Consulting

Acme Comics
An institution in central North Carolina’s Triad region for 25 years, Acme Comics is a vibrant comic book shop with a large customer base both in the retail storefront and online. Sparktivity has been a trusted advisor to Acme Comics on a variety of internal technology projects over the years. Currently, Sparktivity is consulting on a project to enhance the company’s online presence with the launch of a new web portal for its customers.

Columbia College Chicago
With more than 120 academic programs and nearly 11,000 students, Columbia College Chicago is the largest and most diverse private arts and media college in the nation. Sparktivity provided Mac technical support to Columbia’s Book & Paper Department, and also gave lectures on best practices in print production (titled Production: The Big Mystery) to fourth-year Portfolio Review students in the college’s Art & Design Department.

FireStar Communications, Inc.
FireStar Communications, Inc., located in Chicago, is one of the nation’s leading advertising and marketing agencies specializing in residential real estate, serving developers in nearly every major city coast-to-coast. Sparktivity has recently helped FireStar with extensive documentation of existing internal IT procedures and best practices.

Johnny Knight Photo
Providing dramatic photography for Chicago’s large performing arts community, Johnny Knight Photo has become a familiar ally to actors and professional theatre companies in northeastern Illinois. When picture archives began to outgrow their desktop workstations, Sparktivity stepped in with recommendations for storage and backup solutions to streamline his asset management process.

Karreth.com & Lamiavia.com
These websites are the homes of two leading developers of custom themes for iWeb, Apple’s popular consumer application for consumer-level webpage creation. At the request of Lamiavia.com, Sparktivity developed a custom packaging and installation tool for iWeb theme creators. Third-party iWeb themes can now be installed onto an end-user’s computer using a standard Mac OS X package file (.pkg), and Sparktivity has licensed this tool to both theme resellers.

Lienhart Design
With over 25 years of experience working with clients from Fortune 500 companies like Quaker Oats, McDonald’s, Bristol Meyers, Procter & Gamble, and Coca Cola, Lienhart Design is a leading strategic design firm based in Chicago. Sparktivity has provided Lienhart Design’s staff with print production tech support and technique.

Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd.
Well-known in US professional quilting circles for her award-winning designs and superior craftsmanship, Patsy Thompson decided to take the leap from course instructor to content-creator. Sparktivity gave a guiding hand to Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd. as they built their business, starting at identity design and print ads, then stepping through the production and mastering of three 2 hour instructional DVDs, and continuing all the way to the launch of their promotional blog and online retail store. Sparktivity taught the new tools and concepts necessary for Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd. to became a successful independent publisher.

Scranton Gillette Communications
This Chicago-area firm has been publishing B2B communications for over 100 years, bridging the communications gap between vendors and customers through the development and successful application of superior periodicals. Sparktivity set up a Mac storage infrastructure for Scranton Gillette, trained their in-house staff to maintain the new system, and provided ongoing support for maintenance and troubleshooting.

Stratanet
Famous for great customer service and long-time experience as a Linux-based web hosting company, Chicago-based Stratanet has relied on Sparktivity to provide emergency support assistance for select customers, and to serve as a resource when assisting their own creative professional clients.

The Fund for Democratic Communities
A non-profit organization based in Greensboro, North Carolina, FDC makes grants, conducts research, and produces materials to support community-based initiatives and institutions that make communities better places to live. Sparktivity is a resource for FDC, providing technical recommendations and support regarding groupware tools to enhance their team’s collaboration.

Today’s Chicago Woman Magazine
For over 20 years, TCW has been Chicago’s premier publication for and about professional women. It’s energetic, straightforward, intelligent and personable–just like the women featured in its pages. Sparktivity helped TCW modernize their publication by migrating their creative team from Mac OS 9 and Quark XPress 4 to a robust PDF/X1a-based workflow built on Mac OS X 10.4 clients and servers, Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 (with a focus on InDesign CS2), and centralized workstation deployment and management.

A Project in Open-Sourced Culture

In development now, K Means Black is Sparktivity’s project to contribute back to the community of creative pros who have been our customers for over a decade. A free resource about the print production process aimed at Graphic Designers, kmeansblack.com will provide a database of authoritative technical articles as well as a robust user-to-user forum for swapping tips, tricks, and troubleshooting methods.

While the underlying technology for the project’s publishing system and forum will be built on open-source software, we refer to kmeansblack.com as an experiment in open-sourced culture because our goal is to spread high-quality technical information at no charge for the betterment of the creative community as a whole. Published under a Creative Commons license which will promote the wide dissemination of its content, kmeansblack.com will fill a noticeable gap in today’s creative environment.

Custom Built Tools

Phoenix, The Mac Creative Rescue Tool

Phoenix is a troubleshooting utility created by Sparktivity that automates the process of resolving most Mac workstation OS and application issues - all in under 10 minutes!

Unlike the assortment of other Mac troubleshooting utilities, Phoenix is built to tackle the big unaddressed problem for most creative professional users - corruption of an individual application’s preferences files.

Only Phoenix removes the corruption and restores a user’s original settings for the standard and depreciated preferences file formats generated by Adobe, Macromedia, Extensis, Microsoft, and Quark products (among others), returning users to productivity in minutes on a rejuvenated workstation.

Features include:

• Can be run by an end-user with non-admin system privileges.
• Targets common Mac OS X 10.4.x troublespots like corrupted caches, repairing permissions, and performing routine maintenance scripts.
• Flushes font cache files, a common source of font issues and application slowdowns.
• Refreshes a Mac user’s preferences back to their desired defaults.
• Optional ability to restore a clean set of “universal” application preferences pre-configured for the entire organization.
• Phoenix Lite version which provides a limited feature set in network environments where Mac workstations are not centrally managed.
• Built as a Mac OS X standard Package File (.pkg), allowing techs to mass deploy Phoenix or Phoenix Lite via Apple Remote Desktop.
• Generates log file which can be forwarded to techs for detailed problem history.