Refresh Savannah » Event Notices

February’s Refresh: How Do You Run a Creative Services Business?

Kevin Lawver — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:37:14 +0000

We have a speaker for February! Erik Reagan from Focus Lab is going to share some of the secrets he’s discovered in the three years his been running his company with Bill Kenney. I think this is a perfect compliment to last month’s presentation and anyone who’s considering starting their own creative business should come! And if you’re not thinking about starting your own creative business, why not?

Here’s Erik’s description:

I like to learn and to share with others. Over the past three years, I have learned countless lessons as a business owner – both good and bad – and wanted to share part of the Focus Lab story and detail some of those lessons. Keep in mind this will be told through the eyes of a designer and developer, neither myself or my business partner Bill Kenney considered ourselves “businessmen” when we started. Since we entered this venture with numerous blind spots, we now want to shine some light on what we have learned to help others who are going through the process. I’ll talk about things I’ve learned about running a creative services business and hope to learn something from you as well.

We’ll be at ThincSavannah at 6PM on 2/21. I hope to see you all there!

Oh, and if you’re already a part of a creative business in Savannah, check out Made in Savannah and add your company to the list!

Startup 101: January’s Refresh

Kevin Lawver — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:07:20 +0000

Happy New Year! Refresh this month will be a doozy. Brady Cannon from TAG got us a speaker all the way from Atlanta! Marcus Crockett, the CEO of Squidbid is going to give a presentation called Startup 101: 10 Important Lessons for Startups. If you’re thinking of starting your own company or are in a startup, you should come check this one out.

We’re back in our normal location: ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St (3rd floor) on Tuesday, 1/17 at 6PM. I hope to see you all there!

I’m also thinking of doing a Tech Book Trade-In this month too. I’ve got a bunch of geeky programming books I’m not using and don’t see myself needing anytime soon. It feels like an insult to the authors to let all this knowledge gather dust on the shelf, so I was thinking I could bring them to Refresh and you guys could help me find good homes for them all! What do you think?

I hope to see you all there!

A Special December Refresh: What Makes a Technology-Enabled City?

Kevin Lawver — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:29:22 +0000

We didn’t have Refresh last month, but we’re going to do something special this month on the 20th! The Creative Coast is helping the City of Savannah figure out what we need to do to become a real tech powerhouse in the region. Here’s their description for the meeting:

The Creative Coast wishes to gather some insightful feedback from the Savannah community on what truly makes a city connected and technology-enabled. As our city grows we want to make certain our city’s technology infrastructure advances with innovative systems and approaches. Well here is your chance. Come along, bring your ideas however wild and crazy and we will capture them and present them to the city who has patiently offered to listen.

And instead of our usual location, we’re going to do this one at The Creative Coast’s office at 15 W York St, at 6 on 12/20! So, come along and bring some crazy ideas about what we can do as a community to enable innovation! I hope to see you there!

No Refresh This Month

Kevin Lawver — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:17:33 +0000

Due to a bunch of different things, we’re not doing Refresh this month, but, we are going to have a meeting early in December. It’s going to be epic so don’t miss it. As soon as I have the date (…)

Read the rest of this entry »

October’s Refresh: Hackathon 101

Kevin Lawver — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:27:09 +0000

Geekend is coming up in November, and this year, they’ve added the Hackathon! Having participated in my fair share of these things before, I thought it would be fun to do a Hackathon Bootcamp in October to give the locals a leg up on the competition. We’ll cover all the fun stuff about coding competitions; I’ll try to share all the tips I can remember and I might even share some code (I’m hoping to have an open source skeleton you can use to start your projects with, but we’ll see how much time I have). By the end of Refresh, you should be all set and ready to go hack on some stuff.

As part of it, I’m hoping to actually build something – so I need your help! What kind of mashup should we build? Flickr? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Something else? Whatever it is, it needs to have an API we can play with and it signing up for a developer key should be a turnkey process (meaning I shouldn’t have to wait to be able to play with it).

Refresh is always the 3rd Tuesday of the month at 6PM over at ThincSavannah. For October, that means it’s on 10/18. I hope to see you there!

Update – This is mostly for me, but I’m going to be adding links to this post of APIs that I find that folks might find interesting/fun/useful (and which may make it into the demo – I still need suggestions because I’m not sure what I’m going to build). Here they are:

And the slides from tonight’s presentation are already up on Speakerdeck.

What others should I add? Which ones are you interested in seeing mashed up?

September’s Refresh… Unmatched!!

Kevin Lawver — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:22:42 +0000

I’ve got something special lined up for September – design stuff! I know how much you guys like the design stuff (historically, you guys have packed the house for design stuff). The guys from Unmatchedstyle are coming down from Columbia, SC to see us and share a couple of groovy-sounding design talks. What are they? Well, I’ll let them describe them:

Symbolic Imagery in Interface Design

Giovanni DiFeterici will discuss the inherent symbolic nature of UI elements, how people interact with them in relation to their real world analogs and how to build a description of an element’s function into its visual presentation. Understanding how people think about the interactive visuals that we build can help us design more cleanly and to speak more clearly to our users.

