projects Archives - Bad Feather

Launch: Fraenkel Gallery Website

Nearly a year in the works, we’re pretty darn proud to be the makers of the new Fraenkel Gallery website. Established in 1979, Fraenkel Gallery is a San Francisco photography gallery that features work by artists spanning from early masters to present day, including Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many more. The gallery has also published an extensive collection of books, including artist monographs and exhibition catalogs.

In the development of this heavily customized WordPress-driven website, we explored and pushed the database capabilities to the max in order to dynamically display the gallery’s extensive collection of artist works, exhibitions and publications. FraenkelGallery.com is intended to serve as a growing archive for the gallery as well as a resource for the history of photography and its relation to other arts.

Oh, and it’s responsive! Over the past year, Bad Feather has adapted its design practices to develop web layouts that adapt and respond to the ever-increasing range of device sizes and aspect ratios. The website looks beautiful on your smart phone, tablet or desktop web browser.

Process: We Love Edging

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to use a print process we absolutely love called edging. The edges of trimmed cards are painted to add a splash of color and dimensionality. Here’s a great article that describes the process in detail.

We’ve been developing the look of the B Floral brand through a series of print marketing pieces over the past few years and we wanted to do a little little something special for their annual party. B Floral loves pink, but we chose a touch of their secondary color, green, for the edge of these gorgeous, over-sized invitation cards.

JMI approached us to refresh their brand collateral to reflect the younger and more contemporary direction of their agency. The previous stationery had entire surfaces flooded with color, but we thought edging would be the perfect nod to their bold past while establishing a sleek and minimal aesthetic moving forward.

And of course we can’t talk about print processes without giving a shout out to one of our favorite collaborators, Sarah Riegelmann, who helps us bring many of our most beautiful print projects to life.

What Does Web Design Have to Do with Farming?

Over the past year we’ve been working on a web-based project for a man who doesn’t have a personal email address and never uses the internet: our friend and farmer, Ray Bradley. Since leaving his career as a chef for farming more than 10 years ago, Ray has been profiled by everyone from enthusiastic bloggers to the New York Times (it’s frequently mentioned that he’s a childhood friend and former sous chef of David Bouley). But even with great press and a longtime, loyal community of supporters, farming is a tough gig. Ray can use all the help he can get to build his customer base and sell all the delicious produce and products he raises and then treks from New Paltz to NYC twice a week.

We began collaborating almost a year ago with Ray’s girlfriend, Iris Kimberg (who happens to be a bit of a marketing maven), to promote Bradley Farm. Starting with a coming soon site and some good old mailing list sign-up sheets at the market, we collected emails addresses and began sending a weekly newsletter. Over the past 6 months the audience has grown to nearly 500 green market customers who are receiving notice of what’s coming to market and the occasional recipe, photo, or story from the farm. Ray is delighted with the positive response to the emails and when people show up at the farm stand telling him how much they were looking forward to those strawberries or how much they loved the photos of the chicken coop, it makes everyone feel more connected.

Last month we launched RayBradleyFarm.com, a WordPress site with info about Bradley Farm and a blog that hosts both news and press. The annual farm festival is coming up and we’re experimenting with selling tickets and fundraiser raffles online and will soon be taking pre-orders for Bradley Farm pork. All of our marketing efforts have been a work in progress and the website and its content will continue to evolve as the farm and its offerings also evolve with each season. We’ve talked about setting Ray up with a computer he can check emails on from the farm, and although he’s interested, he’s in no hurry to make that leap. In the meantime, he relays the weeks’ bounty to Iris who emails it to his customers.

This was a great summer for Bradley Farm’s famous heirloom tomatoes, so we can’t take too much credit for bringing people back week after week, but we do feel a bit proud when we show up at a crowded market stall each Saturday. it’s been a rewarding experience for us to utilize new media tools to help educate people about their food and the man who works to grow it. For more info, visit RayBradleyFarm.com.

