We’re thrilled to be a part of making London a better place to live and work. We just launched Team London for the Greater London Authority (GLA). This site is a custom installation and is based on our award winning Cities of Service Online Network—a white labeled, simple to set up, turn key solution for cities around the world to encourage and increase service and volunteerism in their local communities.

Team London makes it quick and easy for Londoners to give their time, find volunteer opportunities and do great things for their city. Whether it’s cleaning up the environment or volunteering at one of the capital’s great events, Team London mobilizes the community spirit and enthusiasm of Londoners to make a difference.

Team London will not only serve as a great resource for local organizations and volunteers to come together and do great things for their city but will also be a great tool for the City of London to engage its citizens to make a difference in areas where the city’s needs are greatest—safer neighborhoods, environment, and arts and culture.

On a personal note, the entire team is quite fond of London and we’re happy that our first sizable international project is with a city we adore. Go London!

Read more about Team London at Third Sector.

Team London from Mayor Johnson’s office:

Happy to announce that NYC Service is a 2013 Webby Awards nominee in Government! We’ve always been firm believers that this website has changed the way New Yorkers interact with their community, fellow citizens, and government. After hurricane Sandy, NYC Service was instrumental in getting NYC to some semblance of normal. They have been working so hard these past few months…I’m glad their office is getting the attention it deserves.

We thoroughly enjoy working with them so this nomination is icing on the cake. Do us a favor and please vote for the project for the People’s Choice Award.

We worked with 50CAN, an educational advocacy organization, on a mobile-responsive, multi-site solution for their state field offices. The project is a cost-effective, tailor-made solution that allows them to spin up a new member site with options for customization. 50CAN works in several US states including Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and expects to expand to other US states.

Each site features school and district report cards. There, one can search for an individual school or district and visually see strengths and weaknesses. Letter grades are assigned for certain metrics like student performance and achievement gap. For this, we used Google Charts.

The graphic design for the project was handled by House9 Design.

We’re happy to welcome Richmond, CA to the Cities of Service Network! I grew up in Concord, about 25 miles away. Richmond organizations: register and submit volunteer opportunities!

We’re excited to be involved in NYCxDESIGN (“NYC-by-design”), NYC’s inaugural citywide event to showcase and promote design of all disciplines. NYCxDESIGN will run later this spring from May 10-21, 2013. I don’t think we ever can have too much design in this world so any event/gathering that recognizes design’s economic relevance seems like a sound decision. NYCxDESIGN will coincide with the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

We launched the website last week on Valentine’s Day. NYCxDESIGN’S brand was created by the talented folks at Base Design. We’ve been wanting to work with them so this project was a great meeting point.

See you all at a NYCxDESIGN EVENT! News & Blog roundup about NYCxDESIGN:
Press Release issued by Speaker Quinn
NYCxDesign on FastCompany
NYCxDesign in the New York Times, February 13, 2013
NYCxDesign on mocoloco

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Photo from Children’s Aid Society

We’re happy that 1 of our dearest clients has reached a record milestone.

….a record number of volunteers engaged through NYC Service (1.7 million).

Read more 2013 State of the City accomplishments.

We’re on our 4th year of engagement with NYC Service, making them 1 of our long-standing clients. Congratulations NYC Service!

Nothing to do with interface design at all. Creative and lovely nonetheless.

Dear igloo maker: you put a smile on my face.

Queerskins is the result of a recent collaboration that I embarked on with Illya Szilak, a physician, blogger and author. Queerskins is a multimedia novel that creates a layered experience of memories out of sounds, images and video. It aims to add depth and dimension to what is traditionally a linear genre.

Illya describes the project—“Queerskins explores the nature of love and justice through the story of a young gay physician from a rural Midwestern Catholic family who dies of AIDS at the start of the epidemic. Images of the mythic and the everyday, the sacred and the profane, from banal vacation footage to vintage burlesque, interact rhizomatically with text and audio monologues to subvert preconceived notions of gender, sexuality, and morality.”

It’s been a lot of hard work but also a ton of fun working with Illya. Personally, I was very interested in attempting to allow readers to experience a novel in a new, multidimensional way. The traditional media (paper and print) through which we consume our novels has been around for generations.

I believe it is still a compelling way to read, it creates intimacy and a personal connection with the book’s characters. However, computers and their digital interfaces let us add a new dimensionality to the characters that just wasn’t possible before. Instead of a carefully planned prescription created by the novel’s author, hearing the characters’ voices, seeing their surroundings and experiencing the written word as we chose to do it, adds context and a deeper meaning to the traditional art of literary prose.

Check out the interactive experience at queerskins.com and Illya’s Huffington Post article about it.

We’re all working from home today because of hurricane Sandy. So far, it’s very windy from my apartment in Greenpoint. I fear that some of the beautiful trees nearby around McCarren Park will come down.

On Friday, we launched The Details for Radius/TWC. It’s the fourth website in a series of websites we’ve launched for them. Like any successful title sequence designer would do, we wanted the look and feel and interaction of the site to entice a potential viewer to watch the film. We composed the site as a series of layers. We hand-drew key elements from the film and adjusted photo stills from the film to reflect the dark “everything is not what it seems” nature of the movie. This parallax site is mobile responsive.

We’ve recently started an exciting working engagement with RADiUS/The Weinstein Company. RADiUS is a new film distribution label within The Weinstein Company.

In a short period of time, we partnered with them and launched three film sites: Bachelorette, Solomon Kane, and Butter. All films were pre-released on demand which makes incredible sense. I’m surprised more films don’t do this. Usually on Friday nights, I’m so pooped from the week that an on demand movie is sometimes the most I can do.

The schedules for these film websites have been “ASAP” so the process has been accelerated compared to a typical project. After watching the movie, we pow-wow about the visual and interactive direction and come to a loose agreement about the general direction. We’ll do some quick sketches on the whiteboard and then hit the computer. We go with our first intuitions and gut…this process has been a good way of moving forward fast, informed and confident.

All sites are built using the responsive design techniques provide an optimal viewing experience across any device.