The Local Wisdom Blog

Last week I mentioned that we were gearing up to launch a new version of our portfolio. I’m delighted to announce that it’s live.

We strive for unique yet usable designs, and our portfolio is no exception.

I’m going to discuss intentions, and one of the unique features of the portfolio, but nothing can replace browsing it for yourself.

Now serving skimmers and readers

A lot goes into a web project. So naturally we have a lot to say about each project that we highlight in our portfolio.

The design needed to give a quick overview for skimmers, while allowing more curious readers the opportunity to learn the details of each project.

A new take on the Modal Box

Each portfolio item has clear thumbnails of the website that can expand in our take on a modal box.

Modal boxes typically lock-down the whole website. Why should you lose your navigation because you are looking at an image?

We also aren’t big fans of having to close a modal box just to reopen a new one.

We solved these problems by lighting up the navigation, keeping the navigation active, and adding image changing functionality.

The result is a better, more usable modal window.

Feedback

Let us know what you think. Feedback is very important to us, and we gladly accept it in any flavor (good, not-so-good, or ugly).

info@localwisdom.com

Wrap-up

A lot of LWers put a ton of effort into improving this portfolio, and localwisdom.com in general. In particular, RJay and Melissa poured themselves into this project. I speak for everyone in the Local Wisdom family when I say, job well-done.

Now it’s time to start thinking about more improvements.

You love working with Local Wisdom.

You also know we have the best talent in the great State of New Jersey.

Now you can help share us with the world.

I’m pleased to announce the Local Wisdom Referral Program (Sorry, no fancy acronym).

The Referral Program is pretty simple:

Tell people about Local Wisdom. For every qualified lead you give us, we will give you $100. A qualified lead is an opportunity that generates a Sales Discovery Meeting. A Sales Discovery Meeting is a chance for us to meet with the potential client to learn about their needs.

If we are able to close the deal you will receive a 2% commission of the of the total project budget. This commission will be given to the referrer upon receipt of final payment from the project.

As an added bonus, you will also receive our eternal love and gratitude.

For more information view our expertise or see some of our recent work.

If you have any questions, or would like to submit a lead you can contact me at dlarane@localwisdom.com.

The Challenge
The Global Marketing Group of Johnson & Johnson commemorates the best marketing campaigns from across the global organization in the James E. Burke Marketing Awards. Several disciplines are celebrated including PR campaigns, creative, TV/Film, shopping, and more. Each year, the call for submissions takes place on the pre-awards Intranet site. Once the winners are decided, the post-awards site is developed showcasing the entries, finalists, and winners. The Intranet site launches on the day of the live event and broadcasts the winners to the world. Since 2007, we’ve developed and curated the pre- and post- awards website while other design firms such as Mother and Smith + Manning worked on the creative. This year, we were asked to take on everything.

Design
Giving award recipients the prominence they deserve, our design showcases global winners directly on the homepage. Within one click, visitors can see key information for each winner, such as video, marketing collateral, and campaign summaries. The regional winners and semi-finalists are displayed in a “ribbon” theme allowing visitors to scroll through categories and finalists. To top it off, we added a ceremony highlights page, which allows visitors to experience the awards ceremony from around the globe by browsing photography and playing video.

Develop
Once again our developers drove the project home. Utilizing CSS3 and HTML5, they created a content heavy Intranet site, which was cross-tested throughout several browsers, including antiquated versions such as Internet Explorer 6 (yes, it still haunts us). Always keeping our customers and the Johnson & Johnson IT team in the loop, our QA team thoroughly tested functionality, video players, performance, and copy – down to the trademark (™) and registered symbols (®) synonymous with Johnson & Johnson brands.  At the end of the day, the site launched right on schedule and received rave reviews.

How did it go
Needless to say, both the Global Marketing Group and IT were happy with the results. We enjoyed hearing quotes like: “You guys really knocked this out of the park!” ”It looks dynamic and sleek!” and (our favorite)  “Love love love it!”. We are already in conversations about next year.

Expertise Used
Design & Development

LWers:
RJay (Design)
Melissa (Development)
David, Tracy, Eric (Testing)
Maria (Project Management)
Derrick (Account Management)

Graphic images: homepage, winner page, category page, and ceremony highlights page.

As we gear up for the 4th season of Mad Men on AMC let’s revisit the previous 3 seasons through an illustrated flicker album by the truly artistic and comedic Dyna Moe. Check out her website no body’s sweetheart (you’re our sweetheart, love) and check out her Flicker Mad Men Illustrated photo-stream.

