Come on down to Pica Design for the Belfast Chamber of Commerce Business after hours!

We will be opening our doors for the public to come see our studio and meet our great team.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm

111 Church Street, Belfast, ME 04915

Guests will be entered into a drawing for a custom eNEWS promotional package ($275.00 value). Enter the drawing for a chance to win!

Chamber of Commerce

Pica Design will participate in a panel discussion at CMCA to demonstrate Websites (that work!) for Artists at the CMCA Event: Making Connections: Monthly Marketing Series for Artists this Thursday. Join us from 7:00 – 8:30 PM for Websites, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, e-marketing, organizational websites for artists, and more. Contact CMCA for registration or questions: 207-236-2875 x303.

Our seminar on websites for businesses at Unity Center for the Performing Arts (June 25th) was well received. With five Pica people contributing to the content, we were able to share a broad range of information–from basic website structure and set-up, to CMS and social networking. We left our audience with one message: use us as a resource! Call, write or comment on our blog. We want to hear from you.

A few weeks ago we shared our excitement about the letter ‘O’ and how we accepted the challenge to create the letter using found or re-purposed materials for the 2009 AIGA BoNE Show in Boston. Well, our efforts were well received and unique in that we submitted the only entry that used 100% organic materials. In this case, hay and twine. Ultimately, our ‘O’ was auctioned off to a bidder longing for Maine and now hangs proudly on a sun porch. Here are a handful of pictures of the project in the making and the final installation. Thanks to all who participated. Enjoy!

We Bring You the 'O'

Final Installation at Mass College of Art in Boston. Can you find our 'O'?

Hey, my name is Zak and I’m a summer intern here at Pica Design. While reading a blog today, I saw a rumor that Google Voice is supposedly opening to the public soon, and I decided to write this blog post to elucidate this great service for our readers. While many of you may not know what Google Voice is, I urge everyone with a Google Account (and who doesn’t have one, these days) to pick up their own number.

Google Voice was originally called Grand Central, a company founded in 2005 which Google bought in 2007 for 97 million. Even years ago it was a promising business opportunity, and it remains a great service.

But what does Google Voice actually do? Well, it’s essentially a new phone number that allows a number of features that most phone services don’t offer.

The Google Voice Inbox (Credit: Google)

First, it offers a unified number that you’ll never lose when you move, get a new cell phone, or change phone service. This number can ring any other number of phones that you own, for example, when somebody calls my Google Voice number, both my cell phone and my home phone ring, which means I almost never miss a call.

Google Voice also features a robust voicemail system. When somebody leaves a voicemail on your Google Voice account, it notifies you via text message and even email, transcribing the voicemail into text and delivering it to your inbox.

Finally, there are a host of other features  Google Voice offers. You can send and receive text messages for free online, screen calls, set different voicemail greetings to different contacts and groups, and more.

Google Voice is free, and a great service. I have been using it since 2008 and its unification makes life easier, which everybody deserves. I urge everyone to pick up a number and at least try it out.

Here is a short clip from the question and answer session at our recent seminar at Unity Center for the Performing Arts.

We held a seminar for businesses last Thursday at Unity Centre for Performing Arts. Our attentive, inquisitive audience of business owners absorbed all sorts of information in a short 1.5-hour timeframe. It was a please-ask-questions-as-we-go format, and each of us (there were five Pica Design panelists) added in demonstrations and stories to activate the content with real-life examples of web stuff.

To begin, we covered how websites work (hosts, files, domain names, links, browsers), searching the web, and ways people use the web. We demonstrated the anatomy of a basic website, steps for building a website, and then delved into functionality and content management systems (CMS). We touched on elements of design, testing, maintenance, pre-launch marketing, and launch marketing. And, as we concluded, we talked about social networking. Once we started talking about Facebook and Twitter, we could have gone on and on…

With the support of UniTel and Unity College, we passed on some of the knowledge we have been gathering over the few years. We are already looking forward to our next seminar (we’re hoping to conduct one in the fall). If you think of topics that would appeal and enlighten either business owners or individuals, please comment here. And, as always, thank you for listening!

Join us for a nuts-and-bolts presentation on the benefits of websites for businesses. This is a great opportunity to ask questions about websites, network with other business owners and learn more about putting the Web to work for your business.

Event Details:

Thursday, June 25th

4:00 – 5:30 PM

Unity College Center for the Performing Arts

42 Depot Street, Unity, Maine

For registration and event information, call Julie Downer at UniTel: 948-3959;

or email jdowner@uninets.net

Sponsored by Pica Design, LLC, UniTel and Unity College in Maine

We’re excited about the letter O.

We’ve accepted the challenge to make a 3-foot ‘O’ that will appear in the word ‘SHOW’ at the 2009 AIGA BoNE Show in Boston at Massachusetts College of Art in June. (By the way, BoNE stands for ‘Best of New England’, and it is the name of a regional design competition hosted by the Boston Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, or AIGA). The 3-foot-high, 43-foot-long Exhibition marquee of dimensional letters will spell out, ‘AIGA B(oNE) SHOW’ and will feature found or re-purposed materials. Each letter will be on display for the duration of the exhibition and will be up for auction at the Opening Reception on June 11 to raise money for AIGA Boston.

We have some ideas on materials we would like to use for our environmentally friendly letter O…do you? If you have a suggestion on materials, please leave a comment here (keep in mind the final O must be 25 pounds max).

O, what fun.

AIGA B(oNE) SHOW
Opening Reception: Jun 11
Exhibition: June 12 – July 8
Location: Bakalar Gallery, 621 Huntington Ave., Boston
www.boneshow.org

Thanks to Brandon Bird, AIGA BoNE SHOW Director
for sending us the Call for Characters!

WebSmart Seminar
Where: Unity College Center for Performing Arts
When: Thursday, June 25, 2009 from 4-5:30pm
Why: To learn what a website can do for your business
How: Registration & more info forthcoming