Content marketing for Elbowroom Design

Creative content labs with Elbowruminations

My brother Neil used to run a design studio in Calgary, Alberta, called Elbowroom Design. It was his primary vehicle for serving clients through visual design and digital production for over a decade, starting in the early 2000s.

Just to contextualize that 2003 is when WordPress was invented; Drupal was 2000, MailChimp was 2001. YouTube was launched in 2005. The iPhone was 2007. In these days, to be a designer and digital creator was to be a self-taught, figure-it-out-as-you-go, multi-disciplinary practitioner. This meant anytime you wanted to create something for the web, you were likely also doing it for the first time, using a slap-dash homebrew of whatever tools you could find — and then you'd show others how to do it — and hopefully, get paid.

Elbowroom Design became a collaborative laboratory for creative experiments. (As an example, during this era, Neil created something called PeaceDeals, an unreal ahead-of-its-time concept: crowdsourced moderation for civil disputes. Think of an online platform where Wikipedia-style community arbitrators would "hear" civil cases like a small claims court, offer decisions, and support restorative justice.)

Anyway, as a younger brother and new grad, Neil hired me to help grow the business through creative communication efforts. And through that, one of the main things we cooked up was...

Elbowruminations

Content marketing + blog platform + community engagement

Get the name? Elbowroom + ruminations; like you're musing wistfully while resting your chin on your elbow...?

We did things like:

• Reactions to large company brand/logo redesigns
• Guerilla design critiques of websites
• How-to guides for certain web and technology skills
• A community contest for design-driven photo-critiques, called "Everyone's A Critic"

This was powered by WordPress, syndicated with RSS, cross-posted to Flickr, and was an engine of community delight in an era that hadn't yet seen many businesses engaging in blog-driven content marketing. A few highlights:

When the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics logo was unveiled on April 23, 2005, we did a deep dive into the design team's research and creative efforts behind it:

Our work got engagement all around the web. We got picked up by (now-forgotten bastions of early-aughts design-bloggery) like FightBadDesign, thingsmagazine, Changeorder, IdeasOnIdeas, re-blogged on Metafilter, and more.

We also focused neighbourhood-specific visual design executions, like transit ads, tradeshows, local small businesses, and more — and that helped build relationships locally, and over the long term, in the city where we lived and worked.