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Posted in Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized, Work /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Nimble Web



For those of us who have been developing web sites since the very first days, it has been an exciting ride of ever-evolving technologies, languages and expectations. I remember my palpable excitement way back in the late ’90′s when the first “designed” HTML sites came up and we all rushed in to see what we could do with tables, frames and other tricks. Next came MySQL and the interesting promise of data-driven sites, then .PHP and blogging began to rise. Now we are all about WordPress and its peers like Drupal, Joomla, and whatever is next – like Koken.

I’m not a programmer – I can do some light programming and I grew up hacking around in Basic and its peers, but my abilities are limited to tweaking and cutting bits of code from one place to another. Throughout the development of the web I have tried to think as a designer and as a user – and I always have looked for places where I can get to the results I want as quickly and independently as possible. At Studio Two, we moved to WordPress starting about 2-3 years ago as our primary development platform because it hits that sweet spot between über-geeky and super-user-friendly that just works for us. I can build whole sites from scratch without having to harass Jason, our in-house programmer, or Christine, our super-talented web designer – but if we need to make something really look special or jump through hoops or solve a particular problem, the underlying technical fabric of WordPress’s PHP structure lets us do whatever we want.

With HTML5 coming on full-tilt now, we also have access to a whole new range of fun interactive actions that used to be reserved for flash. HTML5 has also infiltrated the developers who build commercially available themes for wordpress, and those themes are rethinking the basic platform in really exciting and creative ways.

Which leads me to the topic of this post – what I call “The Nimble Web”. My premise is this – we are now entering the 4th or 5th generation of web development and the users are coming along with us – and users ultimately are the reason we create sites. In this iteration, we find ourselves paying close attention to actual user behavior – by really looking closely at the analytics of the sites we build we can see what users are doing and interpret how their interaction should define our content and UX (user-interface) design. My premise is also about “speed to market” – that the new tools of web development allow us to act far more quickly (if we choose to) in creating and deploying sites. The Nimble Web is about creating sites today that provide users with the experience and information that they most want.

If you are reading this post there is a good chance that you are involved, at some level, in the question of “what should we do about our website” or “we need to build/rebuild our website, how should we go about it?”. I receive, on average, 1-2 RFP’s for web development every week. These RFP’s are often very thorough – well-intentioned documents created by committee to define a complex project and solicit accurate bids. What I see in the RFP’s is that they generally describe a website that we would have been building 3-4 years ago – a large, monolithic document with 100′s of pages of content, complex navigational structure, and very rigid design needs. These sites take 6-12 months to build, cost between $10k-$50k and consume significant resources in time and personnel during the development. They are anything but nimble, and they generally have been defined without any reference to actual user behavior.

I want to talk about an alternative. Here’s the story. We manage over 200 websites for a very wide variety of clients – retailers, restaurants, museums, theaters, designers, architects, real estate, and so on. For each of these sites we have access to their google analytics – the statistical report of user behavior on the sites – pages visited, time on site, demographic data, etc. Recently, as I was browsing through the analytics of a number of clients I noticed an interesting phenomenon – despite the diversity of the sites and their content, the same numbers kept popping up – visitors, on average, for EVERY site I looked at, visited between 3-4 pages and stayed for exactly 2:40. On EVERY site I looked at this was true. And if I dug down into the site content, visitors were spending that 2:40 looking for very specific, actionable information – directions, contact, event dates/times, and actionable events like buying tickets. They weren’t lingering or browsing around – they came looking, they found what they were looking for, and they left. I realized that for the majority of the sites we manage, visitors were treating them like convenience stores. You go to the 7-11 not to wander around aimlessly shopping – you go there specifically to buy a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a Hershey bar. In and out in 2:40.

What does this mean? It means two things. One, if you are an organization considering developing a new web presence, consider carefully how much time and effort you want to put into using your site as more than a basic information and connection portal. Make sure that you study your current user analytics and consider the scope of investment you will be making in providing services that users don’t seem to be looking for or engaging in. Also, consider breaking your large project into a set of small sub-projects. We have been working with a number of organizations on this approach with great success. By breaking away from the premise that you can only have a single site for your organization you free up significant opportunity for creating richer and more dynamic experiences for discrete projects. An example of this is what we are doing with Hancock Shaker Village. During 2012 and 2013 so far we have rebuilt the core institutional website and concurrently developed a number of sub-sites for specific programs that had enough scope and content to suggest that a seperate site would be warranted. Thus today you can visit a sub-site for Baby Animals, The CSA Program, and others to come that are still being developed. In this diversity, the organization is finding that it is able to more quickly deploy program-specific content, is able to direct traffic directly to a more compelling experience, and that there are opportunities for creative expression that don’t threaten the function of aesthetic rigor of the main site.

