The world famous Ann Arbor Art Fair is here! With booths and displays setup throughout Ann Arbor, we’d like to get in on the action and showcase some of our artwork from the past few months. When the cruel weather of the midwestern winter and spring lured us back to bed each morning, these were the projects that kept us motivated.

More On the Way…

We’re well into Summer now with some great projects in the works. Make sure to follow our latest musings, launches and news on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

Our first MetaSpring blog post in February of 2008 promised that our blog would act as a hub for communications between our company and the rest of the world. Since then, we’ve tried to stayed true to that commitment while also implementing some changes improve this communication.

The majority of these improvements have been pretty abstract, in terms of how we approach blog posts and what content is discussed. Well, we’ve recently launched a physical evolution of the blog in order to help our readers find the information that’s most relevant to them.

Our Creative Director, Ian Wilson, who oversaw most of the changes, explains:

We do a lot of different things for our clients and we like to share our knowledge and experiences in those fields with our readers through the blog. As our readership grew and we began to dedicate more energy to keeping the blog up to date, we quickly realized that breaking our blog out into more discrete categories would help our readers to more easily get to the content they want. On top of that we were also itching to update the design of our blog, so with that in mind we put together the three sections to focus on their specific topics and give our readers a little more eye candy.”

As Ian mentioned, the MetaSpring blog will now be broken up into four distinct categories, each with its own RSS feed (we’ll still have the cumulative feed available on the blog home page – so make sure to update your subscriptions):

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  Design

  The design process involves a lot of hard work and dedication in a constantly evolving industry. In this section, we’ll share advice on overcoming obstacles and keeping up with trends in the design world.

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  Development

  New trends in web and application development are constantly popping up, so in this section, you’ll find posts on new trends and technologies, code snippets, industry news, and a lot of Ruby-related goodness.

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  SEO & Marketing

  We are constantly exploring the marketing aspects of the web, and this is the home of our ruminations. Posts in this section will illustrate ways to capitalize on new methods to market your website or yourself on the web.

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  Company

  Are you a MetaFan? One of the best parts of a company blog are the conversations that spark up between the public and the organization. This portion of our blog will highlight some of the great things happening at MetaSpring, such as new job postings and site launches.

This new layout is designed to facilitate better discussion so if you are having any difficulties, please let us know. As we continue to adjust the style of the blog, you can look forward to the same high quality content. We’re happy that you’re here and look forward to many great conversations. Talk to you soon!

Valentine’s Day was more than a week ago, but we’re still feeling the love. We’ve been fortunate enough to get a bit of press attention recently and were thrilled to share our thoughts and ideas with the community.

Business Innovations with Larry Eiler

Last week, MetaSpring’s own Casey and JP were invited to record a podcast with Larry Eiler, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Eiler Communications. The podcast is part of a weekly series entitled Innovative Business Results. Guests on the show discuss their organization, as well as other business-related issues in the news.

We were very excited to join Larry on the podcast and thank him for the invitation. Topics discussed include:

• MetaSpring Company News
• Our recent exploration of Web 2.0 in the Academic community
• Ann Arbor’s Tech & Innovation Community

You can listen to our segment here: February 23, 2010 Podcast

And, you can find the full archive of shows at the Business Innovation website.

Job Searching in a Tough Economy

As many of you know, the MetaTeam has a pretty extensive online presence. Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks, you can usually find someone at MetaSpring to connect with. That was the case when a student at the University of Oregon was recently looking for job-searching advice from recent college grads through Twitter. This sort of crowd-sourcing technique was one of the skills Casey discussed in his last post about Web 2.0 and its role in career preparation.

Casey was happy to answer the call and bestowed upon her the knowledge that he’d gained from his job search last summer. The student, Paige Landsem, was able to condense Casey’s thoughts into a very helpful blog post for her class entitled Gateway to Media. The post is intended to help students combat current economic conditions. Well done, Paige!

Upcoming MetaSpring Appearances

We’re continuing our publicity run next month with another local engagement:

Lucy Ann Lance Business Insider – March 16

Lucy Ann Lance is one of the most ardent supporters of the Ann Arbor business community, emceeing events and chairing several local advocacy groups around town. She also hosts a daily (Mon-Sat) radio show called The Lucy Ann Business Insider, 9am-12pm on 1290AM WLBY in Ann Arbor. The show can also be found streaming online on 1290AM’s site or archived on Lucy Ann’s website. We start our day listening to her show co-hosted with Dean Erskine.

After a few conversations with Lucy Ann on Twitter, we were fortunate enough to receive an invite to appear on her Tech Tuesday segment on March 16th . This pre-St. Patrick’s Day show will be a lot of fun and we invite you to listen along.

Contact MetaSpring

As you can see, MetaSpring loves to talk. Usually we let our web designs do most of the talking, but we love to chat in person too. Most of our staff is on Twitter and we maintain an active Facebook presence. If you’d like to get in touch with a member of our team for an interview, networking event, or speaking engagement, email us at info@metaspring.com or check out our staff pages for social networking info.

The Fall development rush is in full swing here, at MetaSpring, and we’ve been working extra hard to crank out some awesome new projects (stay tuned for a future Fall portfolio showcase)! While we have some great posts lined up for the weeks to come, our blogging schedule’s been a bit shuffled this week.

So to make sure that we don’t totally fall off the blogging bandwagon, we’ve put together a special Halloween treat for you – a Facebook Photo Album of the MetaTeam wreaking Halloween havoc around Ann Arbor.

There are even some cute cameos from the youngest members of the MetaTeam!

From all of us at MetaSpring, we hope you had a very Happy Halloween!

Remember the first day of school? When the teacher would have the entire class regale each other with tales from their summer vacations? Well, we’re admittedly a bit far into the fall semester for that analogy, but hey, if the shoe fits…

We’ve certainly had a busy summer at MetaSpring – bringing on several new staff members and moving into our great new office space. In between those big changes, we’ve been working really hard on some awesome projects that we’d like to share with you now.

More, Coming Soon…

We’re already well into the Fall quarter now, with a number of exciting launches fast approaching. If you’d like to keep up to date with all of our new launches and other MetaNews, follow us on Twitter @MetaSpring!