Susannah Gardner of Hop Studios and Buzz Marketing for Blogs invited Moxie to participate in a panel on blog design best practices and the like at SXSW Interactive next Spring!

Kathy is going to have her hands full with her new baby girl, so I’m the designated Moxie representative. I’m honored that we were invited and I’m looking forward to meeting the other designers on the panel.  At Susie’s request, I recommended some of my favorites to attend, but there are so many good designers out there and only a handful of seats on the panel. Kathy and I are both eager to see who will show up and what we can all offer each other.

SXSW, here we come!

I looove February and I especially love Valentine’s Day, despite the mass grumblings from significant others everywhere about how it’s overcommercialized and how Cupid is a Communist or whatever.  Why do I love February so much?  Well, Godiva for one.  But really it’s because everything everywhere is pink!  ... and red and all the Valentine hues in between. 

Aaaaaand it’s also the month of our anniversary!  Moxie is going to officially be three this year on February 14th.  I can’t believe how much has happened in 3 years.  Crazy. But I couldn’t ask for more, to be honest. It’s the best gig in town and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Speaking of gigs, I’m buried under them, y’all.  With Kathy gone, my schedule for the first part of 2006 filled up lickety-split!  I’m booked until May, though it could fluctuate a bit.  At this time, I’m not taking too many more clients for Spring/Summer, so please sign up for the mailing list if you are planning web projects in the Fall and would like to work with me. I’d love to hear from you!

I’ll be out of the office March 10-15th for SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX.  If you’re a client attending the event, drop me an email! I’d love to meet you.  I’ll be speaking on the panel, “How to Make Money with Your Blog Design Skills” on Saturday, March 10th, but floating around most of the weekend.

Happy February!  Hope you spend Valentine’s with someone you love.... or at least someone willing to share a bottle of wine.

It’s March already?!  When did that happen?  Time has been flying this year and we owe a lot of that to you keeping us so busy.  Busy busy and we thank you for it!

This month is going to be extra busy, in fact.  On March 10-15, I’ll be out of town at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) in Austin, TX, but will be back in the office on March 16th and will answer emails as soon as humanly possible in the order in which they were received (unless the sky is falling).

What else is going on this month?  I have several projects that I’m working on, including a couple wine-related sites (pass the vino!), an adorable dog bakery, a couple of hip podcasting mommies and a much-needed (and very large!) Louisiana job-seeker site.  These should be live before the end of the month, so stay tuned for those.

On to my schedule…

Currently, I’m not accepting any additional jobs for the Spring/Summer seasons. I’m booked into July and will be unavailable until early Fall 2006. This, of course, is always subject to change.  I do have a couple projects pending for later on in the year, so if you have a project for early Fall 2006 (around September), please let me know and I’ll do my best to get you an estimate as soon as possible.

Thanks and have a lovely March.  It goes out like a lamb, you know.

I’ll be at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas this weekend where I will be speaking on the panel, “How to Make $$ with Your Blog Design Skills”with four talented industry colleagues.  We’ll definitely share the fun here on the site, so stay tuned for a potential podcast or transcript from the panel, should they become available.  I’m so excited to be on this panel and to get a chance to put faces to names.  If you’re going to be at SXSW, please introduce yourself!

I will be out of the office until March 16th, but will be checking my email periodically in case of emergency.  I’ll do my best to respond to your inquiries as soon as possible on return.  Thanks for your patience!

What a fantastic time we had at SXSW Interactive.  Our panel went swimmingly and it should be Podcast soon, for your listening pleasure.  I am back home a bit early, as I’ve been hit with a very nasty flu. (Gotta love air travel during the flu season!)

To my wonderful clients who are waiting for a mock-up or any other deliverable I’ve promised, I am going to be working this week to get myself well so I can give your projects the attention they deserve.  If necessary, I’ll work diligently through the weekend to accomodate your project as we have agreed. Your patience is greatly appreciated and I apologize for any inconvenience. 

Thank you! 

It’s April already? March certainly didn’t go out like a lamb.  More like herd of lambs.  A pack?  How do you group lambs anyway?

SXSW was fabulous and I got to meet so many people I’d only known online, as well as meet one of my clients!  I was so thrilled to meet Carol, whose financial site will be launching this month.  It’s not that often we get a chance to chat face-to-face with our clients, so it was a real treat, though much too short.

Upon return from SXSW, my household was hit with The Plague (also known as “the flu") for about 2 weeks, which pushed my schedule behind a bit.  I’m almost caught up and hope to be fully back on schedule by the end of April. 

There are several large projects I’ve got coming down the pipe for late Spring/early Summer and I will be unavailable beyond that until the end of September at the earliest.  I’m am beginning to get requests for Fall and I have limited availability for the Fall/Winter 2006 season.

If you’re looking at a project launch around that time and are interested in having me help you out with that, I’d love to hear from you!  Please allow a 2-3 day turn around on emails… you know, just in case I’m buried under a large pile of Javascript somewhere. 

I wish everyone a Spring full of flowers and free of bee-stings. Have a great April!

SXSW Coordinator, Hugh Forrest, emailed an announcement that “How to Make $$ with Your Blog Design Skills” made the ”SXSW Honor Roll” of best panels.  Wahoo!