The web can be a rich, engaging medium but it can also be a confusing, resource-consuming landscape. The Nimble Web would indicate that even large organizations can rethink their presence by taking a close look at the data created by user activity. If you would like to talk about how this might apply to your business or institution, let me know!

22Apr
DONORINVESTOR
Posted in Listens, Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

Investors or Donors?

In the course of running my branding agency, Studio Two, we’ve worked with for-profit and non-profit clients alike. Many of our clients are startups, or entrepreneurial businesses that come to us for assistance in defining their message and identity. This is true for both sectors – there are entrepreneurs in the non-profit world, though we tend to not call them that. Which gets me thinking about semantics.

Entrepreneurs start up new businesses based on creativity, new technologies and new ideas. In the non-profit world, these same people are called “innovators” or a “visionaries” or (usually behind their backs) “crazy”…. But seriously, why is it any less entrepreneurial to start up a new theater company or research organization than a dot-com business? And what’s in a name anyway – why would someone “want” to be called an Entrepreneur?

I think that it is a question worth asking. In the United States, where government support for the arts and for most non-profit business sectors is very limited or non-existant, the act of choosing to spend one’s energies on a challenging venture for the social good requires significant motivation – which is good. Not every idea will be successful and the Darwinian aspects of the free market has a role to play here. The word “entrepreneur” offers some clues to how one might choose to act in the process:

  • Entrepreneurs seek out investors and venture capital to pursue their vision
  • Entrepreneurs are compelled to draft business plans and budget projections
  • Entrepreneurs work diligently to hone their “pitch” and define their message and product
  • Entrepreneurs have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets quickly and efficiently
  • Entrepreneurs often have the idea of scalability built into their business model
  • Entrepreneurs will “pivot” their plan if one idea becomes more successful than another.

If you look around at your non-profit organization, whether well-established or very new, do the above concepts apply? Should they? I think they should – but with a twist. Let’s look at some of the differences and possibilities in the way we use language in the non-profit sector.

  • Non-Profits seek out grants and donors to pursue their vision
  • Non-Profits are compelled to draft strategic plans and budget projections
  • Non-Profits work diligently to hone their mission
  • Non-Profits have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets efficiently and repeatedly
  • Non-Profits often are constrained by the focus of their mission or context
  • Non-Profits generally stay tightly focused on their core “product” despite performance

So here’s the idea. What if you called your donors “investors”? What if you prepared a business plan instead of a strategic plan? What if you considered ways your organization could “pivot” based on its programming strengths and weaknesses?

I’m sure that many of you reading this already do – there are many innovative, nimble minds at work in the world’s great cultural and social organizations. Just for a moment, though, consider switching up the language. Call yourself an entrepreneur. Consider talking to your lead donor about her investment in your organization. Hone your elevator pitch.

Something interesting might happen. If you’d like to talk about it some more – contact me. I’m really interested in how it changes my thinking to simply change a few words and see how they feel.

31Jan
basel bingo FIN link
Posted in Creativity, Uncategorized /By ksprague

Art Basel Bingo

Have some fun at Art Basel in Miami this year – play Basel Bingo! If you are at any of the multitude of art fairs or at Basel itself, see if you can spot the tried-and-true and cross them off on your card. Download your Basel Bingo Card here and share your result with us on facebook! We’re sure there will be fabulous prizes but we don’t know what they are yet!

Click on the image to download your VERY OWN version of Basel Bingo in PDF form

03Dec
scopetentmidtown
Posted in Creativity, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Art Superbowl

Scope Art Fair Tent in Midtown Miami

Scope Art Fair Tent in Midtown Miami

Art Basel and the multitudinous spin-off art fairs are all set to open next week here in Miami. The whole city feels like it is on deadline. Up here in Midtown where Studio Two has based itself, 10 (ten!) huge tents have been erected in the last month to host the many satellite fairs – artmiami, scope, context, red-dot, etc. It has been stupendous to watch these massive temporary structures go up for essentially a 5 day run.

