An Event Apart you say? Didn’t you guys just blog about it last week? We’re glad you noticed! Now it’s my turn to take the hot seat. I’ll try to keep it short, and thus will focus on two of the topics that are particularly challenging me at the moment.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

The educational, interactive, and enjoyable oases for children and their parental figures known as Discovery Place and Discovery Place Kids have gone mobile.

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The below is a guest blog post from one of our interns, Tony Maciolowski. If you’d like to inquire into an internship opportunity with Studiobanks, let us know. Enter Tony.

Chances are that while you’re camped out on your couch watching the latest episode of that must-see show (Mad Men anyone?), you’re also twiddling away on your smartphone updating your Facebook status or asking Google who the actor is that plays the character you can’t get enough of (Don Draper is, without a doubt, the man). You’re not alone.

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Occupy-NorthPole.com is now live and fighting the good fight against cookie inequality! Learn more about the movement on their site and then check ‘em out on Facebook and stay up to date about all the news by following the movement on Twitter:

@ChandlerWobble: Head spokes-elf for the ONP movement.

@Occupy_NP: The official twitter account of the ONP movement.

@Red_NoseRudolph: Santa’s 9th reindeer and proud member of the Reindeer Union for over 72 years.

@Sam_theSnowman: Lead reporter covering the movement for the North Pole News Network.

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I got my first cellphone in 2001. It was a Nokia with a large 1.5 × 1 inch screen that could reveal the entire spectrum of colors as long as those colors were black or white. With the increased functionality (not to mention screen size) of today’s cellphones and tablets, one of the biggest changes for designers has been figuring out how to tailor their designs for mobile platforms and devices. Here at Studiobanks, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of mobile-based projects that we’re working on. Mobile websites and apps used to be an afterthought—now they’re more important than ever.

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I am sitting inside the small computer lab of my design school. On the table beside me lay several introductory pages of HTML lessons that I've printed from an instructional site randomly found through AltaVista; pages which I have since excessively highlighted and penciled handwritten notes across. On the monitor before me, Internet Explorer is displaying the code-editing window of my free Angelfire web page, which I have probably edited and refreshed thirty-some times already this session. It is 1997, and I am fascinated by Web design. I will graduate before my print-centric art school will offer Web design classes. I had a passion; this was how I survived it.

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Contrast, at its most basic level, is our awareness of adjacent opposites. It is something that our human senses were built to recognize. It is always that unique sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch that causes us to take notice. The stimuli we notice first are those which set themselves apart from the “noise” in our perception.

Imagine the distress you may feel as the smell of burning plastic interrupts an otherwise relaxing evening at home, instantly demanding your attention. Imagine the sound of an ambulance siren, and how it so easily pierces through the drone of urban ambiance. Imagine the ancient bowhunter who catches a sudden, jarring glimpse of bright red drops spilled along the green forest ferns, leading him to his wounded prey. Regardless of whether these contrasts are manmade or natural, our response to them is a very potent mechanism of insight, and it has since become a very useful tool for those of us in the business of advertising and design.

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Sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves that things like Steve Carell’s departure from The Office, the end of March Madness, or Netflix instant streaming outages aren’t exactly the epic tragedies we make them out to be. Less than a month after the devastating 9.0 earthquake in Japan, the news cycle and daily life continue on and the millions of people affected by the disaster remain in need.

At Studiobanks, we wanted to help boost donations to aid Japan as news coverage wanes. So when our friends at BooneOakley approached our team to help create a screensaver to serve as a simple reminder that there’s still a need for aid and support, we jumped at the chance.

Visit Japansaver.com to download the free screensaver we developed. The site also lets you donate directly to the American Red Cross to support the disaster relief efforts for those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. Today’s 7.1 earthquake in northeast Japan is yet another reminder of just how desperately donations are needed.

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