We mentioned a few weeks ago that we can work with even the smallest amounts of land. This week we started a project that is on the “Main Grid” in Second Life, on probably one of the smallest pieces of land we have worked with. Our creative team has taken this area and come up with a building that is visual appealing, functional and the best use of the space. This building is complete with a foyer area, large room and an office/meeting room.

One of the fortunate things of having a small area with one building is this creates a quick turn around time, so our team will have this project complete by the end of the week.

Below is a snapshot taken after a day’s worth of work, more pictures will come once complete!

We have been very grateful for another wonderful year here at Designing Digitally Inc.

So in this post we would just like to express our best wishes to you and yours this holiday season.

 Designing Digitally Inc. is proud to announce that the Sycamore High School science lab is almost complete. With the professional guidance of our team the Sycamore High School now has a fully functional science lab in which they can explore different types of bacteria and how the bacteria reacts to certain chemicals. This simulation allows students to learn what the bacteria will do prior to testing in the classroom. This is to assist the students in learning how serious working with different bacteria can be and also how to effectively work in the science lab. We hope that Sycamore High School is able to fully utilize the science lab and look forward to helping them in 2009 on their ventures!

Yes, the rumors are true, we did redo our island a bit. We had to scrap the social lounge to make room for our ever increasing portfolio. It was an executive decision but in the end we know we did the right thing.

We created a way to highlight some of the types of islands that we have done, such as corporate headquarters and training islands, marketing, branding, and promotion islands, and of course educations islands. Our new portfolio sector highlights these 3 categories and has images from our most recent projects within each category.

Join us in-world!

We do more than Second Life I promise! Half of our team is extremely busy with a top secret project that hopefully we will be able to share with you very soon. But for now we continue to share our wonderful Second Life work!

We havn’t reported for a while on our “CCC” project. If you remember we have a large project that for now we cannot disclose to much info about. But you know, the blog always has the inside scope, so we’ll show a little peak of what we have so far. Below you can find a set of 4 pics from Second Life of our futuristic building designs. As you can tell, one is a small lecture hall, one is the landing point and…that’s all your getting out of me for now!

You’ll have to check back with us for more info when this project is complete, at that time we will provided a full report and link to the island (after we get permission from the client of course).

We have finished another island in Second Life! Now this is going to sound a little strange but…we can’t tell you the name of the client or the island and we can’t provide a SURL for you to visit the island. Because we value our clients, some choose to disclose info about their company or the island from the public (plus there is a small thing call a contract that says we cant!). Never the less, I can pass along a little info about the island and a quick shot at the end just because we love ya!

This client has owned the island for sometime and has already hosted a few events on a mock-up stage that Designing Digitally created. After having a great success with there first few events, they decided to expand the island.

Our team did a wonderful job creating an island with a tropical theme. The island is complete with a corporate headquarters building containing 2 boardrooms for meetings with staff, an outdoor auditorium, a cabana lounge, and a lovely garden area.

Are you in Second Life but don’t have an entire island to build on? No problem! All we need is a small piece of land to get started! We are happy to announce the beginning of another build in Second Life. This build, for an undisclosed client, will be one building on a piece of land, on the main land, and will be used for conducting classes within Second Life.

For those of you not familiar with Second Life the “main land” is the largest island within Second Life and is made up of a HUGE piece of virtual land that is divided up and sold off for lower prices than what an entire private island can cost.

Those of you familiar with our work may remember Honolulu Fish and Seafood Corp. which was also a one building development finalized at the beginning of the year. Builds such as this one usually take our team about 1-2 weeks to complete, and are always fun to do because you get a very fast turn around time.

To learn more about our Second Life services check out the links below to our Second Life page or get a free quote today!

Designing Digitally Inc. - Second Life

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The Brooks Group Hills Golf Course is now officially open! Come join us and play a round of golf on the fully customized 9 hole golf course. We start you off easy with the first couple holes, but wait until you make the turn at #4 then you’ll get a real challenge!

Try to be the high scores and don’t forget to check out the clubhouse where you can find videos and audio files from The Brooks Group!

For those of you with Second Life, join us in-world at the link below!

Join us In-World!

