Pictured above, clockwise from top left: Heather Marold Thomason, Kristen Carlisle, Lan Lam, Brad Thomason
Now, back to work.
homies
Fancy Things
Fancy things are happening within the walls of operation Bad Feather.
Here’s a taste. A type exploration by Lan Lam:
Another Good Egg
Just a few weeks ago Lan Lam joined team Bad Feather as our newest design intern. Lan is a recent grad of the Graphic Design program at SVA and we’re loving having her around. This lady is full of clever ideas, has terrific design sensibilities and perhaps, most importantly, fits right into Bad Feather DJ rotation. When she’s not at our studio Lan can be found making Chai and practicing her latte art.
Bring the Noise
We are psyched to announce a new site we built for 1928 Recordings, a Brooklyn-based record label helmed by Ryan McReynolds. Designed in collaboration with our friend Sohrab from Shadowless Kick, 1928recordings.com features a catalog of the label’s releases, listings for upcoming tour dates, and label news and info, all editable by 1928 Recordings (thanks again, WordPress). The online store was built separately using the new White Label service from Insound.com.
For the WordPress nerds out there who might be curious, we used GigPress for the tour listings, Cleaner Gallery and Shadowbox for the image slideshows, Audio Player for the audio samples, and Viper’s Video Quicktags for the video embeds.
Stefan Rules!
We recently completed StefanRules.com, a portfolio site for our friend and occasional design collaborator Stefan Lawrence. The site, designed by Stefan, is built in WordPress and takes advantage of its built-in gallery functions, albeit with a little tweaking and jQuery magic, to create a pretty cool, custom portfolio theme (if we do say so ourselves).
Here are a few of its snazzy features:
- Thumbnails images of featured galleries get pulled into the home page.
- Each gallery section has a sliding exhibition of design projects and details, accompanied by a numbered navigation system. For this we used the excellent jQuery plugin jQuery Cycle.
- An accordion navigation on the left that expands the work section and subsections. While we’re in the habit of sharing, we chose this plugin to accomplish this.
- And, of course, a blog; this is WordPress after all.
A Passport to Learn Money
Our friends over at Skill-Life Inc. launched their first product this week – the Beta version of CentsCity, an online world packed with games that teach teens and tweens financial skills as they earn rewards from their parents, teachers, and out-of-school providers.
We were happy to work with Felix Lloyd and crew again to design both print and online elements to support the launch of CentsCity. Bad Feather created the CentsCity “passport”, which players receive via snail mail when they sign up. The passport comes with a set of stickers kids can affix to pages for banking, investments, charities, rewards, and general progress as they play online.
We also teamed up with our pals at Dtek to design and develop the container site, CentsCity.com, to house the game, which was created by 360KID. Check it out and invite some youngsters to Learn Money! Earn Rewards!
Fresh Meat
We’re excited to welcome Katie MacLachlan to the Bad Feather clan!
Katie is our new design intern and will be working with us in the studio for the next 3 months. This talented lady is a recent grad of the MICA graphic design program where her work was included in Ellen Lupton’s Graphic Design: The New Basics and she also played an active role in campus sustainability. We think she’s a total catch and are excited to put her skills to the test.
For more fun facts about Katie and her portfolio of work, check out ktmac.net.
Emily Heller Photos
Emily Heller is a friend and photographer who recently relocated from Brooklyn to San Francisco to pursue an MFA (sniff, sniff…). Emily’s work, both commercial and fine art, is food photography and she sure does make tasty pictures. We recently completed a new portfolio site to promote her work and we’re happy to see she’s utilizing the WordPress platform for blogging and regularly adding new images to her portfolios. Check it out for yourself.
We also need to give props to Emily for the photography of the print pieces in our Bad Feather portfolio. Thanks for making our work look so good!
Dtek Collaboration: GPII.info and Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identitfiers
About a year and a half ago, our pals over at Dtek Digital Media launched a site for VUHID (Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier). Since then, a parent company GPII (Global Patient Identifiers Inc) has been formed to sponsor and promote the VUHID project, the goal of which is to make universal healthcare identifiers a realistic solution to the current healthcare system crisis we’re facing in the US.
We worked with Dtek to develop a logo for GPII and update the existing VUHID logo and website design to create a more consistant visual identity. You can check out the website and learn more about the VUHID/GPII project at gpii.info.
KNOCK KNOCK!
Out first Bad Feather promo finally hit mailboxes last week. Want one?
Sign Up! (while supplies last)
Conquering PopSci.com’s Best of What’s New
Recently Bad Feather undertook an ambitious project in partnership with Dtek to build the PopSci.com 2008 Best of What’s New microsite. We worked within an incredibly tight timeline and wrangled a massive amount of editorial content, but the biggest challenge of this project was to build the microsite and integrate it into PopSci’s highly customized Drupal content management system.
Brad worked on the site front-end development with Andy Hieb, who contributed to his Drupal expertise to design the microsite CMS architecture and theme customization. The site launched on November 10th, check it out!
On press with SwaySpace
Earlier this summer we began working on a design and printing collaboration with Patrick Fenton of SwaySpace to develop some of the new Bad Feather print collateral. Fellow residents of the Old American Can Factory, SwaySpace is a letterpress printing and design shop.
The process was a fun experiment, together we developed a series of patterns for the backs of our business cards as well as a design for an inaugural Bad Feather postcard mailer. Printed on duplexed sheets of 130# Mohawk Superfine cover stock, they’re incredibly dense and thick enough to do some damage. Check us out, rolling the press one day when we stopped by to check on printing progress.
Be sure to ask us for your very own Bad Feather business card from the six piece set, and join our mailing list to recieve our kick-ass mailer. We should also give props to Rolling Press who printed our Bad Feather stationery stickers and mailing labels. Get em while they’re hot!