We receive many requests to know if we create avatars. We indeed do build avatars however, we create avatars for professional presentation or Second Life avatars for use within that VE. Below is a preview of one of our high end avatars moving around randomly for fun (medium quality so it will fit on the web). If you would like to know more about how we can make an avatar come to life for your website or ad contact us today!

Every business’s goal is to raise capital, create large profit margins, and also to make an impact on the current moment in time. From our experience in digital media we have found that one of the prominant ways of doing this is by establishing yourself into online social networks. Online social networks allow for users to keep in touch with what is happening in your business without directly visiting your blog, or contacting you to find out what’s new. What we have found from our experience is that by integrating your organization with online social networks you have a cost effective way to market you and your company. By using these online social networks you have a stronger chance of pulling new clients, serving current clients with free communication, and even creating profits through the use of these online social networks. This trend in social connections is here to stay and is a very cost effective way to promote your organization. Some of the more popular Social networks are: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. However, you can find an entire list of social network on the Wikipedia website by clicking here. Not only can you use social networks such as the ones stated above, but using a virtual world to create a social network is being adopted by companies each and every day. By using a virtual world you can build a community around what activities and subjects your organization focuses on. You will be amazed at the amount of people that are interested in learning more about your field, company, and future ambitions. There are many different virtual worlds out there, but only a few are climbing to the top of the hill when it comes to company integration. The list includes but is not limited to: Activeworlds , Second Life , Project Wonderland , There, Twinity , and many more. So get out there and socialize as you will be surprised to see who you will run into and how they will correlate with your business in the future. Did I mention your boss will love you as you are saving  your organization money by creating free social marketing? View Us on Facebook View Us on Youtube View Us on MySpace View Us on Technorati View Us on Twitter View Us on Flickr

We are proud to announce that the ThinkBalm Innovation Community Un-Lecture #3. produced a record number of attendees! We had some great presenters including: Sam Driver: Welcome and introductions all around Henrik Bennetsen: The Sirikata open source platform for games and virtual worlds in development at Stanford Koreen Olbrish: Immersive technology evaluation for learning initiatives Robin Gomboy: Building culture in virtual world communities Andrew Hughes Gave each attendee a landmark so the group could teleport to an interactive science lab built by Sycamore High School (Cincinnati) seniors. kids from Sycamore High School in Cincinnati: how they built their own interactive science lab EricaDriver: wrapped-up  The meeting was held at our headquarters in the green room of Designing Digitally Island. This was a great turnout of both corporate and educational people. You can see below the amount of attendees. This was a great collaboration between Thinkbalm and Designing Digitally Inc. And we welcome any meetings in the future with such as powerful and innovative community. Thanks again to all that were present! To become a part of this innovative group please sign up at www.thinkbalm.com See screen shots below:            Congrats Thinkbalm on a great meeting! For more pictures of the meeting see: ·         Erica Driver’s snapshots from Un-Lecture #3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9802442@N08/sets/72157614483190161/   ·         Kyle Gomboy’s snapshots from Un-Lecture #3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30456505@    

We are proud to announce that we are building another virtual campus for a University! We cannot disclose who this client is at this time, but we will be posting pictures throughout the process of building it. We will be implementing advanced programming so that the virtual campus is tied directly into their Learning Management System in which allows them to create and track assessments. We will also be setting up all the multimedia on the campus such as live streaming video, interactive white boards, streaming podcasts, interactive games, and even community events. There are many other features we will be developing, but we cannot give all of our secrets away. This virtual campus will be completed by our team within 30 days! So please stop by and visit our blog to view more progress on this development. See our blank canvas below:

As you can see from the above snapshot our team is moving right along! We have a process for each of our new islands that we follow. Of course this process can change from time to time depending on a few factors such as, location (single region or private island), time constraints, number of buildings/structures and even time of the year. On this project we are following our top secret process to a tee! We started by completing the overall layout of the island, placement of the buildings, walkways, etc. We have also started rough development of two of the major buildings and some of the bridges and other key points of the island. I’ve said too much! (but stay tuned I will give you more next week )

Well it’s certainly time for evolution at Designing Digitally, Inc. After over 6 years of using the company brand we have decided that it is time to catapult our own look and feel into the 21st century. While we are always developing corporate identities, promotional print material, and client websites, we have not had the time to take a long hard look at our own company image in quite some time. Now that we have had our team sit down and really discuss our look and feel we have decided to give our company a makeover! So what does that mean? Well, that does not mean that Andrew is getting botox (sometimes his eyes need it after a long week), Abby is getting liposuction ( if you knew her you would understand that this would not be possible), or Nick is getting a face lift (too bad he looks like a little kid in his profile pic)… But what it does mean is that our logo, website, and other promotional material will be updated in 2009 to give our company a more visually inspiring feel. That way we can finally look at ourselves and do what we have been doing successfully for other organizations for over a decade. Now that we have announced this we would like to share with you all the new 2009 Designing Digitally Inc. corporate logo concept. You can see a side by side comparison from the almost 6 year old logo compared to now. What does everyone think?   OLD VERSION:     NEW VERSION:  

