From the first emoticon in 1982 to the 270,000 words per minute written on Blogger today, the Internet has done a lot of growing. Much of that growth was made possible by the Web Standards Project, a non-profit group dedicated to promoting, well, standards for the web. These standards have evolved over the years making for awesome stories involving some of the greatest digital minds of the past 40 years.

Our friends at Vitamin T think it’s a pretty great story too, so they teamed up with An Event Apart to write a tale of web standards: past, present, and future. We helped Vitamin T and An Event Apart bring this vision to life with an infographic. Find out important things like when Godwin’s law was created or how much a gigabyte of data cost in 1999.

Vitamin T, a talent agency for digital creatives, recently launched their brand and asked us to come up with a clever way to grab the attention of digital agencies around the world. Our solution: The Ad Agency Bloodline. The world of ad agencies is a complicated and sometimes incestuous affair. Our handy chart details the mergers, acquisitions, and launches of some of the largest agencies in the world, from the early 1800s to today.

Did you know which U.S. agency has been open since 1864? Did you know Pizza Hut offered online ordering four years before google existed? Get lost in our tangled web of historical goodies, courtesy of Vitamin T.

Check out the full size image, as well as the post on Vitamin T.

Vitamin T, Aquent’s new sister company, just launched and we are super excited! Vitamin T is a talent agency for digital creatives and is placing folks in awesome interactive shops. You can get in touch with an agent instantaneously on the site, so if you’re looking for interactive work or great digital talent, you probably want to check this out.

Vitamin T came to us with a name, and we developed a brand strategy, a content strategy, a logo, an identity system, and a site design. We’ve always loved working with Aquent, and we were thrilled to be a part of this exciting new endeavor for the company. Meet Vitamin T, agents of creativity!

CHOO CHOO! Trains are awesome. Did you know that people who are obsessed with trains are called “foamers?” It’s true. Over the course of the last few weeks we’ve all become little honorary foamers around here, and today we are happy to announce the launch of the 4th episode of The GE Show: Rebirth of Rails.

We’ve got a train switching game that will completely stress you out, a visually stunning slow-mo video that breaks down the idea of regenerative braking at a zillion frames per second, and an interactive word problem that will give you a glimpse of the potential future of rails.

Check it out!
The Rebirth of Rails

We have been chasing the dream of flight for hundreds of years. As we have conquered this frontier flying has become mundane, almost an annoyance. It has become about being groped and strip searched in security lines. In this episode we hope to reconnect people with the magic of flying. It’s really pretty awesome that 450-ton metal tubes can zip across the sky everyday carrying thousands of people.

All wrapped up in a brand new format, this episode features a short film about the hidden intricacies of take-offs and landings, a plane design simulator, some of the craziest planes and plane photos you’ve ever seen, the possibilities of electric flight, and the future of super efficient engines.

Check it out:
http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/flight/index.html

Electric vehicles are here! Actually they’ve been around for about a hundred years, but in the last decade EV’s have become a viable alternative to gas-guzzling internal combustion engines. Overhauling the automotive industry for a sustainable future is a gigantic challenge and is also our subject for the second episode of The GE Show.

You may remember we kicked off The GE Show a month ago with an episode about Healthy Hospitals. In just four short weeks we developed the second episode: Electric Vehicles. There’s a tool to calculate your daily driving mileage, a driving game, some stunning data predictions projected out to 2030, and several fantastic videos to tie the whole thing together. We are hoping to make each episode better than the last, so this was definitely a step in the right direction for us. Each new episode gets more ambitious than the last, and we are pushing our storytelling in new directions.

Check out the full episode:
http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/electricvehicles/index.html

Up Next: Episode 3 – Flight.

Author Rick Riordan (who wrote the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and the Tres Navarre series) has just released the first book in his latest collection: The Kane Chronicles. It’s called THE RED PYRAMID and it’s got Pharaohs, estranged siblings, family drama, Egyptian mythology – basically everything that is awesome. To everyone’s surprise, tapes have been popping up around the country with audio passages from the book. Rick Riordan blogged about it here and here.

We’re pretty sure this has something to do with a website that we recently designed and built. We’re sort of hoping that you can help us out and put the puzzle pieces together to make sense of it all. This is not a challenge for the feeble of heart, so check out the book, hunt down the audio tapes, and definitely look at the site! You will be rewarded handsomely. This much we know.

Play the Red Pyramid Puzzle.

GUESS WHAT?! We just launched an awesome new site for television’s most-watched history series, American Experience. With over 200 documentaries under their belt, American Experience needed a way to organize their huge amounts of content and bring their full length films to an online audience. Check out their fancy new homepage!

Sound vaguely familiar, you say? We helped American Experience bring these films online last year with a partial site refresh. This year we noticed that our partial refresh was uncovering some unmet needs and some content holes, so we completely redesigned and re-architected the site to meet those needs and bring even more American Experience content online.

In addition to the full length films, we added a blog, special features for films, timelines, photo galleries, maps, a better broadcast schedule, and a place to share your own American experience. Hooray!

And everything is powered by a super slick CMS. We completely revamped their old CMS to be a whole lot more flexible. Now American Experience can fully control almost all aspects of their site, all by themselves.

Visually, we kept the look & feel alive from last year and gave it some major upgrades to accommodate all of this new awesome content. These upgrades will help the site live on in our minds and hearts, like Abraham Lincoln.

We are super proud of the steps we’ve taken over the last year with American Experience to get their site to where it is today. If you have a soft spot for things like Presidents, War, Pop Culture, Civil Rights, and The American West – well then, this site is for you.