This is the superbowl of art and in an interesting way, despite the gloomy view of the entire art world by some, I’m reveling in the parallels. Think about it. Do you really care about football? Maybe yes, likely no – but has the NFL managed to infiltrate your brain to such a degree that despite having zero interest in the sport you maintain an underlying awareness of the event itself and potentially even who the teams are or some other salient detail? Imagine – they took an obscure game played by college boys and transformed it into an industrial mega-brand with influence far and wide. Why? Because there was money to be made.

Bake House Art Complex, Miami.

I like art – I like the idea that people have the right and the desire to create something from nothing, to imagine what isn’t and make it. I’ve been an artist at times in my life and enjoyed the mysterious flow of creativity in the middle of a project that might or might not resolve itself into something interesting, different and beautiful. I agree that sometimes the modern art machine turns out negligible or questionable product defined as art mostly because it is a: expensive to make, b: difficult to move, and c: someone likely got hurt in the process. Nevertheless, to carry my football metaphor a bit too far, much like when one watches a game of football only to see an extraordinary play – some kind of feat of physical prowess and magic that transcends the game and speaks to the human condition in all of us – there are discoveries to be made in the art world. Last night we went to the BakeHouse ArtComplex here in Miami where professional artists have studios in residence. It was an open-house and we went from one studio two another and made wonderful discoveries along the way, particularly the outstanding work of Marcia Ramos-Perelló with whom we had a lovely conversation about how her work connects her to stages in her life and in the moment how she has been connecting to her mother’s hand-labor making clothes. You could see the intense dedication, focus and emotion in both the artist and the work. This is why art matters.

The work of Marcia Ramos-Perelló

To be in Miami right now and to be even 2 or 3 degrees of separation from the art world means that much like the superbowl, you just “know” that Art Basel is happening. Much like that over-hyped ball game, the best way to enjoy it is do dive in and take part. Yes, they’ve made a major industry out of what is really a personal and private matter – art – and in the course a world economy in jobs, money, media and all the ancillary spin-offs of the creation of a major market where one didn’t previously exist at this scale occurs. Like it or hate it, you cannot but be amazed that art has created this kind of gigantic happening and if it means the transfer of wealth between hedge-fund managers and artists, gallerist, critics and others, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. What do you think?

30Nov
RFPfeat
Posted in Consults, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

Rethinking the RFP

Have you ever had to respond to an RFP (A Request for Proposal)? Chances are you have – if you are in any kind of business providing goods and services to institutions and business. I don’t know that I have ever met anyone on the receiving end of the RFP process who is fundamentally happy about it – and that give me pause. I’ve certainly been on boards and committees where we needed to solicit bids from vendors and the RFP seems like the best way to bring definition to the project, but I think there is a better way.

In my business we primarily receive RFPs for building new websites for institutions  The RFPs generally lay out the scope of the project, the needs of the institution, some background, qualifications and requirements of the vendor, and that kind of thing. They can be extremely time-consuming to respond to as each and every element needs to be accurately addressed or your bid will be disqualified for being incomplete. The RFPs vary widely from institution to institution – some include forms that need to be filled out and attached, some require an exact structure to the document you are preparing. All of them have a major, fundamental flaw – they assume that the requestor knows more about what is being asked than the vendor.

This is a key point – the RFP frequently presents a set of requirements that is so well thought-through from the client end that there is very little, if any, room for the vendor to add value to the discussion. Actually, its not a discussion – its a request for a unilateral response. Oftentimes any conversation, questions, or discussion is strictly off the table in an effort to create a perfectly level playing field. And this is where the RFP fails completely for me.

Servers on the web 1995-2012

In my business we design and develop websites. The manner by which we provide this service has changed and continues to change at an accelerating rate as a consequence of the rate of change in the underlying technology of the web itself. The web itself is only a bit more than a decade old – go back to 1995 and that was about when things started to take off. In the intervening 15+ years the rate of change – the growth of the web and its dominance on so many aspects of our daily life and how the world works – has been phenomal and continues to increase exponentially.