If you don’t have Second Life, sign up, its free! You can use the link above to get to the island and you can also find links to sign up for Second Life on that page.

Just for all of you out there that are eager to see the island but just can’t get Second Life, check out our portfolio page that contains snapshots of this island as well as our previous work.

http://www.designingdigitally.com/portfolio/index.php?imgdir=Second%20Life%20-%20The%20Brooks%20Group

We know some of you must be asking “Hey Designing Digitally, whats up with your Second Life projects?!”

Well for all of you out there, we want to show you a few pictures of the concepts we are working on for a project (we’ll just call CCC):

First some walkway concepts:

Here are a few of the awesome building concepts:

Pretty sweet huh?

Now I can’t give to much info about the buildings but I will say one is an info building, and one is a museum, you can probably guess which ones is which :o)

You may also be pleased to hear our golf course project is in the final stages, just need approval from the client and we will be getting that island opened up. Keep an eye out next week for some pics and more info on the project!

Every once in awhile we see blog posts and newspaper clippings talking about Second Life in a negative fashion. Granted, SL does have it’s flaws that we endure every once in awhile. But honestly this virtual environment can be used to have distant meetings, digital conferences, collaboration for educational or institutional purposes, social networking, interactive instruction / training, gaming simulations & experiences, and much more! Now we all have heard about the mass amount of X-rated in the realm of SL, however isn’t this material all over the web? I can’t help but accidentally type in a major websites address to land on an XXX website. So for those out there that have so much resistance to the web being in a 3d realm please understand that the children that are about to be born will grow up using these new forms of social networking only pushing us closer to this type of standardization of interactions.

With all that said I wanted to share with you an article we found today regarding the A-list companies coming back to Second Life as they have learned that just like any other marketing initiative there has to be planning and integration into the existing marketing efforts for Second Life to successfully work. I have to say that we have worked with many organizations and find that the ones that understand how important having integration of the current marketing efforts in collaboration with this new initiative will lead to a great success. But for those that have the “field of dreams” mentality that if you build it they will come you will find yourself with a digital ghost town.

Article:

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/guy/1241998,CST-FIN-ecol26.article

I want all of you out there that are interested in this new form of marketing to know that we are here through each step of the way to ensure that your strategy will provide you with the outcomes you desire. For more information contact us today!

We thought we would share that Google as officially found us in it’s search! We have top rankings in Second Life, Web Design, Graphic Design, Printing, E-learning, and Web Programming. Here is an example of where we rank in the Second Life searches. This is due to our talented SEO and Pay Per Click campaign. Hopefully we can continue to put our efforts into this and see results as shown below. Take a look!

So we had our trade show yesterday in Ohio at COSI. It was a STS & GSA government convention that invited the procurement officers to see what we could provide them in 2009. And as we all know there were tons of other vendors there but who cares about them right? lol…. We thought we would share our booth experience by showing it. Abby is in the picture but from the look on her face I do not think she was ready for this snapshot! Take a look as we did not get to put up one sign (Second Life) due to room. boo!

 Need items for your trade show? Contact us today!

By now know our team has been hard at work in Second Life on a couple of different islands. I wanted to give a quick preview of one of the buildings. Below you can see the building that will be used to give information about the computer courses. It will also be used by the Graphic Design and Game Design clubs of the school. In the pictures you can see the concept coming together in Second Life, then the final shot is the building after a few hours of texturing. Our team just has a few more textures to do in the front of the building, then add some furniture and this building will be finished!

We have started the mock-up of the development of the Creative Computing Campus. Our very creative artists are building a high tech computing campus! This campus will be used by a non disclosed college to teach game development within their Interactive Media department.  Stay tuned as our artist working on this project is very talented! We will keep you posted with pictures throughout the build.

If you are interested in having a high tech campus contact us today!

shhh.. remember that top secret island we are doing? (It is only top secret because we cant tell you who’s it is), so it still kinda still top secret. Isn’t it? Great now I don’t think the title really is correct for this post.  We wanted to share only a tiny tiny bit of what we have built. Again we are only showing you because our artists love their jobs!

This reminds me of  my backyard! (I wish)

The Auditorium

 Look at these guys just hanging out not working….. psshhhhhh

 Who are these guys? Check out our team!