Charlotte Gray

Charlotte Gray explores ordinary people’s emotional and moral choices during wartime. Designed and produced for Warner Bros Pictures by Happy Cog in collaboration with NotLimited NYC, the site’s restricted color scheme and tight layout echo the bleakness and confinement of the title character played by Cate Blanchett. Its content includes streaming video and music and an in-depth tribute to little-known, real-life heroines and heroes of World War II.

Happy Cog has consulted on or created special content for Warner Bros sites including Mars Attacks, Batman Forever (1995, now offline) and Batman & Robin (1998, now offline). [Close text.]

The Marine Center

Coming soon! The Marine Center is a leading distributor of rare, net-collected fish and corals. Created by Happy Cog in collaboration with Frankensite, the upcoming site will facilitate shopping and searching and offer targeted content in a context of elegant, user-focused design and one-of-a-kind photographs. Content management tools developed exclusively for The Marine Center will help the site’s owners keep their copy as fresh as the marine livestock they sell. A Happy Cog/Frankensite-produced shopping cart and mail system will allow visitors to track their favorite product offerings. Watch this space for launch news. [Close text.]

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Fox Searchlight Pictures is a leading distributor of independent films including One Hour Photo, The Good Girl, Brown Sugar, The Ice Storm, and Boys Don’t Cry. Designed by Hillman Curtis Inc. and Happy Cog Studios, the film company’s flagship site provides cinemaphiles with extensive, insightful content by people who make and love movies. Designed for ease of use, ease of reading, and easy updating and maintenance by the client, the site loads quickly even over dialup thanks to streamlined markup and smart use of style sheets. Launched 29 October 2002. [Close text.]

The New York Public Library

Working with NotLimitedNYC, Happy Cog designed content sites for The Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library. Happy Cog also created and led a training program that changed the way The Library conceives, designs, and executes its sites. The training program covered content development, usability, and web standards.

To help The Library reach as many of its patrons as possible, design projects emphasized clear architecture, increased accessibility, and full compliance with XHTML and CSS. Happy Cog also consulted on content to ensure that text “scanned” and could be understood by non-native English speakers.

ClickOn @ The Library, an access and outreach program designed to narrow the Digital Divide, typifies and was the most successful of these projects. Within weeks of that site’s launch, the Library’s free classes were filled to capacity.

Separately, at the conclusion of the training program, Happy Cog collaborated with Carrie Bickner of The New York Public Library to author and produce the NYPL Style Guide, an online tutorial that teaches web designers and developers how to work with XHTML and CSS.

The Style Guide was intended to help shape ongoing Library web development projects, but it has also been read and used as an educational tool by thousands of designers, developers, and students. [Close text.]

GetAccess

Clear Channel Entertainment’s GetAccess is a member site for people who love live music and events. The dynamic site is customized by region, and new versions are continually rolled out to accommodate the company’s many marketing partners. Beyond GetAccess, Happy Cog designs a wide range of Clear Channel projects including co-branded efforts with American Express and Coca-Cola, and consults on branding, usability, and standards compliance issues for Clear Channel’s numerous online ventures. [Close text.]

i3Forum

New! Launched 30 January 2003, i3Forum “is a celebration of inspiration, innovation, and influence, created by Steve Broback and a select group of coconspirators who decided to gather in a special setting once a year to discuss their work and the things that move them.” The first i3Forum will be held in Laguna, California, on 6–8 April 2003.

Designed and produced by Happy Cog as a textbook example of transitional forward compatibility (accessibility, hybrid structural/table markup, XHTML/CSS compliance, minimal bandwidth, easy maintenance). [Close text.]