A Wheelie Podcast-EE Week

By: Amanda Guy

It's only Thursday, but as the Wheelie Crew will be taking off on Friday for the Holiday Weekend, I felt I needed to get my weekly blog post up. I'm sure many of your are extremely excited for this weekend, even if fireworks are not allowed this year. Hopefully you have amazing, fun, and adventurous weekends planned with Family and your best friends. But hang in there for one more day and enjoy another round of A Wheelie__Fill in the blank__week!

This week started off normal. We had our weekly Staff Meeting on Monday morning and discussed all the projects we needed to address for the short work week. Our meeting, as always, was pretty fun and we accomplished a lot right off the bat. With our first podcast ready to be uploaded to iTunes and liquor labels in the works I found myself pretty damn stoked for the rest of the week.

Why was I stoked for this? Well let me just tell you!

Almost every day this week I've gotten to bust out my pencil and some blank paper and began by drawing graphics by hand for Spotted Bear Spirits' packaging designs. This has been so much fun and sometimes it's just best to go straight to the literal drawing board before pulling anything into Illustrator. My hands were covered in pencil lead and my hand was cramping up! YES! Such a great feeling. Don't get me wrong, I love having a skill set on the computer to where I can sit down and start hammering things out digitally, but starting with a drawing and then making it into a custom graphic is even better. Plus there's the fact that I could always use more drawing practice. 

Check out the beginning of my drawing of Confluence. For those of you that don't know what Confluence is, let us go straight to the dictionary!

Webster's dictionary defines Confluence as such...

CONFLUENCE:
noun con·flu·ence \ˈkän-ˌflü-ən(t)s, kən-ˈ\
1:  a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point
   <a happy confluence of weather and scenery>
2:
a :  the flowing together of two or more streams
b :  the place of meeting of two streams
c :  the combined stream formed by conjunction

The drawing represents the confluence of two rivers. In this case this is based off of an actual part of land in the Spotted Bear Wilderness known as the South Fork, where Spotted Bear River and the Flathead River come together.

Okay, with our little vocabulary lesson out of the way let's move on to the rest of the week's events. We had several other projects to work on this week, and I'm just amazed at how productive we've been. Lisa, Dan and I attended the Whitefish Farmer's market after work on Tuesday night and while we were sitting having a beer at the Great Northern Brewery, we all three had so much to say about how much fun and how crazy the last couple of days had been.

Lisa also made some serious headway over the weekend on editing our Podcast down to a 33 minute completed audio file. All that needed to be done Monday was setting the branding elements in place with our Wheelie Team Photo, and the intro put into the clip. The first episode of Outside by Design is officially up and under review with iTunes. Once we get the approval from iTunes it can be accessed from your Podcast apps and iTunes via your cell phones, tablets and computers. Considering this was our first podcast ever, I think we did a pretty damn good job. Just ignore the slight imperfections and keep in mind that It can only go up from here! Oh! And we are already on Stitcher, which is super cool: CLICK HERE.

I highly recommend listening to Podcasts if you haven't in the past. Especially if you are into biking, running, hiking, or anything you active you can imagine. I went for a really long walk last week and listened to one of my favorite podcasts, Nerdist, and it was so much fun because I felt like I was getting something much more out of my walk. 

Well that does it for me this week. I want to give one shout out to our awesome Client Lauren, at Spotted Bear Spirits! We love working with you and we want to thank you for your Thank You :) The Beers were great. As for the rest of you out there, have a super fun Holiday Weekend, don't set off fireworks unless the ban has been lifted for some reason by Saturday and be safe out there. I plan to paddle board, wakeboard, fish, run, and swim! Come back next week for another post on A Wheelie___Fill in the blank___Week.

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