Ok, so we know all this. What’s the issue? As an example, the aviation industry took 70 years to traverse the distance between the Wright Brothers and the Concorde. If you were an organization that needed an airplane in say, 1950, you could have written a specification for the airplane based on your present understanding of aviation, submitted it to manufacturers, and received something in 2 years time that was quite relevant to the progress of the rest of the industry – perhaps engines had improved in that period, or wing design, but it would still be recognizable as a contemporary expression of aviation design. Of course this scenario (unless you are the US Govt.) doesn’t happen – you would go to the industry leaders in aviation and describe your requirements (“I need to transport 30 people 2,000 miles safely”) and you would listen to what they had to say.

Unlike airplanes, most people who use the web everyday feel they have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. They feel qualified to write the RFP based on their experience using their own existing sites, surfing the sites of their peers or competitors, and researching trends and technologies on the web. Generally the specification they write is a good one – it outlines clearly the requirements  as a snapshot in time and this becomes the goal. Here’s the problem – in the time that it takes to create the requirement, draft it, submit the RFP to vendors, collect responses and engage in the project, the underlying systems that the requirements are based on have moved forward. The playing field has changed.

It knows where it is. Does your desktop?

The web is an organic entity. As a dynamic meme, it evolves and mutates rapidly. For those of us who are engaged in that evolution on a daily basis, it’s exciting – challenges you had yesterday are easily solved tomorrow. New tools, technologies, code and whole environments spring up every day. Back 5-6 years ago, we struggled to write original code to solve challenges on a daily basis – today we rarely need to do fundamental programming because the solution is “off the shelf” somewhere out there for us to download and plug-in. My mantra as a web developer is to always assume that someone else has already built what I am seeking, and done a good job of it – my job is to find that tool and bring it to the task. The rise of open-source software and the whole underlying ethos of open-source has created a situation where I can participate in an ever-evolving, ever-updating core architecture (like wordpress)  for the sites I build. Imagine if you will, an office building that is constantly changing, twisting, morphing, adding, subtracting and growing as you live in it – that’s what the web is today and what open-source creates. One aspect of participating in this world – even as an expert – is humility. Neither I nor anyone else really knows where it is going to go. Take the rise of the mobile device – as web designers we weren’t even thinking about delivery to phones 6 years ago – now it is a requirement to consider, and I suspect it will become the primary delivery modality in the next 3 years. What a change that is! A complete re-articulation of the whole user experience, interface, design and technologies. I know I am not the only person frustrated by the fact that my state-of-the-art desktop iMac is essentially “dumber” about its place in the physical world than my iphone – which knows where it is at all times and gives me data based on the geolocation.

So back to the RFP. In trying to create a level playing field, institutions are actually trying to freeze in time this rapidly developing architecture. Instead of saying “The website must do this and that” they should be asking “Who is our audience? What do they want to know? How can we best reach them today and tomorrow?” and they should sit down with vendors like myself and have a conversation. What I would dearly love to do would be to take the RFP, set it to the side as part of the overall definition of the project, and have a chance to tell the client my views on contemporary web design and the future of the medium. One conversation I have been having with clients in the last year goes like this:

“We can build the site you have defined in the RFP – it will take 3-6 months, cost $xx,000 and go through a traditional design process. Or we can launch a new site for you in a couple of weeks.”

This is a statement designed to create a conversation about the contemporary web, the design process that we prefer, and a completely new way of looking at the web as less of an edifice and more as an evolving, organic medium. The RFP process precludes this conversation – freezing the specification in time – and relegates my perspective to the boundaries where it can’t be heard.

I can understand the challenge that any organization faces in this process – how do you create conditions for success? You don’t want to hire the wrong vendor and be left with no budget and a site that doesn’t work. To that end I suggest that the client invest significantly more time in vetting the portfolio of the designers they are interviewing, and following up in detail with provided references, and stepping outside of those references and contacting people at all the organizations that the vendor has worked with in the past. I believe that good businesses are made on succesful long-term relationships involving trust and performance. If the vendor can’t display those qualities, they need to prove otherwise, in person, how they can guarantee the success of the project.

Let’s set aside the RFP and have a conversation. I think it will be fascinating.

