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A Retrospective Look at 2014

The end of one year and the beginning of a new year is always a great time for reflection and taking a moment to step back and revisit the events of the past year. 2014 was an adventurous year for the eHouse team and we were able to enjoy the continued journey of sharing our brand (or rather our re-brand), building expertise and focus on our craft and growing the team. We are looking forward to the experiences that 2015 will create!

New Look + New Places + New Faces

After more than a decade with the same logo, we decided it was time to ditch the {e} house curly brackets and go for a visual brand re-design. We partnered with our friend and uber talented designer, Jay Fletcher. Rather than design this one in house, we handed over creative freedom to Jay and let him work his magic. And the result was a simply killer design.


The brand re-design coincided with a physical move into our new space. As our team grew last year, we said our heartfelt goodbyes to our quaint space and set our sights on a place for the team to grow into. Despite the challenge of sustaining normal eHouse Studio operations while managing the top to bottom renovation of the new office space, we survived. We are now enjoying our new digs on upper King and enjoying the perks of having neighbors like Leon's and St. Alban. For those of you that are local to Charleston, stop by and say hi if you find yourself up that way.



Oh the places you'll go.

We sent the Owners away to Camp, Owner Camp

We were excited to be officially invited into the Owner Camp circle of catharses and were honored to be a part of the conference series. For those of you that don't know, Owner Camp is a small group of other agency owners that meet to talk shop. Aaron and Chris headed to Portland in March for Owner Camp #005 and were subsequently greeted with the typical Oregonian weather, rain. They also managed to squeeze in Owner Camp #007 in Chris's sunny home state of Colorado in the Fall to continue the benefits of learning and relationship building that the camp provides. If you're an agency owner you'll want to be sure to add Owner Camp to your bucket list. It's hard to describe such an invaluable experience, and when you take into account our newly founded friendships, it's truly life changing.

Bureau of Digital Affairs - Owner Camp

Learning from GIANTs

In June, Giant Conference brought together hundreds of usability, user experience, and design rockstars to talk about creating rad experiences themed around visual design, user experience, information architecture, branding, e-commerce and much, much more. Aaron Quinn, one of our founders and the creative director, was a speaker and shared a talk about navigation called "A Make It or Break It Navigation." Our design team enjoyed attending the conference and the industry energy that was brought to Charleston. Oh, and the free beer & ice cream were a nice perk too.

Cowboy Up

In early October, our Project Management team gathered deep in the heart of Texas to attend the 2nd annual Digital PM Summit hosted by the Bureau of Digital Affairs. Their days were filled to the brim with incredible keynote speakers and hands-on breakout sessions. While they didn't come back with 10-gallon hats or authentic lassos, they did return full of great insights into building powerful and scalable teams and processes, leading retrospectives, facilitating client communications and fostering an awesome Project Management team, to say the least.

Future of Web Apps

At the end of October we shipped our DEV team up to bean town to explore the "Future of Web Apps." The FOWA conference highlighted using JavaScript to create full-stack applications focusing on utilizing tools like AngularJS and Node.js and improving development efficiencies while using tools like Grunt or Gulp. It's a technical mouthful, we know.

(Craft)smen

On the topic of new, our developers had a chance to explore the depths of #CraftCMS, which is a lightweight, responsive CMS alternative to its popular predecessor, ExpressionEngine. While developing our rebranded site on this relatively new platform, we filled some gaps of its native short-comings with a few open-source plugins, now available on GitHub.

Raise the Roof

We are proud to continue to craft compelling user experiences for our clients and we are honored to have been recognized nationally for our work alongside other agencies such as Sapient, Digitas, and Razorfish.

Our responsive ecommerce site for Twelve South was selected among the top 1% as Best-in-Show for a mobile eCommerce site by the W3 Awards. In addition, we won another W3 award in Science & Technology industries for our work on five responsive sites for The GEL Group.

Lastly, we were recognized for our work by the W3 awards as well as the IMA awards for our work in the jewelry industry.

W3 AwardsA few new statuettes for the trophy case

Something for the Locals...

Dribbble Charleston

Charleston's Dribbble community was brought to life this year with overwhelming support from the local creative community. These meetups aim to create an open forum for sharing the work we as designers/creatives are passionate about, and are open to all designers, creatives and their friends (no Dribbble account needed). All of which is made possible by generous sponsors like eHouse Studio, Dribbble, Shopify, Cotton Bureau, Local Works, Palmetto Brewing & A Book Apart. We particularly enjoyed the meetup prior to Halloween with guest speaker, Matt Stevens who "Shares Project Highlights and Lessons Too." Follow along @dribbblechs

Matt Stevens speaks to a captivated crowd

Entrepreneurs Getting Their Grind On

Lastly, we joined the local chapter of Startup Grind by hosting a couple of their events. The first was about Fashion Technology,which focused on the emerging integration of technology in the fashion market.

At the second event we heard from venture capital fund parter David Mendez of Cap A Partners, who offered insights to local startup entrepreneurs about raising capital and what investors seek.

Startup Grinds Jeremy Berman speaking with David Mendez

As you can see, we truly enjoyed all that 2014 brought our way and can't wait to see what has yet to be experienced this year for the team and our clients alike.