The new stuff coming out in Cascading Style Sheets and HTML is amazing. What required mounds and mounds of code can now be done in a few lines of text. What required graphics can not be done programmatically on the browser. Here are three great examples:

Alex Girón and his Solar System

Alex is a Web Developer and Graphic Designer out of Virginia. He is the creative director from nclude. He set out to explore the border-radius features and came up with something interesting. This working model of the Milky Way Solar system shows the planets using border-radius and their orbits and revolutions using –web kit animation properties and transform.

Jeff Batterton and his iPhone

Jeff is a User Interface designer and he’s coded an iPhone with a working world clock with NO IMAGES WHATSOEVER. Click on the image to see what I’m talking about. Its all carefully crafted markup and CSS. Keep in mind that this will only display correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Google Chrome. It seems to look fine on Safari 5, but not FireFox 3.6 (definitely not Internet Explorer).

The Challenge
Family owned and operated, West Coast Subs brings the fresh, surf style of California to Toms River, NJ. Residing next to the family’s fashion boutique, The Cali Way (http://thecaliway.com), the owners of West Coast Subs needed to focus their efforts on quickly opening two storefronts. They contacted Local Wisdom to design and develop a site boasting West Coast Subs’ fresh and healthy ingredients along with its Cali flair. Before beginning we sampled the food, and they are accurate; the food is great.

Design
Renowned for its surfing aficionados and health conscious residents, California is the true inspiration behind West Coast Subs. Our design experts were able to create a surf-style aesthetic that complements the shop’s healthy and fresh menu, while highlighting the owner’s passion for the ocean and all things surfing. We built the site using Jquery to provide users with a fun and compelling interface.

Development
Without sacrificing design quality, we were able to develop a site for West Coast Subs, which would deploy in two stages. We shared in the company’s urgency to have a web presence, deploying the first stage of the site to showcase their menu. This put West Coast Subs on the map allowing the site to begin impacting search results, maximizing its customer potential. Next, we tackled the full spectrum, rounding out the full content migration along with design nuances which speak to the shop’s surf-style atmosphere.

How did it go
Being nimble for a customer is core to our philosophy. We were able to share in the client’s urgency and launch the menu stage of WestCoastSubs.com within two weeks then complete the development of the larger site. The rapid deployment, professional design, and local buzz exceeded the client’s expectations.

LWers:
RJay (Design)
Melissa (Develop)
Derrick (Account & Project Management)

Plethora is a great source of personally curated design and art work spanning a series of disciplines. Although the best inspiration comes from the real world, this iPhone app is a great free place to see aggregated work for: web & interactive, graphic design, branding, art, illustration, photography, product and industrial design, interior design, and architecture.

Learn more from the Plethora website or download from itunes.

James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:

We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.

A while back I put together a media storage unit and posted about it.  I was asked by one of our readers to post the instructions/ blueprints so they could build their own also.  Well, what the audience wants, the audience gets, so here they are.

I’ve put the details in the images themselves to make it easy to print out.  Also I recently made 2 of these of a different width and a different purpose.  One was 30 inches wide so the shelving and corresponding silts had to be reduced in width also, but it’s easy to figure out how much to shorten them by.  The last unit I made has about 7 shelves and was made to replace a stereo rack.  Now the stereo is on the wall with all it’s cd’s, a record player and a small top shelf for pictures, but I’ll post pics later on.

If you have any questions, post a comment and I’ll respond asap

Was doing some research today on an IPad case as I still don’t have one.  The guys at the office got the Apple one, but I don’t really like it as it’s very cheap feeling, but I do love that it converts into the stand for the IPad.  So I looked at hard/soft cases, soft sleeves, folio, folio/book-stand cases and I’m leaning towards getting protection and the book-stand functionality with a few choices I’ll show here:

1.  Incase convertible book jacket – protects the IPad all the time and gives 3 viewing angles when you’re at a table.  It’s close to what Apple released, but from what I’m seeing in the reviews, it’s of much better quality and people like it.

2.  Macally Bookstand – Very similar to Apple case, but I like the color more and it fully exposes the edges of the ipad.  No reviews to speak of, so I’m hesitate to take on for the team and buy it.  The note that the IPad isn’t included is from the legal department

3.  Marware Eco-Vue -  This one is the most interesting of the 3 as it’s very slick looking, gives you the 2 bookstand options, but also throws in a hand-sleeve where you can hold the IPad like it’s a glove, check it out below:

I think the glove sleeve sells me on the Marware one, but I’m going to sleep on this on.  So these are the one’s I’m thinking about, let me know what you’ve found or what you’re using for the IPad protection dilemma.  I also found this article at PC World that discuss a bunch of companies that are creating cases/sleeve/ bookstands for the IPad, most of which I’ve never heard of.  The custom ones are pretty cool, and there’s one in there that does decals