23Nov
Stanford University. Photo by Kevin Sprague ©2008
Posted in Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /6 comments

Maybe our kids won’t go to college…

Technology and the internet are changing everything – we all know this – and we experience it in our lives every day. It’s nothing to be in constant communication through our mobile devices 24/7 now. It’s taken for granted that crowd-sourced tools like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Twitter, etc. can bring clarity to chaotic information streams (or not – still a lot of work to be done here). So why is it that we go to college like 19th century scholars at Oxford – bearing our books into rooms with chalkboards? And why is it taken for granted that we should mortgage our futures to pay for this?

I believe in education – I had an excellent one with a succession of carefully chosen private schools and 4 years at Cornell. My parents had the means to make that possible and I thank them for it – but since becoming a parent to two boys, now young teenagers, I’ve been aware of the powerful marketing forces working on me, and them, to convince us that we must, without fail, save every possible dollar to pay for the astronomical tuitions of the future. You can’t turn on the television or browse the web without having Merril Lynch or T.RowePrice remind you that college will cost upwards of $500,000 for your newborn so you better start saving. Inflation in the USA has been moderate to negligible in the past decade -around 3% per year -

but in the meantime college costs (tuition, fees, etc) have increased 6%-9% annually in the same period with an aggregate national average growth of just over 30% for the past decade.

Every parent knows this – and yet the universal response is to toe the line and concede that a 4-year degree is “worth it” and we will “figure it out” when the time comes. Well, lets imagine different. There’s an exploding new movement in higher education pairing online classes, crowd sourcing and real-time feedback going on: massive open online courses, or MOOCs. MOOCs have been written about extensively but I haven’t gotten the sense that we are seeing the forest for the trees here. A recent article in the New York Times gives a good picture of the revolutionary nature of this new idea.

What’s going on here is education embracing technology for communication and feedback like never before – and people love it. What’s unsaid in all this is some pretty powerful stuff – namely, the internet is about to kill college. Think about it – the internet has transformed whole industries completely – we all participated in the transformation of music, the complete revolution in publishing, the accelerating demise of the post office, the transformation of private capital investment that is being currently foretold by Kickstarter and others… But College? The sacrosanct temple of learning? The grassy Quadrangle the hearkens back to Socrates holding forth in the public forum? Could these places, their bricks and mortar, their entire institutional construct, truly be threatened by a bunch of people using google hangout to share ideas?

Yes. I think the internet will kill College as we know it – it may take a long time and it portends to be an ugly, protracted fight. The institutions are embracing new ideas like MOOCs today because they want to explore this space – they are mission-driven to do so. But these institutions are also businesses – massive businesses with trillions of dollars of hard assets – real estate, intellectual property, cash, and the best human-capital on the planet. The facts don’t lie though – the charts above are clear indications that something in the system is fundamentally broken – if the cost of higher education is out of reach for 99% of the people then it is fundamentally irrelevant and requires replacement or revolution. In 2008 teh New York Times wrote about this with the headline “Higher education may become unaffordable for most in the U.S.”  - Well, here we are in 2012 and it is. So now the revolution starts.

Lets look at the pattern of events that will unfold.

1) The recession that started in 2007 struck many colleges where it matters most – in their investment funds. Headlines around the nation called this out at the time and the repercussions on the institutions were significant and deep – suspended capital projects, hiring freezes – all the usual effects that industry feels in an economic downturn. The recession illuminated the degree to which these institutions have become focused on amassing massive hoards of cash – endowment funds are safety nets that hopefully never get deployed – but they have become an industry all by themselves. So what happens when an institution is faced with the fact that they have to subsidize tuition for every student on an increasing percentage scale year over year as tuition become impossibly high? This is already happening throughout most of the USA where tuition fails to cover the costs of the product – and endowments are being tapped to pay that subsidy. Its a broken system that is highly volatile and tied to the risk/reward matrix of the international stock market – and we know how stable and predictable that has been for the last decade or more.

2) Technology accelerates. Moore’s law still applies and its echoes are felt everyday as we experience the arrival of the future on an exponential curve. I’m referring to the unpredictable and transformational change that is occurring for all of us in our communications, our ability to interact with the data-sets that are our world, and the speed by which we connect and share ideas. This is not slowing down – its speeding up and nobody really knows what the world will look like in ten years as a consequence. I hope that it looks beautiful – more connected, intelligent, educated, aware (if you’ll forgive the geeky reference – more Star Trek than Blade Runner….).

