Juxtaprose blog

We recently launched a new site for Heidi W. Durrow. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Girl Who Fell from the Sky which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. I was lucky enough to get a pre-publication edition of the book, and I really enjoyed it—it is beautifully written, with interesting characters. I look forward to its publication next February so I can recommend it to others.

Heidi also runs a weekly podcast (Mixed Chicks Chat) and a yearly festival (Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) which brings together people of mixed racial and cultural experience to celebrate with music, art, poetry, etc. And her website brings together all these aspects of her work.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with Heidi and look forward to watching what happens with her novel and website!

We’re a little late in posting about this site launch (it officially launched a couple weeks ago), but that doesn’t mean we’re not excited about it! We are really happy that we got to work with Lee and Sachi of Common Craft on their site re-design. Their old site was a blog-based site that grew into a site to house their educational videos—but it didn’t have the look and feel of their videos, and the structure didn’t support their business.

So we strategized with them not only over the design, but also the structure, and how to incorporate their existing e-commerce system into the site, without it feeling like you were leaving the site, and how to showcase the videos with all their components (transcripts, languages, licensing options and prices, etc.) without that information overwhelming the visitor.

Visually, we built around their existing logo and the style of their videos (white board with hand-drawn visuals). The home page includes a fun video carousel and we incorporated drawings from their videos throughout the site.

Jay might want to say more about the technical aspects of the build, but we worked with an awesome team in Vancouver, Outcome3, who did all the Drupal backend, while we did the UX and visual designs, HTML, CSS, and the Javascript functionality throughout the site.

We’re really happy with how the site turned out, and are looking forward to seeing it grow and learning from their videos of course! Be sure to check out their latest: Preparing an Emergency Kit in Plain English!

So Jay and I have been planning a site redesign for Juxtaprose.com for some time; we’re hoping we’ll have time this summer to do a new site.

This last weekend we were talking about how we’d outgrown our portfolio section, and wishing we’d have time to re-do it sooner, so we scheduled yesterday evening to see what we could do.

So, now you’re seeing the results. At first I was thinking it was like a botox injection into the site, but that’s kind of surgical (and doesn’t sound very nice); what I really feel like now is that we gave it a fresh coat of paint and hung some art on the walls! We’re happy with how it turned out, and it gives us a good starting place for the re-do.

So, the main thing that probably stands out is the color change. Juxtaprose has now gone through three color shifts since inception. When I first started the company (back in 2002), it was just me, and I chose the colors purple and green. You can see my first business card here:

Some time thereafter I started seeing purple and green logos everywhere (banks, employment sites, etc). So, back in 2006, we changed our colors to orange and muted red:

For this latest color shift, we choose the colors of blue and brown, which is a nice combination of warm and vibrant. We don’t have the kind of business where we feel it’s important to keep the colors as part of the brand. It’s more important for us to have something that feels modern and that we like. That tends to change over time.

I also updated the photos throughout the site to ones I’ve taken on our various trips over the last few years (New Zealand, Joshua Tree, and the San Juan Islands, to name a few). Lastly, Jay created a slideshow in our Portfolio section so that we could highlight more of the sites we’ve done recently in larger scale. We’ll be adding to that soon, as we have some great new site launches coming soon that we’re excited about.

We’re happy to announce the launch of the Training Rules website, to accompany the award winning documentary film, which is currently screening in a number of film festivals. This is the second site we’ve created for filmmaker Dee Mosbacher—in December last year, we also finished the site for Woman Vision, her film production company (our site launch announcement for Woman Vision).

Training Rules is a great documentary that “examines how women’s collegiate sports, caught in a web of homophobic practices, collude in the destruction of the lives and dreams of many of its most talented athletes.” It just won the Pink Peach award at the 2009 Atlanta Film Festival, and recently inspired a story on CNN Newsroom (”Black Eye for Women’s Basketball”). Definitely keep an eye out for upcoming screenings, if you want to catch it in the theatre, and the DVD release is forthcoming this fall.

It’s been great working Dee, and we’ve had a great creative dialog about how to incorporate and work with images from the film (and complementary imagery and design) on the website. One of the interesting features of the Training Rules website, that’s hard to see, except over time, is how the site is designed to evolve and change as the film’s lifespan progresses from pre-screening to film festivals to DVD release, etc.

We’re also doing regular updates on the site right now, as there are frequent developments with new film festival announcements, news & press, etc. Definitely check it out!

We recently finished a site for authors Carmen Flowers and Sue Bailey around their book Grave Expectations. The book has a really interesting premise: how to and what to do in order to plan your own funeral or memorial service. They’ve been getting some great responses from people who find their advice helpful and uplifting, and their book’s been called “the most entertaining funeral planner on bookshelves.” Their goal is to encourage people to laugh and have fun with it. They certainly have some fun stories in there!