XPLANE Corporate Website

URL:

http://www.xplane.com

Synopsis:

XPLANE is an information design consultancy that drives better results for many of the world’s leading corporations including Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, U.S. Department of National Intelligence, U.S. Marines, Nike and BP through visual thinking and design.

Working with the internal marketing and design teams at XPLANE, the entire website was built on the WordPress platform utilizing a custom developed theme to match XPLANE's branding. Content highlights include project case studies, company news, and an online store.

The internal marketing team handles all day-to-day updates utilizing the content management features of WordPress, allowing them to eaisly add, edit and remove all content on the website. Since the site launch XPLANE has also seen significant increase in search engine optimization (SEO) and daily unique page views.

The site is listed in the WordPress Showcase, an honor since only a relatively small number of submissions are added to the showcase.

The XPLANE e-store:

Case studies:

Company news:

To see the full site, visit http://www.xplane.com.

Project:

Leanne Marshall website

URL:

http://www.leannemarshall.com

Synopsis:

Leanne is a fashion designer who recently won season five of Project Runway - a reality competition show on the television network Bravo.

Before the show had ended and Leanne knew she had won, I was approached to help build her a new website to display her collections. I immediately asked my friends over at Transport if they would help out by designing the site.

Working with the extremely talented team at Transport, we designed and built this site in about five weeks. As Transport notes, Leanne needed something up quick, but she also needed it to last more than a season. The design works as any portfolio should: by putting the artist's work up-front and center. When a visitor comes to the site they are immediately presented with two large, randomly chosen photos from Leanne's various collections.

The entire site is controlled via a simple CMS system, based on XML files, which Leanne can edit whenever necessary. This allows her to update images, add collections, add stores and modify her bio without needing to know any technical details. For even more customization, Leanne can even control the pop color that is associated with each collection.

The site was built using the Gaia Framework for Flash, in ActionScript 3 and PHP.

You can view a video recap of the final runway show, held at Bryant Park during NYC's fashion week, which includes Leanne's winning collection here. Leanne has also recently been featured in magazines such as Dwell, and I'm glad to have been a part of her start to a successful career in fashion design.

Project:

p.i.n.k. Spirits website

URL:

http://www.pinkspirits.com

Synopsis:

This high-profile consumer site was built for p.i.n.k. Spirits -- a new premium liquor company which creates various liquors infused with caffeine and guarana. The best way to describe their product is your favorite liquor and RedBull, without the RedBull taste, calories, or color. The first product to launch is vodka, with gin, tequila, rum, whisky, sake and others to follow in 2008/2009.

Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):

- The site makes great use of a couple of open source tools: SWFAddress 2.0 and SWX.

- The site was almost 5 months in design and development.

- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end content database. Once again this made the creation of the CMS go much faster and communication between the site and CMS much smoother. SWX is also used for e-mail list sign-up, and I have released this service open source as part of the SWX contest.

- An extensive listing of drink recipes, events, and venues can be found on the site.

- A custom retail store and bar/restaurant locator was developed for the site, providing users with the distance from their ZIP code to the local places they can find pink's products. I may release this as a SWX service in the future.

- I contracted with The Bailey Group of Philadelphia, PA on this project, whose talented designers concepted the site and team was great to work with.

- A huge thanks goes out to Jason McCoskery, who again was a great partner in development and whose overall development knowledge in both PHP and ActionScript is always enjoyable to work with.

Project:

Gal to Gal Foundation Virtual Walk website.

URL:

http://www.galtogalwalk.org

Synopsis:

The goal of this project is to raise money for stage 4 breast cancer patients through a virtual 'walk'. You can join the site and donate $3 (or more) to create a 'gal' that will randomly show up on the home page as part of the walk. You can also log in after you have created a gal to see her displayed as the 'champion', up front and center. Clicking on individual gals shows who created them along with a short personal message they entered.

Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):

- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.

- The entire site was built in about 1 1/2 weeks.

- There are over 302,400 possible combinations when creating your 'gal': 2 body types x 2 skin tones x 9 hair styles x 5 hair colors x 2 expression choices x 2 expression/lip colors x 2 eye types x 3 eye colors x 70+ outfits. Trust me, this equates to a lot of assets!

- The background changes with each day as the walk progresses across the US. To see the progress, click on the map at the bottom of the site. Note that the walk starts on Oct. 1st, so until then all you will see is the warm-up (Day 0) and race start background. Click the book at the bottom right to learn about each city as the walk progresses.

- Martha Stewart has a tv show and she recorded a segment about the site that will air on her show on October 1st. Can't say I have ever seen her show, but the national TV exposure should really test the limits of SWX.

- The foundation is expecting $1+ million in donations during the month of October, so the site was optimized to handle the heavy load. It is being hosted on three load-balanced servers to alleviate the crunch times as much as possible.

- The site is built for broadband connections, so we were able to load in higher-quality (and lots of) assets. The total overall load is about 2.3 MB and then each set of assets only get loaded when necessary.

- I contracted with Curiosity Group on this project, who's talented designers concepted and designed the site.

- A huge thanks also goes out to Jason McCoskery who jumped in to help out as the timeline kept shrinking and was instrumental in us meeting the deadline.

[Update: Check out Aral Balkan's post on the project and our use of SWX as well!]