3) Traditional models for jobs and career are transforming. Its accepted now that you may have multiple overlapping careers in your life – not just one. Our current crop of business heroes tend to be college dropouts who found the rigid 19th century model unworkable for their nimble, technology-focused minds. They went to work building facebook, microsoft, apple, twitter, and just about everything else while the rest of us were writing papers about Chaucer (that would be me….). I grew up a geek but I put it aside for the sake of my piece of parchment, and having a good GPA and I wish today that my parents had just set up a small venture capital fund with the money they spent on tuition. The rigid rules are breaking down for what it means to live and learn and work.

4) We no longer need to physically convene to share ideas. The college campus is a beautiful thing – but it will increasingly play second fiddle to people who are connected globally and seamlessly. Bricks and Mortar will become increasingly less relevant.

5) Traditional models are ripe for exploitation by disruptive ones. I think that the higher education system and the healthcare industry are the two remaining systems in our world that have not been forced into full revolution yet. Healthcare is there – in the midst of some really rough waters without a clear direction. Higher education still sits in ivory-tower glory on the hill but its turn is coming next and I think we are going to see a massive and traumatic change here in the coming decade or two as the old system resists the new and deploys its resources aggressively to fight it. Perhaps not – perhaps it is in the DNA of education to respond to the over-arching mission at its core which is to enlighten, educate and elevate the people – but I see a large, embedded and static industry with lots to lose. This is Detroit in 1970 making fun of Toyota’s first imports….and we all know how that worked out.

So what can we learn here? What is the opportunity we have as individuals, as institutions, and as a nation? Here’s what I think:

1) As individuals we need to create a new system for tracking, assessing, and reporting educational progress. Jobs in the future will be about what you know and can do, and the technical and creative skills you bring to the table. We need to find accredidation and tracking for these online courses like MOOCs immediately – not in 5 years time. There needs to be a unified view of achievement and progress that is socially-networked and aware – something of a collision between the resume function of linkedin, the timeline aspect of facebook, and the reputation management of a Kred or Klout – but stripped down to be a vivid, professional representation of your individual education, skills, portfolio and ideas.

2) As institutions we need to rapidly embrace the future and shed the past – campuses need to be completely re-thought as places of convening and conversation – students need to be liberated from the schedule, the classroom, and space and time constraints. Administration needs to find ways to fairly compensate and oversee educators and stimulate on-going education and a more competitive model for career evolution than tenure. In many ways the post-graduate research-model of higher education is a much better and more evolved one than the undergraduate experience – lets break down the barriers and allow people to move into place as their ideas accelerate. Ditch the 4 year schedule of requirements. Today.

3) As a nation we need to build bridges for all people to participate in education regardless of age or economic status. Learning should be a cultural norm – we need to talk about learning as something everyone takes part in. Curiosity and creativity is not just for children or young adults. Today, if you have a question you are often only moments away from starting to find the answers online, and engaging in a community of ideas and opinions. the TED conference has shown vividly how much hunger there is in the world for transformative ideas and kudos to TED for opening up their archives, the conference and every idea to the public for free.

In conclusion – the 4-year undergraduate system is broken – we can’t afford it and it has ceased to be relevant to how we are and will learn in the future. It needs to change radically and it can either fight change tooth and nail or embrace it.

This is kind of a long post – apologies – but it’s been on my mind and I hadn’t really seen it out there. What are your thoughts on this? I can’t wait to see it happen.

 

 

21Nov
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Posted in Uncategorized /By ksprague

Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic

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via theatlantic.com

Great article in The Atlantic about real vs. fake (photoshopped, mis-attributed) images coming out of hurricane Sandy. The most interesting thing are the overlaps – images that appear to be fake but are actually real, like this incredible, surreal image of a flooded but lit-up carousel in DUMBO. Reality is almost always going to trump fiction and this is an astonishing image.

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

31Oct
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Posted in Uncategorized /By ksprague

December 2011 article in Passport Magazine about Kevin Sprague

Nov 21, 2011|

Creating Brands, and Art

By Douglas P. Clement

Kevin Sprague at his business, Studio Two, in Lenox, Mass. Photo by Laurie Gaboardi.

What Kevin Sprague does not possess are the equivocal traits of the Shakesperean protagonist Hamlet, characteristics that may make for gripping drama but ultimately leave those who are able to order the world around them through bold actions frustrated.