This means, to paraphrase, that after processing all of the panel feedback forms from this year’s event, the panel we were involved with made the so-called “Honor Roll.” Our panel tallied an average score of 4.0 or above (on a 1 to 5 scale) on the feedback forms submitted by attendees at the end of our session. 

How encouraging! I know that we are interested in participating again, so this has given us experience to grow from. We look forward to both being able to attend SXSWi 2007.  Thanks to all who attended and voted for our panel!

Things are nutty right now, so I’m going to keep this brief.  As you may have read, SXSW is upon us and we’re getting ready to take flight to Austin on Friday morning.  It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Kathy since June 2006, so I can’t wait to hang out with her and network with many of our colleagues.

My schedule right now is booked solid until early April.  We are swamped with inquiries, so I’m not accepting any new projects at this time, but we’ll be reviewing new projects above and beyond the stack of questionnaires that we already have here hopefully in the next six weeks or so.

In some exciting news, I was interviewed by the fine folks at Ellis Lab about the project I did for FashionJunkie.com. If you’re interested in checking out the interview, visit the EE Showcase.  It was so great of them to do that…

OK, off to finish more work before we jet.

Hello?  Oh hi, there.  Yes, it’s me Kathy… the one who fell into an abyss and got lost somewhere between Thanksgiving and Groundhog Day.  If I haven’t said it enough we’re super busy… a good problem to have!  But busy bees nonetheless.  I am packing (and preparing meals for a 2 year old so that he doesn’t eat hot dogs and jello for 4 days straight) and getting ready to pair up with my other half, Joelle, for fun, festivities and technology galore at SXSW Interactive this weekend in good ‘ol Austin, Texas. 

I’ve never been to Texas in my life.  Not even for a flight layover.  So, bring on the BBQ!  Joelle and I haven’t yet been able to attend an event together either so watch out Austin, The Moxie Girls are coming to town and they are armed with cocktail shakers.  We’re doing a quick book reading for The IT Girls’ Guide to Blogging with Moxie on the Day Stage at 11:30am on Saturday the 8th so if you’re coming to the event and want to pop in and say hi, please do!

While we’re attending SXSW, Moxie Design Studios does not sleep.  We’ll be back in the swing next week as usual.  I’ll at some point be booking new projects for April/May but for right now I am up to my gills in design.  We appreciate your patience if you’ve submitted a questionnaire.  We’re climbing Mount Paperwork as soon as we return.  Now if I could only find pink mountain climbing gear…

I bet you thought we fell off the planet.  It’s only been like two… oh, wait...that’s ten weeks.  Oops. Sorry about that!  We have a good excuse, though, we swear. Kathy and I have been working like mad women on myriad new client projects rolling out in March, as well as a redesign of this site. Yeah, yeah, you say, you’ve heard that song before. More on that in a sec!

As we’ve mentioned, we’ll be attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX again this year. Our first time was in 2006 when I shared time on a panel with other blog designers discussing “How to Make $$ with your Blog Design Skills” (which made the SXSW Honor Roll that year).  The only bummer of that trip was that Kathy wasn’t with me. We skipped 2007 due to our workload, but this year, Kathy and I will not only be attending together, we’ll be presenting our first book, The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie.  Our reading is at 11:30am CST on the Day Stage if you’ll be at the conference and would like to attend.  The reading should last about 20 minutes and will be followed by a signing at the SouthBy Bookstore.  Come by and say hi!  We’ll be doing a giveaway, including a free signed copy of our book and goodies from our friends at TheBar.com.  We hope to see you there.

And now, about our redesign… we decided that in order for us to effectively finish our client projects and attend SXSW with any semblance of calm, we would postpone our redesign until the SXSW shenanigans have died down a bit. Everyone in the industry tends to release their Next Big Thing, be it a redesign, a new project or software, right before SXSW. Rather than be one of many, we’d rather wait until we can approach it in a less frenzied way.  We refuse to put anything out there that’s less than and when you rush that can happen.  There will be lots of fabulous sites to peruse during the next week or so… I’m looking forward to seeing what’s out there.

We’ve always received a nice, steady if not occasionally abundant flow of inquiries, but since Blogging with Moxie came out, we’ve received more than we could ever dare hope for. Thank you, thank you!  But, to that end, while it’s fantastique, we are but two women.  Sometimes people get testy when we’re unable to take their project, hollering (yes, hollering) that we should just “hire more people!”.  But if we hired more people, you’d be getting that person and not us.  It’s not about churning out product, it’s about doing what we love by providing you amazing, personal design and a one-on-one experience.  We care about you and your project.  And we appreciate your patience. 

Right now, we’ve had to put the kibash on new inquiries… even just “questionnaires in waiting”.  They’re knee-deep, kids!  So, until we return from SXSW and have time to scale this mountain of amazing projects, we are just not accepting any inquiries. It pains us to say that, but it’s only temporary.  If you already submitted your questionnaire to us or have otherwise been in contact with us, do not despair!  We’ve got them here and we’ll still be reviewing them in the order in which they were received when we return from SXSW.  Hopefully, we’ll be ready to consider more new inquiries by April.

Again, Kathy and I really can’t thank you all enough for your interest in working with us, for purchasing our book and for your patience.  We’re off to SXSW, so we’ll catch you on the flipside!

xo