Over the years, RA has cultivated a repository of structured content to support their mission. While the content is primarily displayed as long form text, there is a wide variety of metadata and assets associated with each piece of content. One of the primary goals of the new site was to enable discovery of new content on the site through automatic selection of related content driven by the metadata of the content the user was viewing. Additionally, RA had a future requirement for advanced permissioning and publishing workflows to enable stakeholders outside of the web team to play a role in the content lifecycle.

Drupal 8 was selected for this project based on several factors. First, its focus on structured data fit well with Rainforest Alliance’s need for portable and searchable content. Second, the deep integrations with Apache Solr allowed for a nuanced content relation engine. Solr was also used to power the various search interfaces. Third, Drupal has historically had powerful workflow tools for managing content. While these tools weren’t quite ready for Drupal 8 when we built it, we knew they would be simple to integrate when they were ready. In short, Drupal was a perfect fit for the immediate needs, and Drupal 8 met the organization’s longer term goals.
 

Getting alignment

For the discovery phase, we had some in-depth conversations with the team at Baltimore Drupal Camp about design trends on the web, and which ones we wanted to explore for this project. We decided that the designs should express both the historic and the punk sensibilities of Fells Point, the neighborhood the event was to take place in, while also paying homage to Frederick Douglass, as the venue was the great Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park.

Drupal Boh logo

Baltimore Drupal Camp had in previous years done a few mash-ups of the Drupal and National Bohemian logos in previous years (the National Bohemian logo being the unofficial logo of Baltimore), and we were excited to try our hand at it. We produced a clean, durable logo that was used in all our subsequent material and that the Baltimore Drupal Camp also adopted for use across their social media platforms. Baltimore’s own Not Mr. Boh even gave it a shout-out on Twitter.

Illustrations

In order to capture the historic and punk aspects of Fells Point that we discussed during discovery, we produced a series of gritty, vibrantly colored illustrations for use as visual assets on the site.

Site Design

Taking both the direction we established in discovery and the assets we generated, we produced a design deliverable for the Baltimore Drupal Camp website. Because the site would change so much as the event got closer (and “Submit Your Session” became “Schedule”, among other changes) we needed to deliver a wide-ranging design that would account for multiple versions of the site.

We worked with the team at Baltimore Drupal Camp while we created the designs and formatted them for handoff, enjoying a productive information exchange about tools and process while we were at it.

There aren’t enough words of thanks for Colin and Last Call Media. Amazing site design, fabulous t-shirts, awesome stickers! You are Drupal!

Liz Lipinski, Baltimore Drupal Camp

Event Material

We were thrilled to see the aesthetic and assets we generated for this project in use on event collateral on the day of the camp itself. Congrats to the Baltimore Drupal Camp on a successful 2016!

Working with PVPC 

We took the project from initial discovery and strategy through information architecture, design, and development. We were able to deliver a compelling, modern, and effective design, with PVPC’s target users in mind. Our discovery and strategy informed a new design for improved site navigation and menu structure, re-working the existing navigation system to create a more fluid experience visiting the site.

MAVCOR is a unique peer-reviewed publication and community that gathers visual culture and hosts multidisciplinary collaborations of scholars from around the globe. This necessitates a virtual space that is the only one of its kind. Previously confined to the Yale departmental design template, MAVCOR came to us to design and develop a Drupal 7 site to enhance the functionality of their user experience, robust asset management, and spotlight their obvious visual culture.

LCM partnered with the MAVCOR team to develop new and enhanced functionality to their Fellow’s Portal, Asset Management, Material Objects Archive, and Search in a visually-centric design honoring their unique and growing community.

The new MAVCOR is a literal and virtual center of publicly accessible collaborative scholarship.

We were able to deliver modern visual stylings and multimedia capabilities that loaded quickly and performed optimally, while incorporating best practices for analytics, social media integration, and search engine optimization.

In addition to informing prospective students and their families about the school, the site met the needs of other important stakeholders such as current parents, current students, alumni, faculty, and staff— each of whom had their own needs from the site. The site also housed faculty and staff human resource forms and information, serving as an intranet behind the scenes.

We worked with Competitive Advantage to update the design of their website, port it to the most current version of Drupal, and migrate away from their former eCommerce system to Commerce. Improvements to the checkout workflow were implemented, product images were updated, and full content control was given to Competitive Advantage to maintain product copy.

We were hired to build a new corporate identity package including logos, branding, a slogan, and a website.

Launching later that fall, we successfully captured the spirit of the restructured department and brought forward their mission to help inventors, artists, and forward-thinkers to access patents, copyrights, protections, and most importantly, attention to their creations.

Strategy

The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute was at a crossroads when they reached out to Last Call Media for a rethink of their web presence. Having previously based their identity around their position as an organization inside Yale, they were looking to transition to an identity that embraced the wider culture of young professionals. Last Call delivered a site design that achieved this through an open layout and bold color and font choices. We also worked with YEI to strategize a smooth user experience despite a complicated site structure, and a system of landing pages that deliver custom content based on user persona or interest.

Design

We delivered a round of style tiles to YEI depicting three potential aesthetic directions for the site. The first was conservative, being subtle in tone. The second was the boldest, utilizing a bright purple overlay on the hero image. The third was a medium between the first two, utilizing some comparatively moderate, punchy colors against an open layout.

The aesthetic in the third style tile is what wound up being selected, which we then applied to a full round of designs as shown below on the Homepage design.