It’s perhaps not coincidental that Mr. Sprague has found a principal and longtime client in Shakespeare & Company, the gem of a theater troupe whose ascension has roughly paralleled that of the creative thinker the troupe engaged to help build its brand and present it to the world through visually arresting images.

Largely for lack of fear, or equivocation, Mr. Sprague turned an unlikely start after college into a process that resulted in sculpting himself into “a strategic marketing consultant who works with organizations to create compelling methods of communicating, defining, and expressing their core values and products.”

His business, Studio Two, continues to grow and prosper, and in July it stretched out and relocated to a stylish space on Church Street in Lenox, Mass., above the equally stylish Café Zinc. Again, there is no coincidence, as the European-feeling café received Mr. Sprague’s branding touch even before it opened.

Other clients of Studio Two include a Berkshires best of the best in varying categories: Berkshire Mountain Distillers, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, SoCo Creamery, Berkshire International Film Festival, The Mount, the Normal Rockwell Museum, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace and couture knitter Catherine Lowe, among others.

While Mr. Sprague and his team—Heather Rose, a native of the Berkshires, Christine Cooney, the senior Web designer, Amanda Bettis and Kaitlyn Squires—have managed to thrive in a place known to bury many shops and businesses after a couple or few mean seasons (winter), he is hardly content to stop there.

As a result, he becomes difficult to define, to pin down. If that seems ironic, given that Studio Two’s mission is to present clients in a rich but simple and clear way, the opposite is true. It becomes clear over the course of a leisurely and delicious lunch at Café Zinc that Mr. Sprague fares so well at branding and marketing because he refuses to compartmentalize.

Instead, he brings the fullness of his life experience to each project, and he passionately broadens his experience through creative projects that are deeply personal but also sometimes marry his professional and personal pursuits.

One of the results is a book on his work for Shakespeare & Company, the leading regional theater for which he began working in 1994, when it offered a roughly six-week festival. Today, Shakespeare & Co. is a year-round operation that has a full-time staff of 40, a multi-million dollar budget and audiences that reach 40,000 a year.

In chronicling the experience on his Web site, Mr. Sprague is not trying to take undue credit for the growth. Yet, in an industry in which photographs and packaging don’t always do much to sell a show, Mr. Sprague’s imagery for Shakespeare & Co. packs a punch that seems unrivaled.

It also led to one of his ancillary projects, the book “Imaging Shakespeare,” which collects many of those images and offers a peek into the creative process. The book itself is another example of Mr. Sprague’s inventiveness and refusal to be bound by established protocol.

Instead of taking his concept and following the traditional agent-publisher model, Mr. Sprague turned to one of the publishing-on-demand models he admires for breaking down a hierarchy that divides the world into insiders and outsiders, often with no defensible explanation of who is on which side of the line—except the potential to bring in money, of course.

Armed with his vision for the book about Shakespeare & Company, he sourced a feasible printing estimate and ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $15,000 in 90 days; people were essentially pre-buying their copy of the book. In the end, a couple thousand copies were printed.

A series of artistic works came together in a different way. Mr. Sprague had been photographing dried flowers for a local botanical garden, and then the self-professed computer geek began marrying those photos with images and text on antique postcards, envelopes and other elements. The haunting images that result, he wrote in a blog entry, “evoke for me a kind of memory, or fragment of time.”

Memories, fragments of time and qualities of the immortal combine in another, more ambitious project of Mr. Sprague’s. It’s another published-on-demand book, this one enclosed in an unmarked black cover, which opens to a title page that says “Muse” in tiny type in one corner.

The photographic novel is his most personal project, and the multi-media narrative tells the tale of an immortal muse. At the end of the story, she gets released from the cycle to become the artist.

One of the images near the end of the book depicts a woman in white floating in brackish water. Mr. Sprague’s back-story indicates how intensively he approaches everything.

There’s a pond in Kennedy Park in Lenox that Mr. Sprague called “kind of a surreal place.” For years, he said, he had an image in his mind of someone floating in the pond amid the autumn leaves.

Finally, he approached actress Catherine Taylor-Williams, the producing artistic director of The Wharton Salon, about being his model. “She was always a very willing subject,” Mr. Sprague said. “Showing up and bringing energy is what a muse is about.”

