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Creative Approvals. Anytime. Anywhere.

New York City — November 2, 2010

GLOBALedit launches their new iPad app in partnership with AREA 17

Adding notes made easy.

GLOBALedit is an online photo and video management system for media, advertising and entertainment companies that work with large quantities of digital assets. Since 2003, the system has combined targeted workflow tools, online storage space, and quality customer care and development to insure that clients have the most streamlined method for managing their photo libraries and image approval processes online. GLOBALedit’s clients include companies such as Warner Brothers, Victoria’s Secret, Showtime and Quicksilver.

Realizing that many of the individuals involved in the image approval process were constantly traveling between locations, GLOBALedit set out to create a more convenient and mobile offering for their users. The result is GLOBALedit’s brand new iPad app for creative approvals which was created in partnership with AREA 17. The app provides convenient tools for reviewing image and video content, appending notes and making approvals, no matter your location or online status. Once changes are made, the app links in with the online application and makes your updates in the main GLOBALedit system. Whether you’re on a plane, on set or at home, GLOBALedit puts the approval process at your fingertips!

Learn more about the GLOBALedit ipad app in the iTunes store.

You can also view additional screens in the AREA 17 portfolio archive.

See also
portfolio archive
Offf Festival 2010

This year, Offf Festival 2010 was held in Paris and we were invited to be a part of a panel of French interactive design agencies along with Upian, Soleil Noir and Uzik. Our four agencies are quite different but what ties us together is a focus on content and a sincere desire to push interactive design in France to new levels.
Designing with principles

Paris and NYC — March 31, 2010

How a file browser saved our souls (and made mother mad with joy)

Subfolio (originally called Filebrowser) was first developed in 2003 to help deliver designs and documents to our clients. When we went international in 2006, it became our cross-office document server too.

But what is it, you ask? Simply speaking, Subfolio reads your file system and instantly turns the content into a website — folders become sections, files become pages. But that’s just the beginning… (at this point, we invite you to learn more if you so desire).

Up until recently, we used Subfolio for our website (or anti-website). It was an assertion that our work — not some fancy website — was the focal-point for AREA 17. Today, we no longer use Subfolio for our website, however it is still used as our cross-office document server, and of course, our client presentation studio too.

After repeated requests from our clients, friends, family, enemies, allies and the design community — we finally broke down and decided to offer it to the public. But we didn’t want to dump our 6 year old code on your poor souls, so we decided to build it again, from the ground up.

With a clean slate, we started with a few principles:

Keep it simple — Don’t make it anymore than it is. Subfolio is an interface for a file system. It is not a powerful extranet platform nor a feature-rich content management system.

Abstract the logic — It’s all about interface, so don’t assume one interface is good for all situations. It must be easy to create unlimited interface “themes” without having to rework the logic.

Give options — Stop the debate on how things should work. Everyone has different needs and ways of doing things. Difference should be cultivated.

Make it extensible — Assume change. In our experience, Subfolio has infinite possibilities. And with each new implementation, new ideas arise.

Internationalize it — Our community is international. Period.

So with that, we set out to build Subfolio (take-two). The first version took four weeks to build, but this time around it took one year … damn principles, can’t live without them, but sure as hell wish we could.

Subfolio is currently in private beta. To learn more, visit subfolio.com and to request a beta invitation, contact us.

On Wednesday, April 7 in NYC and Thursday, April 15 in Paris, we invite you to join us at our offices for Subfolio Sessions, a small gathering to present the app with the aim of exposing all of its features and how to integrate it into your daily workflow.

Agency

See also
Subfolio.com
An unofficial 10 year anniversary

Paris and NYC — January 9, 2010

1999 — 2009

For many good folks, 2009 marked a year of bad after bad then some more bad for good measure. And for us too, what started as an extraordinary year, ended with an “oh la la, is it grave doctor?”

So just like most of the world, we at AREA 17 are happy to see 2009 fade away into history while we look towards a fruitful and more chill 2010. But for us, 2009 also has a special significance that we do not want to forget. This past “year of the ox” is our unofficial 10 year anniversary.

To mark this occasion, we’ve launched a design portfolio archive — a semi-complete archive of used and unused work from 1999 until 2009

For those of you that don’t know our background, AREA 17 is the 2003 merger of Elixirstudio, an interactive design studio started by Arnaud Mercier and Area 17 Media, an interactive consulting firm started by George Eid.

By happenstance, both entities started doing business in 1999 (dude, that’s insane right).

To mark this occasion, we’ve launched a design portfolio archive — a semi-complete archive of used and unused work from 1999 until 2009. This collection of work is not curated (for the most part), but a dumping ground of most everything we’ve done, including explorations, iterations and rejections.

The archive is semi-complete because we are continually updating it with new work and still missing old work (damn Sam, it’s a big job). The website itself uses Subfolio, our file browser app that is currently in private beta. To try the app, request an invite by contacting us.

So if the world ends in 2012, we will never see our official 10 year anniversary. But if the end of the Mayan calendar fails to bring doom and boom, we aim to celebrate with a bang of our own … hopefully by then Internet Explorer 6 will finally be dead.

Agency

See also
portfolio.area17.com