Our hack was an attempt to see how the camaraderie of your social sphere could influence everyday consumption habits. Using the Tendril API, we allowed users to track their real-time electrical energy consumption data in comparison to that of their Facebook friends. In addition to being able to visualize trends in energy usage between you and your peers, users were able to commit to energy saving goals. These goals could then be shared on your Facebook wall in an effort to educate the public.

Above, you can see a screenshot of the energy consumption
comparison between you and your Facebook friends.

I am proud to say that our app took home prizes for Best User Experience and runner-up in the Tendril Energy Internet and Smart Home App Contest. It was also demoed by Tendril at DistribuTECH, the utility industry’s leading Smart Grid conference in San Antonio, Texas. It’s refreshing to see a company like Tendril taking advantage of opportunities like this Hackathon and is a testament to the fact that social media can really change the world.

The Green Carrot Team celebrating their win with Eric Shiflet of Tendril.

In addition to learning about how information technology could influence consumption habits, we also learned how an extremely limited amount of time could influence the workflow of our team. Rather than following our conventional methods for producing a web project, we chose to use a more organic approach. In the interest of saving time, our team utilized Google Drawings to create an interactive wireframe that allowed all of us to collaborate in real-time. Opportunities like this hackathon give creatives the ability to test out new methods of working together and if any part of this experience seems interesting to you I would highly recommend attending one in your local area.

This article is copyright © 2012 

We all get comfortable with our lives, our jobs, our friends. We know what we like, and we know what we don’t. We get to a point where we feel established, accepted, and successful. And because of this, change is scary. I reached this point in my life two months ago. I lived in Boston, had five years of work experience under my belt, established a network of friends and business associates, and enjoyed my free time. But deep down I felt like there was something bigger I wanted to be a part of that Boston could no longer offer. So I took a leap of faith, and applied to all the top interactive agencies throughout New York City. I went to bed that night with many unanswered questions. I would be leaving everything I had worked so hard for — everything I had established since graduating college. Was I making a mistake? That night I decided that one thing was clear — I needed to land my dream job and then everything else would fall into place. And then I found Carrot.

With my iphone GPS in one hand and my laptop in the other, I navigated my way to Carrot for an interview. Two hours later, I left speechless. The energy, excitement and ambition hits you right in the face the moment you walk in. It’s very obvious at first glance, that the people at Carrot absolutely love what they do and who they work with, and it shows in the work they produce. Needless to say, I will never ever forget the night I received my job offer. After hanging up the phone I was jumping up and down in celebration, while also balling my eyes out. My life was about to change — I would be packing up my life and moving to New York City. I had landed my dream job.

I’ve only been here for 2 weeks, but I can already tell you a couple of things; I now understand why New York City is the best city in the entire universe, the people at Carrot are some of the most talented people I have ever worked with, and change is good. I was told that Carrot Creative will one day change the world, and I already see it happening. I can’t wait to finally be a part of something bigger.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Let’s face it — 404 pages may not always be a top priority, but for creative agencies it’s important to embrace the opportunity an error page presents. Beyond the obvious utility these pages provide, 404 pages are a great chance to showcase your agency’s personality, creative chops, and attention to detail. Whether it’s treated as an extension of your brand, or a playful easter egg, these once dull error pages are now considered to be one of the most creative ways to exemplify the nature of your agency and the people that work in your organization. Here’s a round up of 404 pages from a handful of the agencies in our field:

Carrot Creative First thing’s first — let us present what we believe to be the best use of the 404 page scenario. Naturally, this is our own agency

Barbarian Group Barbarian Group cycles through 80 or so odd and amusing (seemingly custom) images, creating a unique experience each time.

Big Spaceship The randomized background is a particularly nice touch (especially the bikes!), but the failed google search attempt at the bottom of the page shows a bit of neglect.

Big Bad Collab Sporting a throwback space-themed design, Big Bad Collab’s 404 page is nice, but doesn’t show the “Space Ghost” we were expecting…

Big Fuel Moderately underwhelming. Womp womp.

Blue Fountain Media Pac Man! Novel idea, but this might be taking away valuable time spent learning about the agency.

Breakfast Simple, humorous, and to the point. However, clicking the FAIL blog image shouldn’t direct users away from the site. That defeats the purpose!

Buddy Media Sterile and utilitarian. Less is more, or something like that… right?

Bully This is the best of both worlds — a cheeky message combined with useful internal links.

Carsonified Well designed and helpful. We applaud you.

Centresource Another well done 404 page containing a nice mix of quirky narrative and useful links.

Cuban Council A vintage  (and humorous) art directed error page consistant with their overall site theme. Links back to the homepage.

Deep Focus “Just drop in the site map and call it a day.”  Meh.

Flightpath  Well designed and user friendly, this is an excellent example of a 404 page.

Free Association Nicely composed, but all of the useful links are well below the fold. And we all know how important the fold is.

Freshthrills  Nice wordplay and art direction here. We’re fans.

Huge Straightforward. Although, we expected something more from Huge.

