Nine-Banded: What’s Old is New Again

Over the past five years the team at Armadillo Studios have prided ourselves on having an eye out for the latest and greatest in the Web Design and Social Media industry. Unfortunately, due to our increasing work load and growing family of clients, we’ve found it pretty difficult for us to write about these trends. So in a way to keep our blog a bit more active and interesting, we’ve decided to launch the *Nine Banded* series of blog posts.

What is Nine-Banded?

Simple, every two weeks we’re going to put together a short blog post with links to three or four really interesting tid-bits of information. They can be anything related to links on design trends, the newest social media tools, records we’re listening to in the offices, stories or happenings with our corporate clients or industry friends, funny pictures or interesting events that we’ve stumbled across – _pretty much anything that we think would be interesting to our followers_. Basically, a way for us to share some of our knowledge and discoveries over the past few weeks, without having to be too serious.

So with that we’d kick off the first edition of *Nine-Branded*, with four fun links.

1. Hero Images

A new Calgary-based stock photography company is sprouting up in the city. It’s name is “Hero Images”:http://heroimages.com/ and it looks amazing.

We can’t wait for a great new local company to come around and help breath some new life into the industry. Let’s just say we can’t wait for the launch of the full product line.

2. Draplin Design Co.

In July of this year our friends at the “Calgary Inter-Agency Coalition”:http://interagencycoalition.com/ brought Aaron Draplin of the “Draplin Design Co.”:http://www.draplin.com/2012/07/tonight_calgary.html to speak to designers of Calgary. It was a great night and one of the best talks we’ve attended in a long while. And the best part about it we got a couple of sweet special edition Draplin posters to adorn The Armadillo Studio… studio.

If you want to know why this was a great little event, just watch the video below (It’s from a Draplin talk in New York, but you’ll get the gist of it).

3. “Design Is A Job” By Mike Monteiro

If you happen to be in the creative fields (designer, web design, development, freelance writer, etc.,) you need to read this book. It’s everything you need to know about running your own small business in a tiny 70 page book.

Trust us, after five years of hustling in the industry the tips in this book are invaluable.

4. Election 2012: Coffee Wars Edition

Fast Company Co., had an interest article on “7-Eleven’s latest campaign to turn the 2012 presidential election into coffee war”:http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681580/7-eleven-may-tell-you-whos-going-to-win-the-election. Essentially, during the duration of the campaign, customers can purchase either Obama or Romney coffee cups to show their “support”.

Neat idea and if there’s anything that Team Armadillo loves – it’s Coffee and Politics.

5. What Does Nine Banded Mean?

Oh yes, _Nine-Banded_ is the “most common type of Armadillo found in North America”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-banded_armadillo. Since ‘Armadillo Nuggets’ was a bit too offensive, Nine-Banded sounded far more interesting… even if we don’t have nine items to talk about.