Back by Popular Demand

This past summer Sonic Union brought back their now infamous prize wheel. Another season of spinning meant team Bad Feather had an opportunity to redesign the wheel with a whole new set of prizes. We took it as an opportunity to have fun with typography and created a unique design for each of the prizes.

The 2010 wheel highlights included a dollar bill, mini bar mini bottle, bag full o’ goods from the Union Square green market and tickets to a Broadway show. Check out the the gallery of type treatments:

Email Marketing Party Magic

We had you at magic, right? Bad Feather recently had great success using an email marketing campaign to promote this year’s Sonic Union party. Maybe you’ve seen the self-mailing poster invite we created last year? We got loads of positive feedback on the design and we’re told the party was one for the record books. When we sat down to brainstorm ideas for this year’s party, the folks at Sonic Union were interested in promoting the event digitally. It is 2010 after all, and in addition to being a greener and more interactive approach, we saved some serious cash by eliminating printing and postage.

Aside from rethinking the distribution of the invitation, we wanted to design an invite to reflect Sonic Union’s industry reputation of being darn good party people. On our end the ideas started flowing with the mention of the Zoltar machine that would be one of several party attractions. We created this digital poster design that we felt appropriately conveyed 100% FUN.

The poster design was embedded in an HTML email campaign sent to an initial list of invitees. We sent this through a 3rd party service, utilizing their list management capabilities to wrangle the guest list (If you’re wondering, Bad Feather favors Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp for our email mailing list needs). The invite R.S.V.P. linked users to a custom form page which we configured to populate to a second mailing list. By R.S.V.P.ing, party attendees were automatically creating a new database of confirmed guests. As the party date grew closer, we were able to use this new mailing list to send reminders to guests and ultimately to export the names of the party-goers to a printable spreadsheet to be checked off by security at the door. It also came in handy when it was time to send some fabulous party photos.

Within 24 hours of the initial email invite, more than 25% of the guest list had confirmed attendance. We attribute this to the 2-click ease of the R.S.V.P. process (and of course to the sexy invite design). The week of the party, a reminder email resulted in more than 60% of the guest list R.S.V.P.ing, guaranteeing the Sonic Union headquarters would be pretty much at capacity. We Bad Feathers represented at this years shindig and upon arrival the place was, as they say, bumpin’.

Email marketing party magic success!

Shop Bag Online

We recently launched shopbagonline.com, a custom-themed Big Cartel store for Bag, a Nolita shop that sells gorgeous genuine leather handbags. In addition to carrying such New York brands as Tano, Sabina and Pietro Alessandro, Bag owner Sheryl Lee, recently launched her own house brand of elegant and utilitarian handbags and wallets, simply named Bag.

You can purchase the Bag house brand collection online, and view many more styles from other brands available at the store on Mulberry street.

Collaborating on JoanWatts.com

We recently developed a new artist portfolio site in collaboration with award-winning book designers, Skolkin + Chickey. We first learned about Joan Watts when our friends at Radius Books published a gorgeous monograph of her paintings. We were pleased to have the opportunity to create this minimal site design to showcase her beautiful work.

Check out JoanWatts.com.

Did Someone Say “Zoltar”?

It’s funny sometimes what sparks ideas, in this case a word.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of image referencing for a project in the works here at Bad Feather. After a good old google image search, our next favorite resource is the New York Public Library’s digital gallery. Take a look at some of the treasures we’ve dug up from the visual depths of the interweb:

(click the thumbnails to view full-size images)

A new dress for Scuola Italiana

We’ve just completed a redesign of ScuolaItaliana.org, a brochure website for Scuola Italiana del Greenwich Village. The site offers schedules and registration forms, detailed information about the school’s methodology, events and additional resources for potential and returning students. Our goal in the redesign was to refresh the school identity and to improve the overall site navigation and content organization.

