The Intern Part Two

With only fifty five minutes left as an employee of the Royal Order, I feel it appropriate to leave some parting thoughts.

I’ve not posted here in some time — the Tutor/Mentor Connection Project took over my workdays with increasing determination, right up until the end. Although the site development is still up in the air, I’m quite proud of how the project has turned out. The site looks great, if I say so myself, and is certainly the most stylish, navigable, and unambiguous nonprofit site I’ve seen throughout this process. What an upgrade from the current version of tutormentorconnection.org! It’s fantastic that (eventually) my work will actually be used by real people to satisfy their needs. That the site aims to improve the lives of impoverished children only adds another level of reward to this project.

Read On

Aug
28
Posted by
Mendelsohn
Filed Under
People, Projects
2

Client Side CMS

The technology is clearly ahead of its time. But a new client side CMS named firerift has my attention.

fire1

At first glance, Fire Rift is impressive. The CMS has set out to make life easier for developers by only managing your content via the CMS. No more hacking of your html and css to fit the limitations of your CMS’s templating system (often archaic and completely different across various other CMS’s.) With Fire Rift, you cut and code your psd and let Fire Rift take care of the content via css class names or javascript.

Photos of the interface after the break

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Aug
28
Posted by
Garrett
Filed Under
Technology
0

Lies for Leo

When my son Leo was born, my then neighbor – artist Mike Lash – decided to create a series of paintings based on some of the not-quite-facts that adults tell children to help them make sense out of the universe. He called the series ‘Lies for Leo’, and asked me to design the accompanying book. Mike’s style is intentionally child-like and so I decided to adopt the board-book format, similar to the ones I read to Leo before bed… over… and… over. Here are some photos from the current gallery exhibition in Hong Kong.

exh_1

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Aug
10
Posted by
hogan
Filed Under
Exploits, People, The Daily
0

Optimizing Destination Kohler

With marketing budgets tightening and full-scale site redesigns becoming somewhat less frequent, we are seeing a growing number of clients that wish to make changes opting for optimization. Whether the site was originally developed by The Royal Order or not, we are being tasked with modifying the experience based on changing business requirements, user feedback or performance metrics. Such was the case with Destination Kohler.

User feedback collected from online site surveys indicated several flaws in the home page architecture of both Destination Kohler (Wisconsin and St Andrews) sites that made it difficult to access specific content. Featured content tiles were not self-evident and in many cases redundant with global navigation. Secondary and footer navigation needed to be reorganized, and the page needed to be optimized for search engines and tagged with Omniture code.

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Aug
07
Posted by
hogan
Filed Under
Design, Technology
0

Ballhawks Bobbleheads

Mike Diedrich was one of the founding members of the Royal Order, and still a close friend and colleague who now works full time producing TV spots for Ogilvy — our benevolent landlord. A long time Cub fan, Mike decided to make a documentary about the guys that hang out on Waveland Avenue wearing baseball gloves, hoping to catch any balls that make it out of the park. In the nearly six years that he has been working on this beast, Kyle and I have contributed when time allowed — Kyle with writing, shooting and editing, me with titles, web design and art direction. It’s an awe-inspiring labor of love, and should be amazing to finally see it on the big screen.

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Aug
07
Posted by
hogan
Filed Under
Design, Projects
0