Design: Projects for your pleasure

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).

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.

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. Soft-launched 29 October 2002 with some tweaks to come.

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.

The Web Standards Project

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) helped end the Browser Wars by encouraging Netscape and Microsoft to support the same technologies, aka “web standards,” such as CSS, XHTML, and the W3C DOM.

Happy Cog designed the original (1998) orange site whose bold minimalism inspired as many detractors as imitators. In ’98, most sites were a hash of deeply nested tables, stock photos, bandwidth-hogging image maps, invalid HTML, and tortuous strings of proprietary code. Many still are. The orange site was stripped-down, forceful, fearless, and standards-compliant. It was visual punk rock, an entirely appropriate look for an angry organization that sought to change the web — and succeeded.

The site has been lauded in design books including Web Style Guide (Yale University Press) and Great Web Architecture (IDG Books). Happy Cog’s Zeldman co-founded WaSP and has served as Group Leader since January 2000. See the Publications page for more about the group’s achievements, goals, and plans.

Jazz Radio

JazzRadio.Net pumps modern and classic, melodious jazz across the Internet and over satellite airwaves 24 hours a day from its home in Berlin, Germany. Produced by Happy Cog in 1999, the JazzRadio site was designed to facilitate easy and constant updating by its owners and managers. In addition to streaming MP3 stereo, the site offers rare concert photographs and biographies of jazz artists, webcams and 360° views of the station and its DJs, local Berlin jazz scene listings, and much more. Certain presentational aspects of the site’s design are outdated by our current standards, but after three years of daily change JazzRadio is still going strong to the joy of fans worldwide. We believe JazzRadio to be the first global jazz brand on the web, and it’s still the one with the most heart.

A List Apart

A List Apart (ALA) is a weekly online magazine “for people who make websites,” designed, produced, and published free as a public service of Happy Cog. In addition to providing a steady stream of well-written tutorials and opinion pieces, ALA is a strong voice for web standards.

The site’s minimalist, content-focused layout approach and usefulness as an educational resource have been cited in books including Fresh Styles for Web Designers (New Riders 2001), Web Redesign: Workflow That Works (New Riders, 2001), and Web Hits (Agosto/Design Exchange, 2000), among others.

In February 2001, A List Apart converted to CSS-only layout to separate structure from presentation, reduce download times, streamline production, and (it was hoped) inspire others to benefit from web standards and browsers that supported them. Encouraged by this action, hundreds of independent designers and developers converted their sites to CSS layout.

Read by over 65,000 designers and developers each week, the non-commercial site is written by the community it serves. Out of five billion sites on the web, Alexa currently ranks A list Apart at 32,300. See Publications for more.

The Ad Store, Inc.

From 1998 to 2000, Happy Cog designed, produced, and created much of the content for the website of The Ad Store, Inc., an international ad agency with a downtown, storefront attitude. We enjoyed tremendous creative freedom on this account, and are still rather fond of the old site in spite of its tiny text and framesets, which we would consider liabilities today.

The Ad Store has since developed sufficient in-house firepower to do its own web development, but we continue our friendship with this client, a New York neighbor whose street smarts, business sense, and flair we admire.