BY Whitney Goodell, POSTED 30, August 2010 
I went to Lugano, Switz this weekend and Valley of Versazce. I think it was my favorite place I have ever traveled to; and I have been to a lot of places. I have really awesome pictures to post late this week, so check back every day :)
You can read the full post on Whitney’s Blog: Whitney’s Blog
BY Whitney Goodell, POSTED 26, August 2010 
So you can rent cows here. RENT COWS. I really want to. You have to spend 4 hours a day with the cow you rent, and you get all the milk and cheese from it. So.. basically I would have to wake up at like 4 am with the farmers, and then get to work at 8ish like usual. Sounds legit to me!
You can read the full post on Whitney’s Blog: Whitney’s Blog
BY Marcia Hoang, POSTED 15, August 2010 The Zurich Street Parade is pretty much a huge techno dance party. With over 30 floats and 100 dj’s with several stages set up, the party never stops. Whitney, Karen, and I all slept in Saturday morning, had lunch, before heading to Zurich which is only an hour and a half train ride away. The music was definitely not what most Americans listen to but the people looked great and loved having their photo taken! Here’s a little taste of who I saw yesterday.
You can read the full post on Marica’s Blog: switzerla di da
BY Jon Glicksberg, POSTED 08, August 2010 Just this week we were called in by three clients, in new positions in new organizations. This means a lot: it’s a a recognition that, with their own personal success on the line, they come to us because they know, from past experience, that we will deliver.
And, in return, we WILL deliver, and put our best work forward. In these cases, budgets become a secondary consideration. We are thinking about our personal commitments to friends and colleagues, and investing in long-term relationships. This is formula for mutual success.
Good Work for Good Clients, Will Bring More Good Clients.
Good clients, in our experience, are the clients who truly care about their business and succeeding. They are passionately committed to their business, and therefore willing to work collaboratively towards the best strategic or design solution. If you help them to succeed once, they will turn to you again in the future. And this mutual loyalty leads to great work.
Read the original Blog Post: JGlicksberg’s posterous
BY ICON, POSTED 05, August 2010 The statistics cited in this video are referenced and sourced on the Socionomics blog.
BY ICON, POSTED 25, July 2010 We have spent much of the first half of the year working with our clients to develop marketing programs with a heavy focus on social media, mobile applications, blogs, etc. We’ve brought some great programs to market, which are showing success for our clients.
Inevitably, this work led us to think about how to move our own site forward. It is not a complete new site, rather a refresh with the goal of creating a central hub for the ICON activity around the world, and on social media platforms such as FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube and Instapaper. As well, it reflects some of our evolving design and development thinking, especially with regards to mobile and tablets.
1. Mobile Optimization
The arrival of the iPad has fundamentally changed the way we are approaching all site design. Where traditional websites are point & click, tablets are swipe & drag. And now, suddenly, all websites, need to be prepared to “Work Well” across mobile platforms.
Our new homepage features a hi-bred design which is equally relevant on a desktop, or tablet. The Jquery hero-space, and work feature section, are both dragable on a tablet or iPhone:
2. Live Feeds
Agency activity taking place in forums outside of the .com website has increased dramatically. In our company, for example, there is tremendous cross over between our non-work interests, and our agency business. So, we are experimenting with access to the complete feeds of our offices in Switzerland, NYC, and Madrid, as well as the personal Twitter feeds of the officers there. We are also posting our Instapaper reading list, and most recent YouTube video.
We hope, it will show how active and engaged we are in marketing, technology, culture and the word in general. All of which make us better equipped to serve our clients. In the process, it will also let you get to know the personalities behind ICON either a little better (or perhaps a bit too well ;)
BY Nicolas Baumann, POSTED 20, July 2010 Let’s talk (or rant) about web standards. I recently read an old but still relevant article about web standards it explains the different standpoints (idealist and realist) and reminded me about the issue I regularly face with cross-browser compatibility. I always cared about HTML and CSS standards such as proper semantics, not using deprecated tags or attributes and in general clean and organized code. But what I never really paid a 100% attention to was how my stuff displayed in all the different browsers, if it rendered properly in IE 8, Chrome and Firefox (if it displays properly in those 3, you’re generally good to go with the other browsers), I was happy. I could afford this because I knew my audience, in most cases my audience was gamers and they’re usually on the cutting edge of software and hardware, and if it wasn’t gamers, it was my TA, and I knew my stuff would be graded with Firefox.
There’s a point after which you simply need to stop providing support for old browsers such as IE6, it’s not worth the time, the pain and the money. I do still check how my website displays in IE6 (great tool to view your page in different browsers), but do I really do anything about it if it doesn’t display well or barely? Honestly, no. I’m not going to support a browser which was released in 2001 and has had no major update since, especially when there are new versions of the browser available. The furthest I’m willing to go is slap this piece of JavaScript in. It does a decent job and has helped me out many times in the past.
Internet Explorer seems to be catching up a little, IE8 does a good job and it seems that IE9 will have good support for HTML5 and CSS3. This will, however, not solve our problem. We’ll have 3 browsers which won’t support HTML5 and CSS3; IE6, IE7 and IE8. IE users are notorious for not upgrading their browser for whatever reason, and those 3 aforementioned browsers will probably hold 20% of the browser market share for a while even with IE9 on the block, it also doesn’t help that IE9 will not be compatible with Windows XP (60% of the OS market share). So what are web developers supposed to do?
This post is continued on nbaumann.com: http://bit.ly/cH5MSo
BY Marcia Hoang, POSTED 20, July 2010 This weekend I went to Bern with my coworkers. We got there Friday night and stayed at Nic’s house. He was gracious enough to barbecue for us but of course all he bought were ribs, sausages, chicken wings, sausages, corn, sausages, some bread, chips, and sausages. I had to throw in a bag of salad into the mix to make sure we weren’t completely off balance. You may notice in the picture below that Nic is half wet because he courageously stood in the rain to barbecue for us! Go Nic! I should have taken a picture of the bucket-o-meat but the guys attacked it before I realized that I should probably document this event. We did nibble in the green house while the rain died down as Nic was so kind to re-enact for you guys.
You can read the full post on Marica’s Blog: switzerla di da
BY ICON, POSTED 14, July 2010 PR Momentum continues to roll for our Why Not client:
BY Marcia Hoang, POSTED 04, July 2010 
This weekend was amazing! Lindsay (another design intern here) and I went to Zermatt early Saturday morning. It started off really rough though. Let me start back from Friday when I bought our tickets online to try to save some money. We were super excited because I found some really good deals. Then I purchased and printed them when I found out that I had bought 2 pairs of tickets going from Zermatt back home and none of the tickets were actually to Zermatt. So I told my boss Lori who said not to worry she would go down with us to straighten it out at the train station. When we got there with Lori and her husband Jon (the other boss), they said they could not do anything and Jon went off on them for poor customer service and the level of rudeness we were getting. I felt so bad that they were doing all this for me. At the end, we ended up buying another pair of tickets to get to Zermatt… meaning the super saver deal I tried to take advantage of online had been nullified. Great.
You can read the full post on Marica’s Blog: switzerla di da
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