Alex Herder http://www.alexherder.com Animation Producer Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:37:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 The Duke & the Duck Productions gets a facelift http://www.alexherder.com/2009/11/16/the-duke-the-duck-productions-gets-a-facelift/ http://www.alexherder.com/2009/11/16/the-duke-the-duck-productions-gets-a-facelift/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:40:58 +0000 admin http://alexherder.com/?p=91 One week without a “day job” and so far so good.  Last Monday I met with Nancy and Alissa from Belmont, Inc to talk about how we might be able to help animate iMAGINE Alexandria’s story, then I spent most of last week working on a new website design which I want to share here.  We’re working with an amazing designer out of Chicago, Darren McPherson, who will help us translate this into a custom Wordpress theme but I’m proud to say that this design is pretty much all us.  Please let me know what you think.

Draft Homepage

Draft Portfolio Page

]]> http://www.alexherder.com/2009/11/16/the-duke-the-duck-productions-gets-a-facelift/feed/ 0 Company Name Survey Results http://www.alexherder.com/2009/10/24/name-survey-results/ http://www.alexherder.com/2009/10/24/name-survey-results/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:10:16 +0000 admin http://alexherder.com/?p=85 Last week I published a survey to about 80 family members and friends asking them to help Dave and me pick a permanent name for our new animation company.  We shared our top 5 names (below) and asked people to rank them on a 1-5 scale with 1 being “I hate it” and 5 being “I love it.”

The names

  • The Duke & the Duck Multimedia
  • 3 Radical Media
  • Cranky Town Studio
  • M is for Media
  • Animaniacal

The interesting thing here is that 4 out of 5 names (all but The Duke & the Duck Multimedia) were what I’m going to call “net negative”–that is they had more 1’s and 2’s than they had 4’s and 5’s.  The name that had the most 5’s (“I love it”) was also the one with the most 1’s (“I hate it”), Cranky Town Studio.  The only real lesson that I took away from this process is that people are fickle and there’s no predicting what they will think about any given thing, especially names.  I suppose that’s why we have experts.

Speaking of experts; through my connections at iMAGINE Alexandria, Tate Linden from Stokefire (a naming/branding agency) took the survey and had some really valuable feedback for us.  We ended up not choosing his favorite (Crankytown)  but his comments were really useful for us in finally picking the name, which we did.  I am pleased to announce that we are now The Duke & the Duck Productions, which if you’ve known us for a while is the name we’ve been using since we started out.  In the next few months we’ll be rolling out all sorts of cool stuff like a revised website, business cards, and of course, new animations.  Stay tuned!

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