News Archives - Page 4 of 5

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

The Fruits of Our Labor

Recently Bad Feather had an opportunity to design a wine label! James Benedetto of Scotto’s Wine Cellar in Carroll Garden is releasing his ’05 Benedetto Blend and he came to us for assistance. The design was inspired by the wine-stained, handwritten label stuck on a sample bottle from winemaker, Tony Coturri.

The Coturri vineyards are sustainably farmed, the grapes are hand harvested and the wines are hand crafted. The limited production of the Benedetto Blend 2005 is a bold, earthy wine that will compliment hearty peasant food well. We’re finding the wine and the label very appetizing!

BF_benedetto

Fresh Meat

bf_katie_card 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.

Balls, Rooftops and Wares

A lot is happening as summer gets under way here at the Old American Can Factory, (although you’d never know it’s summer with day after day of rain). This past weekend was the opening night of Rooftop Films, and Sunday we visited the inaugural Market where there were many beautifully designed, handcrafted and delicious wares to be had.

The previous Saturday the Can Factory hosted and collaborated in the NY Architectural League’s Beaux Arts Ball, this year titled “MANUFACTURE”, and it was quite the production. A factory of makers in the garage were silkscreening, sewing, headdress crafting, letterpress printing and so much more. We participated in open studios during the event and were delighted to have partygoers, guests and fellow Can Factory workers stop by to check out our work and load up with Bad Feather promos. Throughout the night we snacked on tacos, dosas and delicious ice cream served from various carts and installations in the courtyard and washed it down with frosty beers. When all the making and tasting and showing was done (we loved watching Lite Brite Neon bend neon), we closed our doors and joined the crowd for one hell of a dance party til the wee hours of the night. Thanks to our special guests and everyone who stopped by to say hi.

Emily Heller Photos

EH website

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!

Playtime with Sonic Union

These invites are hot off the press and we couldn’t wait to share…

Our pals over at Sonic Union are preparing for a launch party to introduce their newly founded audio post company to industry friends. We created this self-mailing poster as an invitation to the event in their amazing new space where they record, mix and – ahem – PLAY.

SOU play poster

Website and Music Survey in the Hunt for an Assistant

We’re tackling some great new projects here at Bad Feather and March (like April thus far) was a very busy month. In an effort to manage our schedules and work flow, keep organized and maintain communication in the midst of all the design and development to be done, we set out to hire a studio assistant.

To help narrow down our search for candidates (our initial posting brought in more than 250 applications in just over 48 hours), we asked the following questions: What are your 3 favorite websites? What music are you listening to right now?

A pool of truly talented applicants emerged in the hunt, many of them listing some of our personal faves like boingboing.net and designobserver.com, and it seems everyone and their mother loves the new Animal Collective album and the “Dark Was the Night” compilation as much as we do. We were surprised by how many people responded with such obvious and uninteresting answers in the website department like google.com and craigslist.org (where they found the posting), but a few gems were also brought to our attention, such as (you’re welcome for sharing) sleeveface.com and scanwiches.com. kristen

And who, you might ask, did we chose? The lovely Kristen Carlisle who listed brooklynvegan.com and the new Lily Allen album, “It’s Not Me, It’s You” among her faves. Kristen most recently worked as an account strategist for Google before joining us here at Bad Feather and has quickly fit in taking turns as a featherriffic DJ while wrangling our projects and studio into order. We’re already beginning to wonder how we ever got along without her.

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.

Radius Books in the Bad Feather library

Big thanks to our pals over at Radius Books who have so generously gifted 5 (!) of the Radius titles to our Bad Feather Library. We received a big ol’ box of books a week or so ago containing Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations, Charles Arnoldi, Mark Klett: Saguaros, Lee Friedlander: New Mexico and John McCracken: Sketchbook.

Radius profiles awe-inspiring work of individual artists and photographers. The books are designed with impeccable attention to detail and craft; printed and bound they are objects of beauty to behold in and of themselves. It would be difficult to say which book is our favorite, although Lee Friedlander’s photographs spark our New Mexico nostalgia with each turn of the page.

radius_books

You can buy Radius books for your own library through their online store. If you’re the type to try before you buy, I recently spotted the Julie Blackmon and Lee Friedlander titles at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in NYC.

KNOCK KNOCK!

knock knock card

Out first Bad Feather promo finally hit mailboxes last week. Want one?