My absence from posting can only be attributed to one thing…the birth of my and Amy’s baby girl.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working from home and today, decided to share the view from my home studio desk.

-Christopher

Busy day in the studio.  Stellamara radio on Last.fm.

Early Friday morning, before any bustle.  Here’s the view from my desk.

-Christopher

Pelletier-PD has more than a decade’s experience in product development consulting to provide clients with engineering creativity and problem solving skills, as well as the ability to bridge gaps between technical and marketing teams.

The Massachusetts website designers at Studio99Creative created a brochure website for Pellitier-PD to showcase their experience and establish their brand.

You can visit Pelletier-PD at www.pelletier-pd.com.

Amy spent some time this week rejuvenating the signage at our Western Massachusetts website design headquarters.  Included in the mix are some fabulous new window decals that are subtle but highly visible.  We’re totally digging this upgrade.

Huh-wha?!? Yes, that’s right…we’ve removed the recycling bins and there’s no more separating trash here at 99. But how can that be?

Ok…hold on…there’s got to be a good explanation, right? Yes, indeed. You see, we’ve stopped recycling simply because we’ve run out of things to recycle. How is that possible?

Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to become a paperless office…with great success. With little or no exception, all business is now done with electronic documentation. From proposals to compositions to invoices, we’ve made the complete switch…everything is paperless.

Without paper to recycle, the only remaining recyclables around the studio were our water bottles. Switch! We’re now using stainless steel refillable bottles, filled with filtered tap. No more plastic.

After these eco-friendly mods stuck we discovered that our recycle bins sat empty…really empty. So we stopped using them. We’ve stopped recycling because we’ve stopped using the things that needed to be recycled. We’d like you to think about doing that too.

Got a green story of your own?  We’d love to hear about it.  Drop us a note.

Braiden Rex-Johnson is a best-selling cookbook author; a regular contributor to Pacific Northwest, The Seattle Times Sunday magazine; and a columnist for Wine Press Northwest and Amazon.com’s Al Dente blog. She also knows a thing or two about staying current.

We re-designed her website in 2006. Since then, there have been a lot of stylistic and functional changes in the web world and Braiden wanted to stay ahead of the wave. Last month, we launched a refresh of her design, widening the layout, simplifying graphic elements and content, and integrating a Content Management System throughout the entire site.

Braiden’s website is rich and deep with content and bringing all that information into a CMS provides better site-wide search functions and gives Braiden the ability to edit all of her content. Very cool.

We love Photo Fridays.  While working in Orlando this week, we took a break and hung out at Cocoa Beach.  Here, we caught friend of the studio, Shawn, at the end of an afternoon of surfing.

Today in the Studio we’re listening to some fabulous down tempo chillout on Radio IO Chill.

On right now, one of Chris and Amy’s favorites, Center of the Sun by Conjure One.

Where’d the “99″ come from? I get that question almost as much as “Did you really get your start-up money selling patent-leather stiletto-heel shoes?” But that’s a whole different story.

No, the studio’s namesake doesn’t come from the year 1999 or the 80’s pop hit “99 Luftballons”. If we were to name the studio after a year, that year would be 2002, the year we incorporated. And I think “Studio Rock Me Amadeus” just gives the wrong impression. But I digress. Where did we get our name?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Like most start-ups, our early-on shoestring budget left little room for formal office space. Consequently, we worked out of a home office. The home’s street number? Yep, 99. Nice job connecting the dots.

But image is everything, right? So what were we to do when our contemporaries asked where we were working on any particular day? “At home in my jammies” didn’t sound like the vision we were after. We had to come up with something. We did…the tongue-in-cheek “Studio99″. It worked. We liked it. It stuck.

We grew fast and acquired real office space soon enough. That home office is now a bedroom…but it will forever be fondly seen by the studio founders as the four walls that gave us a name.

-Chris