Believe it or not but our offices will be closed for summer vacation from August 9th – 19th.
In the event of an emergency (like a server outage or some other unspeakable horror) please use this form to get in touch with our support staff: http://www.mindsharestudios.com/emergency/
If our support personnel are unable to address your issue, they [...]

At Mindshare Studios, we work with a lot of print and graphic designers and have found these guidelines to be essential when implementing a designer’s work as a dynamic web application (CMS, blog, shopping cart, etc). you can download a PDF version of this document here.
Choosing Fonts
Body Copy
Generally, it is best to use “web safe” [...]

Here is an excellent talk by Michael Bierut from the acclaimed design agency Pentagram in New York on the general topic of “clients” – highly recommended watching for any professional or amateur designers.

Mindshare Studios sponsored the Del Norte High School’s girls Track and Field team. The donation was used to purchase a tent the girls can use during meets.
Go Knights! http://www.delnorteknights.com

Thanks to all our clients for their patience over the past few weeks while Damian was out of the office helping out with his newborn son, Jack. Damian is back in the office and all projects will resume immediately. Mindshare Studios will not be accepting new clients for several weeks while we catch up on [...]

WordPress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla
We at Mindshare Studios are always interested in trends amongst the most popular open source Content Management Systems. One window into their relative popularity is how frequently they are looked up on Google. Here’s a live view of exactly that data from Google Insights for Search:
Oh yeah and while we’re at [...]

Mindshare Studios’ client the Keshet Dance Company, a non-profit youth dance organization in Albuquerque, NM has been given a National Award by Michelle Obama.
The following text is quoted from Keshet’s newsletter:
Keshet Dance Company has been nationally recognized as one of fifteen youth arts and humanities programs to receive the prestigious 2009 Coming Up Taller Award. [...]

This news is not directly related to our work but well worth mentioning anyhow… Damian is going to soon be a father! You can learn more on Damian and his wife Lara’s baby blog.

We donated this small website to help Alex (of Invisible City Designs) and Yon get a new refrigerator.
Check it out: http://www.ournewfridge.com/

Why you should keep your software (and website!) updated

I often have clients ask me why they should upgrade their websites to the latest version of whatever software their site happens to be running (be it WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine or something else).
For anyone who works daily developing or maintaining software, especially open source software, [...]

We have added a realtime graph of our VPS web hosting system load so you can readily see how the server is performing. Check it out: http://www.mindsharestudios.com/memcron/
The graph is generated by the memCron application, the recent DreamHost API contest winner.

Mindshare Studios has jumped on the bandwagon and created our own Facebook page. We’ll be integrating it with our site so that new updates on our website will be displayed via Facebook (this will help promote Mindshare Studios as well as our client’s websites when they get launched or updated). We can help your business [...]

I recently stumbled across a pretty good blog article by a Swedish web professional entitled “10 things businesses should know before building a website”. It’s covers some points worth considering before you get involved with any web development company.
The tips are excellent, and all web professionals are likely to have clients who could learn a [...]

Occasionally, things go awry with web servers and web applications, heck, even Google has gone offline. So just in case this ever happens at Mindshare Studios, we just launched a simple status update service at the domain http://mindsharestatus.com so that we can keep you in the loop even if our own website and/or web server goes [...]

Learn more about Content Management Systems in our brief whitepaper: Intro to Content Management Systems (PDF)

After deciding not to update our line of commercially available Flash applications, Mindshare Software, to the new Actionscript 3.0 specification, we decided to release them as open source projects.
This is just a small way to give back to the open source Flash community. I’ll update this post once the new OS versions are actually ready [...]

Damian Taggart and Jason Nakai of Mindshare will be traveling to the 2008 south by Southwest Interactive festival in March. The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panels with speakers such as Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the [...]

I am pleased to announce that the Mindshare Headquarters (aka Damian’s residence) will be moving to a new neighborhood in Santa Fe. Our new address is now available on the contact page.
This move should not effect our clients negatively in any way! Thank you for you patience.

As promised, here are the files from the class I taught at UNM.
ActionScript 3.0 Class files (ZIP file)
The above file contains all the sample code along with several PDFs from the class.

Damian Taggart and Jason Nakai of Mindshare Studios will speaking about the new Adobe Creative Suite at a free event at UNM’s Department of Continuing Education next week.
“… a panel of local leaders in the design industry overview the highlights of the new software release, Adobe Creative Suite 3, and show you its groundbreaking new [...]

Flash Animators, Broadcast Designers and Motion Graphics Artists
Gain worldwide recognition for your finest work by entering the most prestigious juried competition for Flash animation and motion graphics. If selected, your award-winning pieces will be shown at the 2007 Best in the SW: Flash Animation & Motion Graphics Festival in Albuquerque on October 9, 2007. Throughout [...]

April and May have been great months for business. We are preparing for the launch of six websites including a new site for Bikram’s Yoga Downtown Albuquerque, Schichtel Restorations, Erika Black Jewelry, the New Mexico Women’s Foundation, EQ Solaris, and the Get Sassy!™ Accounting System.
The URLs will be posted a soon as we go live.
We [...]

Mindshare Studios is volunteering at the FITC conference (www.fitc.ca) in Toronto this year. FITC is a Canadian company that produces engaging design and technology events to inspire, educate and challenge the best new media designers and developers from around the globe.
FITC is a venue for new media designers and developers to learn the latest [...]

Mindshare Studios now offers full service email marketing! We’ve got better prices and more features than many competing brands including Constant Contact, iContact, PatronMail and others.
Our email marketing technology is built on the GraphicMail application and has been used successfully by over 6,000 customers across the globe.
Learn more »

We’re finally launching our new website. This has been a long time coming. We are still in the process of refining our current services so check back soon for more updates or sign up for our newsletter and stay in the loop.

Mindshare Media is now Mindshare Studios.
We’ve changed our name and expanded our services.
 

Mindshare Studios, Inc. was formerly known as Mindshare Media, Inc. We decided to change the name for several reasons including some confusion with several other business that are also using the name “Mindshare Media”. The new name also reflects a change in direction [...]