We thank everyone for their already submitted input on our new logo draft! After many emails and many blog responses we thought we should ask you for your thoughts…after all, it isn’t so much what WE think of us as what YOU think of us! What does everyone think of our draft logo? We’re looking for your feedback before making a final decision! How could we make it better? What is appealing? What do you think should change? Our team wants to hear from you! Please email us or respond to this blog post with your feedback! This is our current draft of the logo.  

We are proud to announce that we have been selected to create a virtual mental health facility for a non-profit organization. The goal of this virtual world is to assist patients virtually when he or she cannot physically meet with their counselor. This service will be offered to current clients and then also to the public after beta testing. The island will consist of private and public spaces for socializing, summits, lessons, resources, and of course counseling. The virtual world will be fully integrated into a new custom built learning management and membership portal website that will allow users to register and become members of the facility.  The site will have membership registration, user tracking, resources, view the virtual seminar calendar and sign up for attendance, instant messaging and chat, and also audio conferencing via VOIP. The VOIP will be developed with advanced java applets and will be integrated directly into the LMS. The mental health services (virtual world and portal) will be offered to the current clients of the organization as a test pilot followed by the opening to the public in hope to spread mental health awareness and assist people in immediate need. Keep visiting our blog to watch this new project come alive!

We’re working on finishing up a virtual campus for a client and as you can see below within just a few weeks it has gone from a rough patch layout into a virtual campus. This development is around 70% complete at this time. We still have quite a bit of work to do on it, but you can see from our previous post that yes we do work at Designing Digitally, Inc. despite the fact that Andrew is distracting us all day. Check out the evolution:

After a week of development we now have the main facility building built for the Virtual Mental Health Facility. You will watch the campus evolve this coming week to be fully functional. The portal web site will be developed starting next week as we are using screen shots from the Virtual Mental Health Facility in the graphic layout of the portal. Once we have the island ready to go it’s time for our talented graphic designer to develop the layout and then our programmer to develop the coding for the portal. Stay tuned for more updates on this project!  

We have many clients that ask us to see progress throughout the development of their virtual training facility.   So we thought we would share with everyone a stop motion animation of a resent development for one of our clients.   This allows you to see how we go from rough layout to a polished island for our client to use. See below:   Sorry for the ugly static looking GIF image.LOL

One of the best things about developing in Second Life is the complete freedom. You can develop an island in any way, shape or form. For our latest project we are developing an island for a hospital, so for this we wanted a very relaxed and easy to use island for all visitors…and most of all we wanted simple. Well, simple to users doesn’t always mean simple for the designer. We have just finished getting trees wrapped around the entire island and it looks great! It really helps close in the island and creates a very comfortable earthy environment. So whats next…? More trees! As you look out your window into the woods you’ll probably notice that from a distance you can’t see through the woods to the other side. This concept can be a little difficult to achieve in Second Life sometimes because the trees don’t really "grow" and you don’t have all the clutter (dead trees, weeds, small branches) close to the ground. So to fix this - you add more trees! With already a few hundred trees in place it wont take much more, but we want to create the closest illusion of the real thing as best we can.

We would like to announce to the clients, employees, and friends of Designing Digitally, Inc. that we have decided to relocate to Franklin, Ohio. We have officially signed our new lease and will be relocating in May. We are excited to move into our new space which will allow us room to continue to grow. We look forward to making the new space our own and for those who visit to feel comfortable and welcome. Below is a photo of the new office, which is located here.   Here is a preview of the new office:    

Our Second Life development project just added the bottom bun. As we get close to finishing one:   We are in the meat of one:   And we just received the announcement that our latest island is ready!   We have seen this a couple times in our past and my team has really done well to balance all projects. The toughest thing to achieve is the proper balance between all team members working on each project, to ensure they all are developed within each time frame. Our "top bun" project is almost complete. Our "meat" project needs finished as quickly as possible because that project also corresponds with a web development project that connects this new island with the company web page. Finally our "bottom bun" project needs to be complete before that last week in April (did I mention that project also has a video with it which we will be scripting, creating audio for and developing, which ALSO needs done on the same deadline as the Second Life island!?). Have no fear, ALL project will meet their deadlines!   Nick

