Blogging is a much more comfortable way to display a portfolio, anyway. We’sre going to start this off by punching through the process I went through when (re)designing this site. I hope it’s insightful.

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She’s been a blast to have around. Ashley especially likes her. See more photos of her over at Ashley’s Flickr page.

I’m sure there will be some more pictures of her at the Aspiring Indie Flickr as time goes by. How can you not take a picture of her? It’s impossible.

We’re working toward becoming a paperless business.

Why Paperless?

The most exciting part about being paperless (aside form the obvious one - using cool web apps) is that it is good for the environment. Instead of using paper which costs trees and resources, we use Basecamp. Instead of taking and storing endless pages of notes from meetings, we use Campfire. And through using Competitious we are able to compare the competition’s work with ours and eliminate file folders and filing cabinets and…phew, isn’t that reason enough?

Basecamp

We’re far from the first ones to pick up on Basecamp (or to praise it!). We use Basecamp to keep track of all Indie projects, from video shoots to web design due dates. But that isn’t nearly the end of it.

We use the integrated chat rooms to record notes during meetings. This is a huge help when it comes to productive/effective meetings. Chat sessions are saved and can be searched - that’s big for us.

Indie keeps a copy of all policies/mission statements in Writeboards. We like to keep an eraser handy to correct these things as we roll, and highly encourage collaboration on them. Writeboards fit us perfectly.

Time tracking is very helpful. To-do lists rock. What else is there to say? Basecamp simplifies what would be an endless amount of emails and scrap paper into a solid, structured website.

Highrise

The newest addition to the 37Signals family, Highrise allows for contact management across multiple users. Really, I consider it a relationship manager more than a contact manager. It can hold so much more than contact info - photos, files, notes about the person that don’t fit into a category - stuff like that.

Most recently, I’ve used Highrise to track a conversation with a client about a design project, manage feedback on our new website redesign (what do you think?) as well as keep track of questions (and then the answers) for an interview. It’s very versatile, being that it is what you make it. The only question is: how long until we need to upgrade to fit more contacts?

My favorite part of Highrise is how cool it feels to offer someone’s contact information using the cool contact info page. Here’s an example: it’s my “card”. Tell me that isn’t cool. And giving info out (only when appropriate, of course) looks very professional when done with this application. I dig it.

I will be very excited to see where 37s takes the Highrise / Basecamp package in the future. It has a lot of potential. I’m excited. It will be worth the wait, I’m sure.

Competitious

We use this website to manage our competition, both in the local and the national sectors. It can be daunting, when dabbling in web design, photography, and videography, to keep track of who else is doing everything you are doing. Competitious helps by allowing us to keep “clippings” of prices and examples of their work. Then, an automatic comparison matrix is created to allow us to match up our features next to theirs. Quite nice.

Below you’ll see an example of our wedding videography competition in a comparison matrix. Hey, maybe this is the sort of thing we could publish at some point (once we dominate them on all points, that is!). You can see it gives you red exclamation points at each category where you are missing something that the competition has. Very useful.

Oh, and Competitious should be seeing some major updates soon. I’m very interested to see where they go with this product. Worth keeping in mind, for sure.

Scary Being Paperless

As Justin said at our last staff meeting:

“A paperless office is an accountant’s nightmare.”

And maybe I’m in no place to argue with that. I guess that’s why he handles Indie’s financial side and I don’t :).

It makes sense that certain things like receipts are much more difficult (notice I didn’t say impossible) to come by digitally. Actually I was having a conversation with my dad the other day about keeping track of bills. He keeps a large pile (as I see it) of bills organized (as he sees it) into Paid and Unpaid. He asked me how I do it. And I realized that every bill I pay is done online. I have digital records, I suppose, but no piles.

So there is still hope for even accountants embracing a paperless office, I think. And that’s not to say that (for now) there aren’t exceptions. We still print contracts and proposals when we must (sigh) and will inevitably have to use some paper resources from time to time. But here’s to hoping we can help the environment as well as our own organization and team communication by using the applications above.

