Juried by Graphic Design USA magazine for nearly five decades, the American Graphic Design Awards recognizes outstanding achievement in graphic arts of all kinds: print, packaging, point-of-purchase, internet, interactive and motion graphics. It’s open to everyone in the community, attracting over 8,000 entries in this year’s contest. Only the top 15% are awarded, and we’re honored to be part of that crowd.
Nine previous Mightybytes projects have also earned these awards. For more information on Mightybytes’ industry recognition, check out our Awards page.
Bike advocacy and biking for the planet are popular pastimes with our crew.
In May, Joy, Steve, and Tim biked the NYC to DC Climate Ride. In June, we participated in Active Transportation Alliance’s Bike to Work Week Challenge, winning with 100% participation. This Fall, Bryan, Bill and Tim are headed to California for a 320 mile excursion down the coast in the name of sustainable solutions and a green economy. They are raising funds for Climate Ride and need your help!
We each have different personal reasons for participating in Climate Ride but one thing is consistent: we believe in the organization and the great work it does.
Bryan’s Ride
“I believe in the principle of eating good food grown in a sustainable way. I believe in the principle of efficiency in transportation as manifest in biking. I believe in the principle of clean power. Climate Ride is about all these things and more, which is why I am raising money and tasking myself with this physical challenge.”
Bill’s Ride
“I am volunteering for Climate Ride because I believe in the great work of the beneficiaries, especially Embarq, Green America, and ClimateCounts.org. At one point I applied for a job with 1% for the Planet as well. My experience so far with the people involved has been great. I have volunteered with numerous organizations and a lot of times have been let down on the day of the event. I am encouraged that Climate Ride is an organization that I want to continually be involved with. Also, after a personal health scare, I am committed to making cycling a larger part of my fitness activities.”
Joy’s Ride
“If you ask me, we should all be doing what we can while we’re able to. I’m biking the Climate Ride California because I believe in the power we can have to impact the world when we all come together. I feel blessed to be young, healthy, driven, and totally capable of completing my second Climate Ride of the year. I’m raising money for the Active Transportation Alliance and the League of American Bicyclists, both of which are dedicated to providing safe, more efficient and sustainable methods of transportation including walking, biking and public transit. The ATA specifically is based in Chicagoland, focusing on safe routes to school, safer sidewalks, crash reduction, and more throughout our local community. John Lennon was right on. ‘Power to the People.’ We can do this!”
Tim’s Ride
“For me this Climate Ride is embodied in four simple words: Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline. Tar sands are one of the biggest greenhouse gas offenders. The Alberta, Canada Tar Sands produce over 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per day, more than 1.3 million cars. There is currently one of the largest environmentally-driven civil disobedience acts going on at the White House right now to protest a pipeline which will bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, an area that still hasn’t recovered from last year’s BP oil spill. Take a look at this alarming video produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox (Gasland):
According to Josh Fox’s video, this pipeline looks like it could potentially run through my hometown of Iron Mountain, Michigan and that is literally too close to home for me.
Plus, the Climate Ride experience is an amazing one. Five days of working hard, sharing, and learning while surrounded by a talented and incredible group of people makes for an outlook-changing endeavor.”
More Ways to Do Good
Climate Ride has expanded its list of beneficiaries from three in 2010 to twenty-seven in 2011, so there are more ways than ever to make a difference. More importantly, we can now raise money for a local cause! Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance, an organization dedicated to making bicycling, walking and public transportation safe, convenient and fun in Chicago, is the ride’s newest beneficiary. ATA advocates for transportation that encourages and promotes safety, physical activity, health, recreation, social interaction, equity, environmental stewardship, and resource conservation.
Please consider making a donation at the link below. Every little bit makes a difference. Thank you.
Attend Tuesday’s Arts & Business Council’s workshop to learn how to improve your online marketing efforts through the use of social media and website analytics.
Online Marketing is not easy, especially if you don’t have methods to measure the performance of your marketing efforts. Installing Google Analytics or a paid analytics service to evaluate you website’s performance is a good start. But you can easily get buried under mounds of data if you don’t know what metrics are important to your business. And once you have data on these metrics, how do you use it?