We are pleased to announce that we have completed a fully interactive 2D game-based learning module for one of our non-disclosed clients. This tool is being used for sales training via the web. The learning module consists of a quiz-like game structure followed by 3-5 minute animated tutorials which include audio commentary, as well as video. "Serious games" are developed to engage the user, as well as to entice the user to really want to learn the information that is being presented through the modules. This particular learning module is SCORM 1.2 and 2004 compliant and is tracking the users time, score of both the pre and post assessments, and bookmarks the user on each chapter to ensure the ability to come back to the previous place where he or she left off. We packaged this into the client’s current learning management system and it implements with a simple import of our zip file. Because we have an NDA with our client, we are unable to provide you with the actual module; however, we can provide you with screen shots (with the clients content blurred for privacy reasons). For more information regarding our web-based training and serious game development contact us today!

  After many conversations with our team we have decided our new logo will officially be what you see below:   We are proud to announce we will be moving to a larger space, introducing our new company brand, and will be launching our new website in May of this year. Our New Address is: Designing Digitally, Inc. 8401 Claude Thomas Rd. | Suite 23 | Franklin, OH 45005 (Located in the Cincinnati / Dayton Area of Ohio) Be on the lookout for our fresh new branding, website, and our new crib next month!  Have a creative day everyone!

Designing Digitally has just completed a task almost unheard of in the Second Life community. A fully customized island with 6 buildings AND a 2 minute 30 second machinima video promoting the island, in 2 weeks! The video itself was actually completed in about 6 days. From the development of the storyboard, to the recording of the audio and videos to the final approval of the finished video. Our client had a tight deadline to get this island done for a presentation and our talented team was able to step up to the plate and put in the extra hours each day to get the job done. More info on the completed island will come soon. For now, please enjoy the video: Contact us today to learn how we can create your island and machinima video!

Lately our team has been building virtual campus after virtual campus and focusing on the learning aspect of the space. But sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. These might not be a specific aspect of the learners engagement, but we love to see the detailed 3D models of the schools’ mascots our developers have created. We thought that since these islands are not open to the public to view that we would provide you with snapshots of these mascots just for fun. Check them out!      

We share so many of our virtual world developments that we sometimes overlook our Graphic Design department. We are working with a new client, KK Motorcycle Supply, and have helped sponsor their 39th Annual Old Time Newsies Race by providing our Graphic Design services on the poster below. All proceeds from the race will benefit Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Miami Valley.  We are excited to share this event with you all and hope that you come out and help support Big Brothers Big Sisters. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.oldtimenewsies.com or call 937-222-1303.

We would like to announce the completion of a Drupal content management website for our client. This site will allow for memberships to the content, newsletter and resources. Each page has the ability to be edited via the administration user interface using a rich text format editor. We also included the ability to track analytics, shopping cart implementation, Google adsense implementation, dynamic drag and drop photo galleries, and private areas for members only. We wish Barnert Global the best with their newly developed CMS website and will be along side them throughout the process of updating the site.    

We mentioned earlier that we were working with a new client, KK Motorcycle Supply. Our first project (aside from the poster we mentioned earlier) was to redesign their logo. They wanted to get back to the logo the company was using many years ago…but with an updated look and feel. They also wanted 3 versions of the logo to be used in several different mediums (as they had many years ago). Below is the final result:  

  Designing Digitally, Inc. is excited to announce the launch of Fight Her, LLC! This Content Management System was developed to sell the new clothing line Fight Her by Kristina Centers. "Every woman I know has had to deal with some type of battle. It could be divorce, single motherhood, bad relationships, money problems, alcohol or drug problems, health problems, insecurity issues, etc. but inside of every one of those women is a true fighter. Women have this amazing ability to dig deep when they are at their lowest and I wanted to try to capture the celebration of this beautiful quality that we all possess." -Kristina Centers, Owner To learn more about Kristina and her inspiration behind Fight Her visit http://www.fighther.com/about-us/ 

We are proud to announce the completion of the redesign for GSAPROPOSAL.COM. The GSA Proposal Web site was a redesign of an existing site with two goals in mind: Creating a custom, updated, professional look and feel Giving the client ease of use in updating the site These goals were accomplished by developing a custom design and converting it for Wordpress. Because of the large amount of content, the site was set up in blocks allowing the client to edit specific pieces of a page without worrying about the effect on the rest of the page or site. The client has full control of the site with the ability to add, edit, and delete content including pages of the site. The site in includes a blog, provides users with videos and audio (radio shows), and also integrates Twitter, posting the most recent tweet from the client. Please click here to view the site!

We're proud to announce that on January 1st 2010 we have launched our new company web site. Please feel free to browse the site to see what our talented team has developed throughout 2009. We look forward to 2010 and hope that all of our team members, and clients have a relaxing and enjoying holiday break!