The water in the pond was cold and the lily pads were like tentacles. Ms. Taylor-Williams swam out to the middle and got tangled in the weeds. Mr. Sprague recalled a momentary flicker of wondering whether he should keep shooting or jump in and help her.

Fortunately, no help was need. “She got out, got dressed and that was it,” Mr. Sprague said.

In all, he printed 50 copies of “Muse,” which he sold to friends and family. Prints from the project have been exhibited at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass.

“It’s always good to have a project just to recharge your creative batteries,” Mr. Sprague said.

When he’s not helping others or pursuing his own muse, Mr. Sprague is working for the greater good of the Berkshires. He attended Berkshire Country Day School as a boy, as do his sons. His wife, Kristine, is an architect. To give back, Mr. Sprague is on the private school’s board.

He is a co-chair of Berkshire Creative, which not only provides an online clearinghouse site for job listings, news, resources and more but actively works to stimulate new job growth in the region as well.

It’s a full and varied portfolio for someone who was an English major at Cornell and had his heart set on publishing a novel.

The segue into Studio Two, which launched in 1994, was one of those happy accidents with an improbable beginning. After college, in a “sympathy hire,” Mr. Sprague’s grandfather, who ran an engineering company focusing on wastewater treatment, brought him on to create some marketing materials.

He wrote script, hired a cameraman and an actor and made sales videos. A friend of his, meanwhile, had acquired a broadcast video-editing suite. Mr. Sprague re-wired the whole system and taught himself how to use it.

It was kind of an epiphany. He had been a hobbyist photographer and hadn’t experienced editing video. “The idea of using frames to make a story was compelling,” he said.

Then his grandfather fired him, which was the tradition with such sympathy hires. He did some industrial videos for other people, and then the “computer geek by birth” anticipated that video was going digital and bought a Mac.

That led to his learning Photoshop and Quark, and around 1994 he was working on a brochure for a company his father started. “It was a complete train wreck. I was not a graphic designer,” he recalled.

Mary Garnish, his neighbor, offered to help and Studio Two was born. Ms. Garnish and Mr. Sprague worked together for a decade before she moved on to other pursuits, and he continued building the business.

“People hire us because they hope their business will expand and grow,” Mr. Sprague said in summing things up simply, and Studio Two’s longtime clients have all grown significantly.

To learn more, see the Web sites at www.studiotwo.com and http://kevinsprague.com. The Web site for Berkshire Creative is http://berkshirecreative.org, and the site for Berkshire Country Day School is http://berkshirecountryday.org.

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via passport-mag.com

Douglas Clement did a nice job of capturing my history in this interview – and thanks to Laurie Gaboardi for a nice photo as well.

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

22Jan
Posted in Uncategorized /By ksprague

Miami is color

We’re wrapping up a 5 day trip to Miami – came down here to find out
more about the city, to feel it’s vibe, meet some interesting
thinkers, and build some connections. Why? Because we think this is
going to be our new market – not only for Studiotwo.com but for a
thinking about creating something of our own – new products, new
ideas, new vision. So far, the trip is proving to be all that it
promised and more. We came here looking for color and we found it – in
spades. Walls painted magenta, lit up at night. Interactive
fluorescent LED floors at the Audi pavilion at DesignMiami – the blue
sky, white buildings – palm trees with Christmas lights. Take a look:

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

22Jan
Posted in Uncategorized /By ksprague

Pedro S. De Movellán – Artistry in Motion

via davidsongallery.com

If you don’t know Pedro S. De Movellán’s work – you should. Pedro is a resident of the Berkshires and a leader in the world of kinetic sculpture. I’ve had the pleasure of photographing and filming his work for some time now and it is truly extraordinary. He has inherited the regional mantle for kinetic sculpture pioneered by George Rickey, the late artist whose studio is over the line in Columbia County – but I think Pedro has taken this to a whole new level of material, craftsmanship, and creativity. The majority of Pedro’s work is set into motion just by air currents – so finely balanced that the merest puff sets them going. He also has some clockwork sculptures that are a marvel. Pedro has a new exhibition at the Maxwell Davidson Gallery in NYC coming up soon. Take a look at the link and you can see some great video clips of his work in motion.

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

21Jan
Please Subscribe! Good ideas and Nice Pictures in your inbox from Kevin. Thanks!

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