Sign Up UX Design

Your web app’s sign up experience or the call-to-action on your website better be top-notch. People have short attention spans and take no mercy when shopping or passing judgement on your service or products. We’ll be looking at some best practices and review great examples that help demonstrate what goes into a solid sign up/call to action user experience: we’ll get into some psychology, patterns & design reviews. Gene Crawford will be delivering this one.

Wait, you want more info about these guys? They happened to give me that stuff too!

Gene Crawford (@genecrawford)

Gene is a designer with over a decade of experience in the industry with a degree in Graphic Design. In 1994, Gene met the Internet and has been honing his skills in information architecture and usable interface design ever since. He has overseen the design and architecture of hundreds of web sites and applications. An active member in the design community, he’s the editor & producer of unmatchedstyle.com, organizer of refreshcolumbia.org and the ConvergeSE.com conference.

Giovianni DiFeterici (@giodif)

Giovanni has a BFA in fine art and a BA in Graphic Design. After earning his BFA, he taught in public schools for a couple of years but found that he really wanted to work on projects with other creative people in the web design industry and hasn’t looked back. Giovanni is also an editor for unmatchedstyle.com and co-organizer for the ConvergeSE.com conference.

And now I’m guessing that you’ll want some details on when and where. Well, those don’t change much, but here you go:

When: Tuesday, September 20th at 6PM
Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor

And now, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve got a small favor to ask – please help me spread the word! I’m not a designer, and not a marketer, so I need help getting the word out to the local design community. Anything you can do to get people there would be much appreciated!

Some Light Reading on Libraries

Kevin Lawver — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:53:53 +0000

Refresh is on Tuesday, and we’ll be talking about the future of libraries. We’ll have the director of the local library system and he wants our feedback on how the library should prepare for the digital future and how they can stay relevant to the community. It’s a great opportunity for Savannah’s local technologists and designers to come together and help influence the future of one of history’s greatest inventions (a place where I can go and access all the world’s information… for free? CRAZY!)

The library folks have sent along a short list of links to get us all ready for the discussion – so, check them out (pun intended) and I hope to see you on Tuesday (8/16) at 6 over at Thinc!

I hope to see you all there!

August’s Refresh: Retooling the Library

Kevin Lawver — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:28:39 +0000

I know I said we were going to have the guys from Unmatched Style come down in August, but they had something come up so they’re now speaking in September. So, for August, we’ve got something special. What is it? It’s a grand question, and one that geeks like us should have a lot of fun with:

Keeping the Library Relevant: An opportunity to retool the Savannah/Chatham library system.

Christian Kruse, the Library Director of our local library system, needs our help. How do libraries stay relevant in today’s world? If you could redesign the library, what would you do? What’s missing from our communities that the library could provide? If you want to find out, or want to be a part of the process, you’ll need to show up!

August’s Refresh is Tuesday, August 16th at 6PM over at ThincSavannah (35 Barnard St, third floor). I hope to see you there!

And while we’re announcing events, the first Free Advice Friday is coming up on August 5th from 12-2 over at the Creative Coast office (15 W York Street). We’ve got a great lineup of advice-givers and absolutely no idea how this is going to go. I’d love it if folks showed up to ask questions and get some free advice (or at least drop by, say hi, and watch the trainwreck).

June’s Refresh: Not On The 20th, It’s On The 21st!

Kevin Lawver — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:03:24 +0000

You’d think after thirty-six years on this planet, you know, the blue one with the calendar that hasn’t change in all of that time, I’d know how to read a calendar and pick out the third Tuesday from a month. Apparently, I need more time, because I told everyone (and I mean everyone) that Refresh this month is on 6/20, which is not a Tuesday.

So, before this mistake gets propagated any farther, let me set the record straight: June’s Refresh is on Tuesday, June 21st at 6PM, not the 20th, which is not a Tuesday.

I apologize profusely for my error of chronological due diligence and will try to make sure it never happens again.

June’s Refresh: It’s All About Coffee!

Kevin Lawver — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:41:10 +0000

What happens when two local independent coffee roasters each ask two different local design studios to develop branding for them? How does each designer go about solving the problem of branding a coffee roaster? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about at Refresh this month!

I was drinking coffee one morning and realized that two designers I know have solved remarkably similar problems and both came up with different and effective solutions. So, since our speaker for June bailed on me, I decided I’d ask both of them, and their clients, to come to Refresh and share their processes with us! Thankfully, Steven Scarborough and Bill Kenney and Billy Steele from Focus Lab agreed to come share their deepest darkest branding secrets with us! And, as a bonus, both clients, James from Cup to Cup and Phillip from PERC have agreed to join us and bring some product so we can see (and hopefully smell and maybe even taste) the product the designers had to brand.

I think it’ll be a really interesting look inside the design process and give us a lot to talk about. Since this is a design-related thing, and I’m not a designer, I’d really appreciate any help you guys can give in promoting it around town. I’d love it in we could fill ThincSavannah up with design-loving caffeine junkies!

And here are the details:

What: Refresh Savannah: Branding Coffee
When: Tuesday, June 21st @ 6PM
Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard Street on the 3rd floor

I hope to see you there!