Ignite Social Media Not the most stunning design, but it gets the job done.

Jumping Jackrabbit Beautifully illustrated page with a parallax effect. This page is a delight to stumble upon even though he is cooking carrots. EEK.

Odopod Snarky, but still quite useful.

Space150 With no additional links, this error page relies on the main navigation for users to regain their bearings.

This article is copyright © 2012 

While my favorite thing about Carrot is the people and being small enough to know everyone’s favorite food (note to self: pick up peanut butter filled pretzels for Dan), it’s still exciting that we’re large enough to offer great benefits that rival any New York agency. We’re still working on that free cafeteria, but we do have medical, dental and vision insurance plans. We prefer that our team members spend their time worrying about how awesome the work they’re creating is, rather than how they’re going to pay to get their tonsils out.

In truth, there’s only one thing missing from Carrot — you. We’re growing steadily and, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re right smack-dab in the middle of taking over the world. We can’t sail this pirate ship without a full crew, so check out the positions below that we’re looking to fill. Think you’re a good fit? Drop us a line/email/pigeon/parrot/baked good.

Developers
Carrot does things a little different than the average agency. We’re looking for devs who will have an opinion and cringe at the phrase “code monkey”. Everyone is a creator at Carrot, and we mean that.
Check out the full description here (PDF).

Strategists
Did you play Risk as a kid? Are you the bomb at Connect Four? If so, we want to talk to you! Carrot is looking for a strategist who geeks out on data, has experience managing marketing/sales funnels, and relishes the idea of being measured on ROI.
Click here for the full description (PDF).

Assistant Account Executive
Do you have to-do lists for your to-do lists? Have others referred to you as their lifesaver, the one that helps keep everything together and running? Carrot needs support from a note-taking, calendar-scheduling person like you. Think you can help a brother/sister out?
Check out the full description here (PDF).

If Carrot sounds like a place you’d fit in, we want to hear from you.
Go ahead, fill out an application!

I may be one of the younger Carrots on the team, but I’ve had a lot of jobs at a lot of different companies. In my experience, Carrot Creative is the single most amazing company I have ever had the honor of being a part of. It’s not just that I feel like a part of a team when I come into the office, but I feel like I’m part of a family when I leave the office. We look forward to hearing from candidates to help our family grow!

This article is copyright © 2012 

To demonstrate, we are using an example with Stephen Colbert running for Presidency of the United States. While we lament that this scenario is completely fictional, we are going to use this as a means of understanding what capabilities are available to users with the Timeline.

Here we can see Stephen taking advantage
of his cover to advertise his campaign.

Events are now grouped together by month and display in
a concise fashion making it easier for friends to join.
The advent of the Timeline also makes it very easy to go back
and look at previous events that others have attended.

Photos take center stage on the Timeline, offering a gallery view
and the ability to activate a lightbox with one click.

Facebook users will have the ability to feature any story they wish.
Above, you can see how a post looks before and after it has been featured.
The Featured view expands the content to a full column width view.

Another addition to Facebook is the ability to post Milestones and Experiences.
A Milestone comes with the ability of uploading a photo to commemorate
the event. These milestones also have the ability to be featured and will
display very similarly to the featured photo we looked at earlier.

Work and Educational information received a major revamp as well,
being implemented right into your stream of stories. Now there is
no need to toggle a user’s information tab to view this data.

The experience of using a Timeline is very unique to other social networks. Having the ability to go back to a specific period in time is refreshing and yields new ways of consuming information. This change makes information seem more historical and we thought this would be a great way to showcase that. Also, for those of you wondering, you can sign up for the Facebook Timeline right here.

To view Stephen’s full timeline, click here.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Platlas.com: A love letter to our favorite social networks.

Earlier this summer, we took on the somewhat daunting task of exhaustively mapping out the ecosystem of Facebook. Even though Carrot is a Preferred Development Consultant and we consider ourselves severely versed in the Platform, we still learned A LOT by delving into Facebook so expansively. However, our ultimate goal was to narrow down a story within this vast array of features, into something compelling and widely relevant to us: our clients and our industry. Platform education is an integral part of our relationships with our brand clients, so we decided to focus on what is most relevant to them: content creation and interactions.

We began with a flat infographic (PDF) to share with our current and prospective clients, mapping the features available to both a Facebook User and to a Facebook Page. For each feature, there are a number of response actions available to Facebook users; we are calling these “edges.” Essentially, Facebook features – anything from Profile fields to Status/Wall updates – allow users to create and share content. From that content, users have actions such as “Like” and “Comment,” a variety of tagging options, and so on. These edge actions are what make Facebook truly a powerful experience for users and a valuable tool for brands. They are what populate newsfeeds and enable the spread of content from Page to Profile, Application to inbox. Taking a step back to get a bird’s-eye perspective of the spread and availability of these edges, across all features, has helped us garner a better understanding of content-share relationships. We also realized that experiencing a flat version of this map is limiting. So, a new Carrot Labs project was launched, to bring this infographic to life as an interactive experience.

