Well it’s been an incredibly busy week. In addition to our normal work load, we of course also had our presentation for the American Marketing Association that we blogged about last week. However we successfully made it through to Friday and are all looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend.

So for those wondering, the presentation went pretty darn well if we do say so ourselves! Before we get distracted, we just want to give a big thanks to the AMA team who went to great lengths to make sure everything worked well for us (even going so far as to bring two projectors in case one didn’t work – smart thinking guys)! So thanks Mike, Brian, Doug, Laura and anyone we might be forgetting… you guys rock.

Overall the presentation went very smoothly. Ian talked about user experience, good and bad websites and various user testing and analytics tools and then spent around forty minutes answering questions once the presentation was complete. The crowd was great (thanks guys!) and had a lot of fantastic questions. We’re talking with AMA about possibly doing it again as a webcast, so if this is something you might be interested in, drop us a comment below or shoot AMA DC an email letting them know that you want to know how to create websites that don’t suck!

Below: Ian pontificating about user experience, best practices and sucky websites.

So last week when we were just about finished with the presentation we all sat down to do an internal critique. We do several of these with every single project that goes through the studio – it’s a vital part of any successful creative process. The plus side of critiques is that they always end up improving the final product… the downside is when we decide to make major changes less than a week before our deadline.

And of course that’s exactly what happened last week on Friday. After reviewing the presentation we decided that most of it was good to go, but that the illustration style we were using on a couple dozen slides needed to be improved. So we trashed a quarter of the presentation with only four days to go and started again from scratch.

Bryan developed a new, simple, ripe-like illustration style and proceeded to churn out a slew of new images, finishing the last one the night before the presentation. It was a little nerve wracking cutting it that close, but the result of all that effort was a way cooler presentation with hilariously awesome illustrations of kingly users and runaway brains. A couple of our favorite images from the presentation are below. Good work, Bryan!