Notes from the Future Desk: January – week3
By:
Jerrod Long
on 2/5/2016
We’ve made it to week 3 so this is a habit now, right? I’ve never believed in that but on to the point. This week each department continued a past theme. What is it they say about repeating the past?

Computer Graphics
Brainstorming for CG can be similar to browsing the toothpaste isle, who knew?
With so few creative limitations, deciding what NOT to do in CG is actually the best way to get started when brainstorming. I usually prefer as many limitations as possible because then you are forced to think about how to use less tools more creatively. It’s a lot like buying toothpaste, there really are just too many options.-JEckert

Design
Expect and design for failure. Always.
Designing for failure is one of the most heart-wrenching but important things you have to pay attention to, especially in content design. –Emilee

Development
First decoupled architecture, now core support for responsive images. WordPress is coming along nicely.
With the WordPress 4.4 update came support for responsive images using srcset and sizes attributes. Although this functionality comes automatically, theme developers should update their functions.php file to optimize the sizes attribute for their theme. Not sure how? The blog post is coming soon! –Natalie

Strategy
We’re always looking for new ways to test, this week we added Optimizely to our tool belt.
Continuing with the A/B testing theme, Casey & I have been doing a lot of research into Optimizely. They offer a really slick point-and-click web interface to do A/B variant testing on any webpage . You can also do some neat tricks like creating segments and targeting specific variants to those segments. And: it doesn’t require much setup. Drop a tag into the page (perhaps using Google Tag Manager – but that’s a later discussion) and you are ready to go. Looking forward to finding a project to use this on for sure! –Ben

Accounts
Give better advice to your clients by basing decisions on facts instead of opinions.
I deeply and dearly love the Google Analytics extension for Chrome. It lets me look at how a client’s site is being used in real time so I can ask better questions and give better advice. Without the data, it is all just opinion. –Kim

QOTW
Your place for all the happenings in the mind of Jerrod Long that made it to print.
This week Natalie stole the quote show â¦
Just this once can we not be joking and actually get a flamethrower? –Natalie
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