At this workshop Tim will take an in-depth look at:
Defining what metrics are important for your organization, i.e. measuring what matters
Defining benchmarks and comparative analysis
Assessing resources, goals and change management
Building a front-end that supports robust back-end analytics
At this workshop you will learn how to measure and report on visitor interactions on your website and social media platforms. But more importantly you will learn how to go beyond mere reporting of data by pulling actionable insights from the numbers that will energize your marketing efforts and help you reach your business goals.
Understanding Social Media & Website Analytics
Here are the details for this workshop:
DATE: Tuesday July 26, 2011
TIME: 9:30am - 12:30pm
LOCATION: National-Louis University, 122 S. Michigan Avenue, Room 5006
Check out this Monday’s AUG Chicago (Chicago Area Adobe Users Group) meeting for ideas on how to build business using your website, social media tools, and iterative measurement strategies.
Building a sweet site, setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles, even ranking well in search engines doesn’t mean a thing if customers aren’t lining up to buy your products or services. In this meeting, Tim will discuss how you can get these elements to work in tandem with one another to build business. The session will explore strategies behind creating and maintaining a successful online presence that includes optimized site performance, community engagement across social channels, and iterative measurement and analytics tactics to drive results. He will also use several case studies to show exactly how these elements work in tandem to help grow your business.
Success requires equal parts engagement, marketing, community management, measurement, content strategy, and of course a kick-ass web/mobile site. So whether you are a developer, designer, or manager, this presentation will give you some practical nuggets of information that you can use to improve the online performance of your business.
Increasing Online Engagement
Here are the details on this session:
DATE: Monday July 18, 2011
TIME: 6:30 - 8:30pm (Doors open at 6:00pm)
LOCATION: Ascend Training, 410 S Michigan Ave Suite 433
Prior to launching into the full-fledged festivities of Andersonville Green Week, Mightybytes is co-sponsoring this documentary on eco-terrorism and the darker side of living green. Join us at Chicago Filmmakers on Friday, July 8th at 8:00 PM.
Marshall Curry’s documentary tells the story of the Earth Liberation Front’s (E.L.F.) Pacific Northwest sleeper cells whose malaise with public protest—and the police’s aggressive tactics—decided that traditional forms of peaceful protest and activism resulted in an inability to lead change and subsequently targeted private property as a way to economically sabotage companies the E.L.F. decided were destroying the environment.
Throughout the 1990s and into 2001, The E.L.F. burned down timber companies, slaugherhouses, S.U.V. dealerships and a $12 million ski lodge in Vail, Co. The E.L.F. also destroyed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington due to a false belief that they were raising genetically engineered plants. All in all, this E.L.F. cell’s string of actions caused nearly $80 million in property damage. In March 2001 the American arm of the E.L.F. was designated as the country’s “No. 1 domestic terrorist threat” by the F.B.I.
The film focuses on Daniel McGowan, a seemingly gentle guy born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in Rockaway, Queens—whose dad’s was a New York cop—was a business major in college, and while working in corporate public relations saw a documentary about environmental destruction and afterwards went to work with a variety of environmental organizations in New York. It was in New York that McGowan realized that continued environmental destruction seemed imminent. McGowan says, “I engaged in the ‘representative democracy’ kind of activism, but my heart was never in it.”
Environmental Hero or Eco-Terrorist?
McGowan subsequently moved to Eugene, OR and decided to take active engagement in the radical E.L.F. He says, “At some level, I thought it (E.L.F. actions) was effective. If I would have written a statement that I think genetic-engineered trees are bad and old-growth logging is bad and sent it to every media outlet in the counry, it wouldn’t have been paid attention to. There is something really strange about when you attach a statement to an arson it suddenly becomes newsworthy….it is like propaganda with teeth.”
McGowan was taken into custody in Brooklyn, NY in 2005 and brought to trial (back in Oregon) on charges of terrorism for his participation in E.L.F.-related arson plots. The government threatended McGowan with a maximum 335-year sentence. The film shows how a determined F.B.I. can pin the co-defendants against each other to bring down these suspected (though not formally charged) “terrorists.”
What would lead someone passionate about a cause to meddle with private property and potentially threaten the livelihood of innocent people instead of leading change nonviolently? Do crimes against property in which no one is killed or injured really constitute as acts of terrorism? See the film and share your thoughts! There will be a discussion immediately following the film.
LOCATION: Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark Street
