web Archives - Page 2 of 2

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.

Stefan Rules - Home

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.

SKL_pass_cover

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!

SKL_centscity

Announcing (drum roll)… the all new PoetryProject.org

Bad Feather is proud to introduce the new identity and website of The Poetry Project.

Located at St. Mark’s Church in NYC, the Poetry Project has been publishing, hosting readings and workshops, and providing resources for writers and readers of contemporary poetry for over 43 years. They needed an updated identity and site that looked beyond their rich history to their future as a vital arts organization.

The new logo is composed of a brush-lettered scrawl projecting in a megaphone shape. The colors are bright and bold, like the character, present currency, and dynamism of the organization itself. We hope the new identity communicates the voice of the Poetry Project:

…The most important thing that we do is present… Without listenership, readership, AUDIENCE, the Project wouldn’t exist for the luminaries to do their thing.

We built the site in WordPress (as code is poetry), allowing the Project to post content on a regular basis in various types, including calendar events, photos, audio, and video from events, historic archives and news. The Poetry Project hosts many events, so a calendar function was a big priority. For this, we used the plugin Event Calendar 3. (Other plugins used, if you’re curious: Contact Form 7, Audio Player, Smart YouTube, WP Super Cache, Cleaner Gallery and a few more. We went plugin crazy on this one).

The site also features a store to sell, among other things, membership to the Poetry Project and subscriptions to their publications. We used Big Cartel for that puppy.

We’re psyched about the results. It’s been a true labor of love. Take a look.

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.

Join the Chorus

Join us tomorrow night for the record release party of PT Walkley’s new album, Macy Wakes Alone, at the Blender Theater in NYC. The album will be performed in its entirety, complete with string quartet, pedal steel, saw playing, harp playing, flutes, horns and choirs and you’ll be humming the stick-in-your-head songs for days. Don’t miss this show, tickets are available online.

In the meantime, you can listen to Mr. Macy Wakes Alone using the interactive song book we created at ptwalkley.com, and read what the press has to say about the album on PT’s blog. Hope to see you there!

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!

Making websites with Dtek

Last August, Brad and I met developer Andy Hieb at a lunch with some friends in Seattle. It’s now been nearly a year that we’ve been working together with the fine men of Dtek Digital Media, co-founded by Andy and Rhys Daunic in 2000. As they describe themselves, “We are media buffs who believe in the democratizing potential of the Internet and digital technologies”.

What began with some identity and branding work for their web clients, has grown into a partnership between Bad Feather and Dtek to design and build websites. Dtek’s experience in development and coding, focus on usability and accessibility, and fondness of web standards and Free and Open Source Software is the perfect compliment to our own skills and goals as makers of fine websites. Some of our recent projects include Skill-Life, Seattle Performance Medicine and RxCreative.

Check out Andy and Rhys’s other project to promote youth media literacy, themediaspot.org