Just as the visual experience we have built has been an exciting experiment, so has been the development on the backend. Jeff, who handled the bulk of development, will be detailing this in the near future… but it’s worth noting that this experience does not use any flash. It is a mix of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Javascript, and whole-lotta math.

As with any ecosystem, the Facebook platform is constantly evolving and growing. This is exciting for us as we’ve built this “Social Platform Atlas,” because it means we will be continually releasing new versions (while archiving previous ones for reference). The beta launched Platlas (accurate to Sept 1, 2011) is already slightly out of date with Facebook rolling out changes in the last 2 weeks as they lead up to F8. Not to fear – we are already tracking these updates on the Platlas News page, and will implement new releases of the infographic as often as we can. Additionally, we are excited to have a Pages interactive view in the works (for now, you can view the flat version). If all goes well and we see the social community enjoying our Facebook-centric Platlas, we will be taking a look at other social platforms to help tell their stories of content and sharing as well.

You can follow Platlas updates on Twitter and of course, on Facebook. Be sure to visit Platas News to keep on top of the latest in Facebook updates and our continued development of the project!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Before this, I had been watching Carrot for some time, always amazed and inspired by everything I saw them do, make, blog, tweet, tumble, or touch. I had toyed with the idea of applying to work with them and by “toyed” I mean I had thought about it day and night for months. I knew Carrot was no ordinary company and that my approach to join them couldn’t be ordinary either. I also knew that there was no other place I wanted to work at as badly as Carrot and should I fail, I would be hard up to find a comparable alternative. I bided my time. I plotted. I planned. I cackled to myself as lightening struck my laboratory on a dark, stormy night. Finally, on June 5, I implemented my elaborate scheme; stop wasting time looking for and applying to jobs I didn’t want and start putting all of my time and energy into getting the one that I did. This began the phase I deemed “go Carrot or go home.” Aside from abandoning job opening searches and applications, once a day, every day, I began to tweet at Carrot a reason to hire me. Most of these reasons were valid. Some were silly. One was a promise to react exactly like this should I be hired.

This article is copyright © 2012 

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is trying to recognize design limitations and seeing how to remove them while still staying true to the original idea/goal. The Milky Way is physically shaped like a spiral, but does it NEED to be when communicating its data? Why NOT visualize the Periodic Table in a more linear format?

What’s your tactic on breaking barriers? Which ones are self-imposed, and why foster them?

This article is copyright © 2012 

Okay. Not too bad. Covers all the basics – hat with crossed bats, earring, mustache. Probably could look at little meaner, though. It looks as if he’s taking his graduation photo for the yearbook.

(Also could be a close relative to Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. But, I digress. Moving on.)

This guy is awesome. A true pirate. A more badass version of the pervious style. I love where this is going.

Whoa, what happened? A complete 180 from their previous look. The 60s were a weird time in American history, so I’ll chalk this design up to political uncertainty and cultural revolution.

A clean shaven smiling pirate. A true American hero. Either that or it’s just some guy’s dad dressing up for Halloween.

Back to the original. “No more playing around this time,” they said to themselves.

This is not correct; I just wanted to include Keira in this post somehow.

Here we go. Their current pirate is truly menacing. One of the more underrated logos in MLB. They nailed the swashbuckling checklist – bandana, eye patch, goatee, earring, mean snarl, and the “jolly rogers” bat formation tying it back to baseball. The only element that truly changed over their history was the man, not so much his accessories. Even though their logo shifted around a few times over the decades, the cultural legacy left by Blackbeard and Johnny Depp still rings true.

And although the franchise could be facing their 19th straight losing season in a row (the all-time record in the history of major sports), their logo is still a winner in my book. Yarr!

This article is copyright © 2012 

We’ve  just launched our latest Carrot Labs creation: carrot.is.

What started out as a social aggregation project turned into a multi-plaform directory of your favorite agency geeks. If you’ve run into any of us in real life, you’ll know that our brightly-colored biz cards come printed with a custom QR code. These codes activate each staff member’s carrot.is mobile site: an extended business card where you can view a quick bio, utilize touch-activated contact info, and continue onto social profiles.

carrot.is/chris on your phone

We’re consistently a pleasure to engage with across all media. The non-mobile, social stream version of carrot.is lets you check out a Carrot’s stream on Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Last.fm, Flickr, and more—we are on a lot of networks—without leaving the carrot.is profile. Aspiring to work here? Get a sense for your future peers like never before, and decide which platform you’d like to engage with them on.

carrot.is/chris on the web

Across both the mobile and web versions, you can easily switch between and browse other Carrots’ profiles to really get to know us all. As entertaining as my social spew is, I’ve lamented that people may want to enjoy the rest of the company as well. Carrot is known for a substantial staff presence on the social web, but we wanted to make it easier for you, the stalker, to enjoy us with less clicks.

This is just the first of a few projects that Carrot Labs has in the works… check it out!

This article is copyright © 2012