Out of the Deep Blue | Photography | Design | Creative consulting

Kamen Estate Wines

Here is just one of the designs we created earlier this year, for Kamen Estate Wines, an excellent winery in Sonoma. The site includes a gallery, wine club and an online shopping cart.

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New content on the way, and a quick “Owned”

Hello! It has been too long since I updated Out of the Deep Blue, and I want to change that today. A lot of the design work I’ve recently done has been for startups whose content is strictly stealth mode until they are ready to face the world. The same goes of course for my work with secret shadow governments and hybrid car/dogs, which I will not mention here.

I do want to take part today in a small bit of internet activism. The same folks who tried to pull SOPA on us are back again with a new attack. The name of the site exposing this is “You’ve Been Owned,” and while the name borders on cheesy, the cause is important. It’s about your legal right to resell your own things, basically. If this goes through in the Supreme Court, it would be a disaster environmentally and economically, preventing people from selling and reusing old items. I will borrow this part from the site to describe it better:

It’s unbelievable, but trademark and copyright holders are trying to use a legal loophole to take away your right to sell things that you own. If we lose this fight, practically anybody who wants to resell products they bought — from Macbooks and iPhones to our clothing and textbooks — will have to ask copyright holders for permission first. And they’ll have the right to deny it! It’s bad for so many reasons: It’ll undermine Craigslist and Ebay, hurt the environment, increase incentives for manufacturers to move jobs off-shore, and effectively ban the traditional American yard sale.

I am posting this because we at Out of the Deep Blue firmly believe in reusing, and not in legal mandates to create more junk. There is also an excellent article on the whole thing here.

An Introduction to Appstem – file under Stop-motion, Voice-Overs, and Hybrid-Ninja

I will let the video speak for itself! Stop motion magic by Eli, voice by myself, Appstem by our partners at Appstem. This was a really fun project, the first voice work I’ve done for a long time…

Now is the Winter of our New Content

It has been an exciting and challenging few months since being handed the proverbial reins at Out of the Deep Blue, and certainly busy!  My previously-held theory that websites go into development hibernation during the Fall and early Winter now has some strong evidence to the contrary.  All the same, it seems many of OOTDB’s partners and clients are shaking off the internet snow and are ready to show off their shiny new CSS coats…

I will now dispense with the strained metaphors.

We have several ongoing projects at the moment, both brand new and redesigns with our existing partners – stay tuned in the next couple months; a lot of new content is on the way!  In the meantime, I am adding more of our existing work to the portfolio, with more content to follow shortly.

A Transition for OOTDB

Our Team: TImnit Gebru, Andrew Chen, and me

Dear Colleagues, Clients, and Friends-

I recently found out I was accepted to the Runway Program, along with my teammates and co-founders Timnit Gebru and Andrew Chen, and two other great teams. The Runway Program is a “pre-team, pre-idea venture creation program” which is funded through Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt of Google is the LP).

One of the many cool things about the program is the “pre-idea” facet, i.e. we will be involved in a search process for the first few months to find a problem in need of a solution, then build prototypes, get user feedback, and iterate until we have a solution we can present to potential investors.

This is going to be more than a full time commitment, so I’m handing the reins of Out of the Deep Blue over to my younger brother Alex, who is a rising star design talent, with a growing passion for photography to back it up.

Alex Woolery, Lead Designer

You can read some more about Alex on our About Page (scroll down a bit).

I want to give a shout out to CoLab and Appstem, two companies that I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with over the past few years, and who have helped OOTDB immensely in our success and growth. Alex will continue to collaborate with CoLab on web projects, as well as helping Appstem build great apps. Both companies are filled with great people, and I will greatly miss working with all of them.

I’d also like to say thank you to all of the amazing clients I’ve been able to work with over the years; from amazing chefs to sustainable builders, each and every one of you has helped to sustain our small business, and I hope that OOTDB and our collaborators continue to provide you with great products and services to help tell your story, connect with customers, and grow your own businesses.

I’ll be posting updates on this blog from time to time on our new Runway backed company, and Alex will be maintaing the blog with OOTDB updates. I’ll leave you with a little video that I used to “pitch” myself to my potential Runway teammates, as I think it’s a good summary of some of the work we’ve accomplished over the years.

Please feel free to leave a comment by clicking on “Comments” below the blog title at top, welcoming Alex on board if you have a chance, we’d love to hear from you!

Client Testimonial: Rammed Earth Works

One of the best scenarios in a service based business such as photography or web design is when the client shares your vision and supports your creative approach to solving a design problem (or better yet, gives you some great ideas to work with). I recently got some really nice feedback from Rammed Earth Works, who definitely fell into this category. In this case the end result not only looked great (IMHO), but has helped to bring inquiries and new clients. I’ll let the founder speak for himself:

We had a sense our website wasnʼt targeting our audience. Rammed Earth Works is

a company of innovators and artisan builders. We wanted a website that was old

world and cutting edge at the same time, as creative as we are. We interviewed

several web designers before finding Eli Woolery. We are thoroughly impressed with

the quality of his work. The entry page has clean lines that showcase our unique

materials and do not distract new visitors with clutter. The site is easy to navigate

and the text and visuals are well-placed to attract new clients. The site also directs

clients who are already familiar with Rammed Earth Works to visually appealing

examples of our work to inspire their own choices of material and design. Eliʼs

product design background and skills as a fine art photographer are exactly what we

needed. He is conscientious and easy to work with. Since the redesign of our

website we have experienced a notable increase in inquiries and new clients. We

enthusiastically recommend his work to professionals in need of artistic,

well-organized, and user-friendly web sites.

-David Easton, founder, Rammed Earth Works

Seed to Stalk announced

A project I’m working on with chef extraordinaire Jeremy Fox recently got some press in the San Francisco Chronicle and Grub Street SF (New York Magazine).

We are working on a cookbook, website, and more, and to launch the site preview I created a stop motion animation which you can check out below:

You can also find the longer initial version here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Inspired by Dentsu London’s highly creative self-promo, I put together the mini-short below using the iPad app iBanner HD and some help from my family (be warned this has nowhere near the technical sophistication of the Dentsu piece, but it’s still kind of fun for something hacked together in a few hours). Music by Air King Sound. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! from Elijah Woolery on Vimeo.

Vintner’s Collective Harvest Party

Vintner’s Collective,  a fantastic “multi-winery tasting room that is home to twenty of the most experienced and talented winemakers in the Valley,” hired me to put together a stop-motion video of their annual Harvest Party. It was a heck of a lot of fun, as I hope the video conveys:

Ubuntu Concierge Dinner: Stop-motion film

At the end of August I shot a short film highlighting Ubuntu’s Concierge Dinner; this was composed entirely of stills shot on a Nikon D700 camera, with ambient lighting.

(full HD version available here)

Chef Aaron London worked furiously on an array of delicious looking dishes; I didn’t get to sample anything that night, but came back a few nights later to try some of the things I saw being prepared and was not disappointed by my anticipation…it was fantastic!

Just one step in the deliciousness...