at the competition, It is a little hard not to feel like an underdog. Help us out by casting your vote for Be A Design Group! Voting ends February 10, so don’t delay.

Did blogs kill Emigre? It sounds nice, and is kind of a trendy way to say goodbye to the publication. Blogs are getting blamed for everything lately, and we bloggers gladly take credit. Newspapers all over the world are near death and blaming the internet. Print-on-demand allows anyone to publish a book or magazine without any of the painful bureaucracy of the old publishing institution. Technology is constantly changing the rules, and that is usually a wonderful thing.

What I find disturbing about what is being said by those most upset about Emigre’s end is their negativity towards blogs. There is a good reason why blogs are replacing traditional print publications: they are better. The publications die because they would rather die than embrace the new system. It is their failure to embrace blogging that has caused their death, not the blogs themselves. As much as I would like blogs to be responsible for killing Emigre, the truth is Emigre just didn’t want to play by the new rules, so they stopped playing. It is sad really, because Emigre could have made a really nice blog.

October 1

I drop a teaser in Be Aware 6 about my Lego camera. I get a couple nice comments and that is about it.

October 2

I quietly post the Lego camera instructions on my photo blog (FoundPhotography.com) to little fanfare.

October 8

I get my first roll of film back and gain the reassurance that the camera does actually work. I make a post to the toy camera group and a Lego group on Flickr. I get a pretty good response from the groups.

October 9

Presumably tipped off by members of the Flickr groups Digg, BoingBoing and MetaFilter post about my camera at about the same time. The tidal wave begins.

October 10

Engadget picks up the story.

October 12

A little late to the show, but worth mentioning, I get “clicked” by MSNBC.

October 16

As of today, 93 blogs have made posts that reference the Lego camera (according to Technorati). This more than anything will probably be the biggest help to me because it will increase my pagerank, and bump me up in search results.

The question you are all asking is, “How much traffic did that generate?” Well, before the hype, FoundPhotography.com generated 500 visitors on a good day. On October 9th the site’s traffic peaked at 29,000 visitors. For the visual people out there, it looked like this:

Of the 85,671 visitors I have received so far this month, here is how the traffic broke down:

Digg: 18% (15,400 visitors)

BoingBoing: 10% (8,500 visitors)

Engadget: 7% (6,000 visitors)

MetaFilter: 6.5% (5,500 visitors)

The important part of the graph to notice isn’t the peak, but rather the sharp drop off. Massive viral traffic is meaningless if it doesn’t generate repeat visitors. My hope is that a small fraction of the traffic from the last week returns to my site. While viral traffic is great, it was never my main goal. That is wy I feel relatively confident that some of the visitors will return. I never set out to be a one-hit-wonder. Instead, I am building FoundPhotography to be a site worth coming back for. The same is true of Be A Design Group. Every post we write has the goal of getting the reader to return. That is where the real value is. A regular reader is worth much more than 30,000 visitors that never come back. That is why Be A Design Group’s monthly traffic will still greatly exceed that generated by the buzz machines.

Let my experience leave you with this final bit of advice: Focus your effort towards developing consistent quality content, and if in the process you hit the viral jackpot, all the better.

By using any of the widely available free newsreaders, (I recommend NetNewsWire, Yahoo, or the new Safari) you can “subscribe” to any site with an rss feed. Simply enter http://www.beadesigngroup.com/rss2.php into your newsreader and you will have a subscription to Be A Design Group. That is pretty easy, right?

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