We’ve been pretty busy for the past few months and that work has borne fruit with a few cool project launches. So with no further ado, here are some of the things that have been keeping us busy lately.
Peter Schiff / Wiley Publishing
For this project, we teamed up with Brickyard Partners to create the official publication and social media home for bestselling author Peter Schiff. We worked primarily with Peter’s publisher, publishing giant Wiley, to create the home for cataloging Peter’s books, television appearances, and speaking engagements.
Peter is quite the force of nature. As it says in his bio, “Schiff is best known for his accurate predictions of the performance of the stock market, commodities, gold and the dollar. He is frequently quoted in major publications such as The Wall St. Journal, Barron’s, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, etc. Schiff also makes regular appearances on television and has been on Squawk Box, Closing Bell, Fox News and other programs and has a weekly radio broadcast as well…” And rumor has it that he’s running for a Senate seat in 2010!
For this project, R.A. Ray did the design and development honors as well as the CMS integration. But his involvement began with consultation on the direction of Peter’s photo shoot for the hero image. That clear direction facilitated the tone that would drive the design effort. R.A. also incorporated a nice touch, allowing the page color scheme to match the book selected on the main page. All in all, this was another very nice project with our friend Howard Mann at Brickyard Partners.
Postal Exam.com
This project launch represents the culmination of a long-standing relationship and series of projects for a wonderful client. It is simply a plain fact to observe that Postal Exam.com is the class brand in its field. This is all due mostly to the man behind the brand, Tommy Parnell, who knows more about how the postal employment system works than do the folks who run it. Seriously, this is no exaggeration.
This project was also special for the fact that it once again brought us together with the great guys at Vector Media Group, who handled all of the backend programming for the components of this project. For our part, Angela Conlon designed the online test and user account areas, and R.A. Ray did the website redesign and front-end development. The result is a comprehensive resource for information, advice, training products, online practice tests, and overall postal career preparation.
Kids.Woot
Our work with Woot continues and they’ve made us an integral part of their ongoing design and development efforts. Following on the heels of our re-launch of their 4 primary sites, we’ve recently helped them prepare and launch Kids.Woot. This represents the fifth property and we are very happy to have been a part of it. Design honors for this one reside with Angela Conlon, who worked closely with the Woot Workshop team to realize this new Woot.
Xomba
Xomba is a community site where writers contribute articles and share in the revenues generated by their articles’ pages. It has a thriving, growing community and the articles cover an expansive list of categories.
Though we’d only be tackling the IA and visual design, this project presented some significant challenges. Nathan Ford was responsible for taking them from a stock CMS template to a highly-organized and visually appealing site, while enhancing the site’s brand articulation.
Solid information architecture work was crucial in facilitating the logical and user-friendly organization of an ever-expanding set of article categories. That work had to be translated into a manageable page architecture that also accomplished the other requirements …all within the significant project constraints. That accomplished, we turned things over to the Xomba team to develop and launch the site. Kudos all around.
More on the way
That’s it for now. Several other projects are in the works and nearing launch. So until then…
Last week we were thrilled to launch the 
In talking with Howard before working with him we found a strong kinship with his philosophy and an affinity for his approach to things. We clicked. Anyway, we’ve worked with Howard on 3 projects thus far and have thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Can’t wait to do more. On this particular project, Angela Conlon did the design wizardry and R.A. Ray worked his magic with some custom scripting and WordPress integration. Go team!
We’re excited to announce the relaunch of 
