Penelope Illustration, 2010

Friend and frequent collaborator Penelope Dullaghan wanted a fresh, ever-simpler redux of her minimalist and popular personal/professional/portfolio site. With her elegant designs in hand, we developed a lightweight custom theme revision that sharpens the focus on Penelope’s prolific and varied work.

Sidelight: As mentioned on her blog, Penelope is the featured artist in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Communication Arts magazine. Check out the interview and image collection in a bookshop near you!

A reading trail is a set of books linked in an interesting way—it might be a journey through the underworld of crime thrillers, a tour of the books that influenced Milan Kundera, a professor’s introduction to French existentialism, or anything else you can think of, serious or whimsical.

Unique to Reading Trails, these trails intersect: you can find new books to read by skipping from trail to trail — from organizing theme to organizing theme. It’s like browsing at the library, except that next to every book on the shelf are other books by the same author, and from the same period, and with the same mythological characters, and that your favorite author was also influenced by, and with whatever other shared characteristics readers have chosen to highlight as they create their trails.

To create their vision, Nathaniel and Nick called in logo and icon design from our frequent collaborator Penelope Dullaghan, gathered structural and programming advice from lead Utopian.net developers, and incubated the project through the design and build phases at Utopian.net Labs.

We’re happy to see Reading Trails fly off into the world, and we hope you’ll stop by their site, or check out the Reading Trails Facebook group, for more info or to join up with this close-knit and cultivated group of passionate readers.

The new Scott Hull Associates site

Scott Hull Associates is a respected representative for a varied and lauded stable of talented artists. When Scott and Co. needed a site that would deliver more control to each of the artists they represent, we worked from a beautifully simple design by our frequent collaborator, and Scott Hull-represented illustrator, Penelope Dullaghan. With Penny’s gorgeous look-and-feel, user interface collaboration by the brilliant Josh Sears, and lots of input from Scott, his staff, and their represented artists, we crafted a new site with a new look, powered by a multi-user site manager in the form of WordPress-µ.

It’s open-source foundation software that can empower many team members — and, with commenting and RSS syndication throughout, associates outside the team — to contribute and craft their corner of the site into their best face forward for the organization. We tried to build Scott’s vision of the most immediate, informative portfolio preview in the business. As each artist grows their sample work and their blog in the new format, we hope the site will be almost like a sit-down interview with an artist you might hire for your logo, brand image, or design project.

Each artist is master of their sub-section of the site, making the portfolios, blogs, and creative notes there direct, personal, and fresh. With so many striking personalities, styles, and subjects on display, it’s easy to browse the new Scott Hull site like a collection of awesome personal blogs, a comfortable yet vibrant and evocative atmosphere for prospective clients to get to know the artists they’ll work with.

Scott additionally contracted Utopian.net for training and support to help get the artists started with the new site and tools. We produced a number of custom screencast video tutorials for using the browser-based visual editor to keep portfolios updated, and other basic tasks. While similar to our progressing and publicly-available WordPress Video Guide series, these videos include details of the portfolio/gallery management features, admin panel extensions, and plugin functionality adapted or created specifically for scotthull.com.

Congratulations to Scott and everyone at Scott Hull Associates on the launch, and many thanks to them and their awesome lineup of some of the industry’s brightest talents for making this such a fun and creative project. We’ll continue to work closely with Scott and his team after the launch, too, helping to keep email, web traffic, and application data flowing smoothly throughout the Utopian.net-hosted Scott Hull Associates Internet presence.