If you have any questions about the above applications, or how you might utilize them in your organization, we would be happy to help. Just drop a comment on this post and we’ll reply with some (hopefully) useful information.

Speaking of which—does anyone else use these applications? Even better, what else do you use to improve your workflow?

Ashley will be helping in a lot of the administrative areas, handling duties that any assistant would. She’s also rounding out the group as the only female among the rest of us thugs. She has quite a job in front of her!

If you’ve seen our Flickr pages recently, you’ve seen the work of Ben. He’s an amazing retoucher, with some great work up right now. He’s also a solid photographer, and is especially interested in seeing Indie reach out to some local indie bands in the area. If you happen to be a band that might be interested, give us a shout.

Again, glad to have you two aboard. It’s all about the people you have on your team, and it’s great to see ours share a passion for seeing artists find work and a way to communicate with their audiences. Keep it up!

This one is especially striking.

As you can see, they had a lot of fun. It turned out to be a wonderful day, which is always great when your wedding is done outside!

Don’t worry, the rest of the family was there too.

Congratulations again! And you can view any of the photos from this wedding on its very own Flickr page.

Justin Jones is our new Business Manager. His expertise in managing business financial info and his passion for art and creative technologies make him extremely valuable to Indie. He’s one of those guys—everyone knows one of them—where he just has to be a part of every project if it’s going to be successful.

Trent Lloyd is our Director of Photography. His eye for photos and his administration skills stand out, for sure. He’s actually been heavily involved in church planning and worship for some time now, which is exciting and gives him a unique creative taste.

The greatest part about these guys is they are looking to the future, excited about new technology, but they’re also incredibly creative people. We’re lucky to have them on board.

You’ll probably be hearing from them soon here on the AI blog. Also read more about them (and me) on the about page.

Again, welcome guys!

Venture Works, a resource center for entrepreneurs out of Huntington University, announced the inaugural Huntington County Business Plan Competition in February earlier this year. See the official press release here.

Long story short: Indie entered. I sat through all of the workshops offered, spent weeks working on a business plan, received tons of great feedback from our advisors and our team, and submitted the plan. After a couple stages of elimination, Indie ended up alongside 4 other finalists in the last stage, which included a 30 minute presentation.

And it seems they liked it.

Aspiring Indie took home $3,500 in competition awards (woo!) to put toward our business initiatives. And it has been a huge help. A big thanks to all the judges and organizers who believed in us!

Read other news about the competition:

• Initial Press Release Announcing Competition
• Venture Works Names Finalists in Competition
• The Official Press Release Listing the Winners
• The Winners Announced on FortWayne.com (fourth paragraph)

The platform is easily found and read.

You can find anything in this website within two clicks. It is very easy to navigate.

IndianaPundit.Blogspot

It’s great to see Indie being mentioned this way in the community, helping to someone with a message communicate in an effective way.

AdamMildredforFortWayne.com was designed and built for Adam Mildred’s political campaign for City Council at Large.

The site was given an overall rating of B+. Read the review here.

Timothy Lloyd performed with band members Nate Pelz and Nick Weaver today as the featured musical guest of a Studio 149 dance performance at the Scottish Rite Auditorium. While the band enjoyed the performing for the crowd, the show was also the debut of their CD humbly entitled A Rough Demo.

Sold at the door to those both familiar with the artist and new fans, A Rough Demo featured five songs written by Timothy Lloyd, including Oh Glory and Save the World.

“…this recording captures the essence of the songs and the heart of what I am trying to accomplish through my music…”

Timothy Lloyd

While contributing to the audio production of the CD, Aspiring Indie held a lead roll in the visual production of the CD. Among cover, label, and marketing design, AI also designed a web site for simultaneous release with the CD. Still receiving creative and structural inspiration from artist and designer, the site is always changing.

Timothy Lloyd and his band plan on releasing a larger “studio release” album in August.