Scuola Italiana was founded in 1987 and over the past 23 years thousands of students have learned Italy’s language and a deeper understanding of its remarkable culture. We wanted to create a logotype that would not only reference Italian design (yes, we used Bodoni) but that would also reflect the establishment of the scuola.

We re-purposed the majority of the content including a wonderful library of images the scuola has collected for event announcements over the years. We also based the color palette on the original website so the overall site design would be familiar to returning students. We’re quite proud of the outcome, a minimal html design that shows how pretty code can be.

Heather is a student at the scuola and Bad Feather loves Italia! We thoroughly enjoyed our research for this project. Here is a great article we stumbled across on Italian type design including a story about Massimo Vignelli smuggling Helvetica.

Young Visionaries

Do you know someone with an idea for a project that works toward a vision of change? The International Women’s Health Coalition recently launched their 2010 Young Visionaries Campaign:

At the International Women’s Health Coalition, we are inspired by the activism of young people and their visions for the future of sexual rights and reproductive health.Through our Young Visionaries contest, we aim to celebrate, acknowledge, and support the exceptional and ongoing work of young people.

Our Young Visionaries contest encourages youth to share their visions for young people and the future. Until March 25, 2010 youth between the ages of 18 and 30 can share their visions for a just and healthy life, and get a chance to win a $1000 grant from the International Women’s Health Coalition to fund a project that works toward this vision.

We recently completed a project, in collaboration with Dtek, to design a microsite for the Young Visionaries contest. Built on top of the WordPress platform already being utilized for IWHC’s Akimbo blog, the site allows users to register, nominate a contestant and vote to support their favorite nominees. You can read a more detailed write-up of the site development and WordPress plugins we utilized, courtesy of Andy, over on the Dtek blog.

Check it out and show your support for the visionaries from around the world.

Frontside or Back Bowls

Wow, this blog has gotten a bit dusty! While it’s snowing outside here in Brooklyn, we thought we’d take a moment to tell you about another little project we worked on with SKI Magazine earlier this winter…

The folks at SKI were looking to create an interactive map of Crested Butte that allows readers to follow 2 different skiers on a typical day at the resort. Bad Feather established the art direction for the project and SKI Magazine developed the project in-house. Choose an itinerary and see for yourself what the mountain and town (monster breakfast burrito?) have to offer.

A Case of Holiday Madness

The activity level at Bad Feather HQ during the month of December can best be described as elfin. Handmade activity was at an all-time high, as we all abandoned our computers and dedicated all resources to making, baking and packing for the holidays.

Some time ago we decided buttons would be the perfect holiday goody and so, this Fall we set to work designing buttons and buttons and buttons until we selected the 20 best (the 2009 holiday edition, if you will). During the first week of December, while Brad and Heather headed to Miami for a dose of art and sun (did we mention we brought back a hambone and mustache cream as souvenirs?), the ladies of Bad Feather held down the fort and made a mound of nearly a thousand buttons.

The second week of December we decided it was time to explore our stop-motion curiosity, because of course a video is the perfect way to send a holiday message to the world. We created a quick storyboard and began cutting and taping a forest worth of paper feather trees. For the next two weeks we slowly crafted our set, including an ice skating pond and airplane. In retrospect, the hours of photographing and editing that followed were nothing…

And then there was the question of what to give to our friends and family? Cookies of course! One week before Christmas we all headed home to our respective kitchens with many pounds of sugar, butter and all those ingredients that make the word a better place. We returned the next morning each with dozens of dozens of cookies, of which we ate quite a few.

And so we packed, we labeled and we mailed. We battled the local post office which twice returned our button packages (the second time on Christmas Eve!). We designed, we edited, we emailed and eventually we all headed off (just a bit exhausted) to our respective holiday activities. Perhaps we took on too much, but it sure was fun. Thanks to all who have since sent us thanks and compliments – we hope you ate your cookies, are proudly wearing some very bad buttons, and that all enjoyed our holiday video experiment. Happy New Year!

Have you heard 2010 is the year of the Bad Feather?