Another one of my favorite Viget traditions is our annual holiday gift.  While we love getting cards from others, we’ve always felt that sending out a simple card is just too ordinary for us.  And while creating e-cards is fun, we like to break out of our comfort zone as a team and do something creative that’s not ”web.” 

So … every year, everyone pitches in to help make about 300 gifts, and we send them to all the folks who helped make the year so fun and successful.  We’ve made VigorBalm, Vigoroma, Vigelicous, and, last year, VigeTags.

This year, it’s VigetRocks.  Blue and orange rock candy carefully delivered in difficult-to-open plastic containers.  If you hold yours on it’s side and spin the balls around, you’ll notice the Viget logo in there somewhere.  We had fun putting them all together (some more than others).

Since we couldn’t track down every address we wanted to, we have a few extras.  If you didn’t get some Rocks but want a batch, comment below and we’ll send ‘em out right away (while supplies last.)  Happy holidays!

The editor of Bon Appétit magazine announced this week that the new issue of the magazine features a refresh of its logo, which has gone untouched for seventeen years. As a publication with a substantial history, not to mention a growing circulation of over 1.3 million and a successful website on Epicurious.com, this is a daring and frequently detrimental step for the brand. However, in this case, they’ve done a nice job at creating a sophisticated yet approachable image by combining a nicely-done custom type project with a well-executed style strategy.

They don’t let me write much about design around here, being a strategist and everything, but since I’m a fool for typography, Thanny was gracious enough to let me gush over one of the well-done rebrandings among the many, many, many, many missteps — be careful, that last one may haunt you for a while. I’ve also been paying attention to food and wine magazines lately, so this definitely caught my eye.

Before, then after:

Read the rest of this entry »

In August of 2005, Seth called me and asked if we’d help build Squidoo, which we were proud to do.  More than two years after the beta launch, the site continues to grow, and now has over 300,000 pages of user-generated content, with 1,000 more being added every day.  In last week’s SquidUpdate, Seth noted that Squidoo gets nearly 6 million unique visitors per month, and roughly 12 million unique visits.  Raising money for charity was one of original goals of the site, and they’ve done that to the tune of more than $100,000.

My favorite line from the post:

“And here’s a neat tidbit: We’re profitable. We haven’t raised any VC money, and now we shouldn’t ever have to.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Recruiting is part of my job here at Viget and as everyone knows, it’s hard to find great people.  We know the traditional methods of recruiting often fall short and that hiring exceptional people may require exceptional methods.  We recently started a recruiting experiment and the results were exciting.  I thought a summary might be valuable to other employers who wrestle with recruiting challenges. 

In September, we posted two different advertisements for an Office Manager job.  They produced distinctly different responses from applicants.  One job listing (see #1 here) was a replication of the standard job description on viget.com.  The other was more creative – “A Letter to the Hard-Working-But-Currently-Uninspired Job Seekers” who are looking to work for a company “that values its employees and holds them to high standards.” See #2 here.  We posted them about a week apart on the DC craigslist under the office/admin category. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I had the honor of speaking at the second meeting of Refresh the Triangle. We were hosted by Shoeboxed.com, a local start-up, and their space accommodated the crowd of about 30 people nicely.

My talk was on techniques for securing web applications, and common security holes to look out for. After a very inspiring similar talk at Refresh DC, I was definitely excited to share my knowledge about security with the mixed group of designers and developers and show off the glaring holes in some Ruby on Rails and PHP sample applications. As a presentation geek, I wanted to try out a more experiential technique, using demonstrations instead of slides. The crowd got involved, asking great questions about topics like Cross-Site Request Forgery and laughing at the insecurity of “Upload King!” and “Festival of Bookmarks.” The demo code and security resources are available for you to enjoy.

As is Refresh custom, a post-meeting meeting at a local pub inspired great discussion and showed what a vibrant group of web professionals we have in North Carolina. We’re very lucky at Viget Labs to be part of both Refresh DC and Refresh the Triangle, and we invite you to visit the Refresh the Triangle site to suggest future topics or find out about upcoming events!