Our value comes from shepherding your ideas.

In thinking about why we charge what we do and why we’ve decided to concentrate on a niche (design + development of informational websites, corporate tools and web applications) I came to this realization:

Our value comes from shepherding your ideas.

What does that mean? Sometimes it means that we say ‘no’. Sometimes we say it a lot. Anytime we say it we are doing so for one of many reasons — either it’s not something that you need (and so you don’t need to pay for) or it’s not something you can maintain (we didn’t even have a blog for the first two years of our business) or some other reason that always comes back to the goal of the project. To read more about saying NO check out this awesome post by A List Apart: No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas.

We do what we do because we love it, and we’re really good at it. We have built processes and refined them so that each client gets the best of our talent and attention.

photo credit

Randy. In his underwear.

This post has a picture of Randy in his underwear playing Guitar Hero. A client sent it to me to use on his Friday Favorites (because he loves South Park? Because he loves cartoon nudies? Because he loves Guitar Hero? I don’t know, it was just in the folder with the other pictures…). I can’t use it though—because I’d have to sacrifice one of the awesome pictures of his family for it, and that would be unforgivable. Believe me, you have never seen family pictures like these.

So I give you this post, because this picture was too good/weird to be left on the cutting room floor.

100 Layer Cake Colorboards

I love the blog 100 Layer Cake. They have these awesome colorboards that show swatches and images—and I wanted to use and display them. So I headed to IKEA, nabbed some cheap frames and printed out some of my favorite boards. Voila!

To see the ones I used and check them out for yourself search ‘Colorboards‘ on their site.

Thank you!

We want to thank our clients, friends and family for the support and success. We hope you all enjoy a great holiday weekend!

There will be no Friday Favorites post tomorrow—but you can take a few minutes to see anyone you missed:

Michael Carey

Kira Griffin

Karen Kaminski

Amanda Nelson

How do you pronounce Sawaya?

How do you pronounce Sawaya? ANYWAY YOU CAN.

I’m new to this whole “how do you say that? can you spell that for me?”. My maiden name was Smith and never in my 27 years of unmarried life did someone have a hard time pronouncing “Amber Smith”.

Prounounciation

Ok, so how do you say it? Actually, you can just sound it out:

SA-WAY-YA, but all of the ‘A’s are soft – like “suh-why-uh”

Update: The soundbite wanted to auto play for a lot of people, which was irritating. If you want to hear it, ask us.

I used to spell it out for people as “SAW….AYA” but that didn’t seem to work. Then I heard my father-in-law spell it for someone “SA….WA…..YA” and that works a little better.

It’s also one of the reasons that I always answer the phone, “Good [Morning], Sawaya Consulting, this is Amber speaking”. It’s better for everyone if I just get that out there and no one is faced with the “oh jeez, now I have to try and say this name”. No worries though, anyway you want to say it fine with me.

Kerning

Ok, now that you can spell it, can you kern it? While I love how the letters fit together all nifty like, it does create a kerning issue. Our friend @skirke helpfully sent a link to this article: how to kern type perfectly