There are silly feuds and then there’s the crowdSpring vs. Threadless vs. “Spec Work is Evil.”  At South by SouthWest (SXSW if you’re kewl) panel “Is Spec Work Evil?” a three-way fight occurred.  First, you have all the designers who hate doing speculative work (i.e., you’re basically handing in a project and hoping the client accepts it and pays you) yelling at the designers who managed to get paid by doing spec work.  Second, while it isn’t featured as part of the official video, crowdSpring representatives accused Threadless of being a “work on spec” site and Threadless took great offense to both that and crowdSpring comparing themselves to Threadless.  And then the Internet, especially Twitter, start a great to-do about nothing.

Good lord, what a silly waste of time.  By the numbers: (more…)

For as much hype as the Printed Blog has generated for itself, online-to-print is not a new idea.  Not even close to a new idea.

Go back a few years and you’ll see all manner of websites getting in on the print market by way of books. Perhaps the first notable entrant in the this category was 2000’s release of the first print edition of The Darwin Awards. Some more recent entrants in this space would be Stuff White People Like (New York Times Bestseller List 2008, 2009), I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (NYT 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) and Diary of a Wimpy Kid (NYT 2007, 2008, 2009). (more…)

Ever heard of Dreaming Tree Films? Don’t be shocked if you haven’t, Dreaming Tree has been tucked away in Ravenswood for the better part of a decade, dealing with largely out-of-town clients and not making a spectacle of themselves on the local scene. Alas, some people prefer action to hype. Dreaming Tree was one of the early adopters of original online video. Back when BMW Films was making a splash with “The Hire” and the U.S. Army was getting overbilled for the “Army of One” campaign, Dreaming Tree was producing short films for digital distribution on the websites of UHF stations. If their “Mr. Marvelous,” a satire of blind dates and superheroes that would fit in nicely with this summer’s box offices trends, was online I’d link to it, but somewhere along the way Dreaming Tree started doing large campaigns instructing teenagers on video production at the behest of larger corporations like Samsung and their focus shifted. Still, I understand Dreaming Tree as recently wrapped filming on the feature-length “Revengends” a greenscreen-backdropped experimental film fusing the stories of Hamlet and MacBeth.

We recently had occasion to catch up with Dreaming Tree about their transition in business direction and current activities. (more…)