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.

Whetstone home page

You can visit their site whetstonewinecellars.com.  To see more of the source photography, see our earlier post here!

About Page - Whetstone

Vineyards Page - Whetstone

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!

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

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.

I spent a few days last week in LA shooting more of this type of content, so stay tuned!