Tonight, I met up with Wook and Dan – Team Barrel – at Cookshop on Tenth Ave and 20th Street for a “company-sponsored” (tax deductible!) dinner. We went with a nice fruity Spanish white wine, some spicy hominy (think well-spiced popcorn) and grilled Montauk squid for starters, some seafood for entrees (I opted for a light scallop dish, Wook had the black bass, and Dan tried the grouper special), and a good collection of dessert (warm brioche, apricot turnover, raspberry sorbet). We talked big and made many plans, like doubling our fees and finding an office in Manhattan (although there’s always the unspoken sense of – damn, all of this can *poof* go away), but we also had solid conversations about website designs, branding processes, and other work-related topics (like our incredible $100 laser printer purchase off of Craigslist and how to best utilize our new Blackberries). Things feel good when you can talk about what you do and it has that “yeah I’ve been pretty busy” ring to it.

Speaking of which, Wook and I finished updating the Kang & Kim portfolio so people can take a look at what Wook, Dan, and I have done in the past ten months. We’ve kept off some of the more recent clients to include in our new Barrel website (coming soon!), but the K&K portfolio gives you a good sense of who we’ve worked with, the quality of our work, and the design choices we’ve made. Each page has a neat Flash slideshow, so you can get a quick run-through of our efforts without much clicking. Not detailed in our portfolio is the work we’ve done for ColumbiaGroups, our internal project that provided low-cost web and branding solutions to Columbia student groups – probably not the wisest business idea, but a good way to get our name out and try some different designs. And Tailor Made KSA is starting to grow, albeit slowly, as we reach out to more KSAs and do some heavy marketing (thank you Xanga!).

Alright, that’s enough self-promotion for one night. More fun, cool, and good-looking designs to come!