Work

Outbrain

Under the direction of Jason Santa Maria, SimpleBits designed the logo for Outbrain. We also handled the HTML, CSS and JavaScript development for Mr. Santa Maria’s designs.

Wikirank

Dan Cederholm worked with Small Batch, Inc. on the design (logo and interface) of their first project, Wikirank: a tool for exploring and comparing what’s popular on Wikipedia.

Rogue Amoeba

SimpleBits worked with Rogue Amoeba, a company that creates award-winning audio software for the Mac, to redesign their website. Beginning with markup & style wireframes, a new template structure was designed to focus on each product and drive downloads and sales. Streamlining the interface with attention to typography and a simple grid vastly improved the readability of the site.

Rogue Amoeba were wonderful clients. Smart Mac people creating awesome software tends to help. Anyone dealing with audio is advised to check them out and download some of their offerings.

Sphere

SimpleBits worked with the team at Sphere to redesign their corporate site. A refocus on the various products Sphere offers was the goal of the effort, while highlighting the partners and rapid growth the tools are enjoying.

MTV

SimpleBits worked with MTV.com between April 2007 and December 2009 to create the XHTML templates and CSS that powered redesigns of their various properties.

Prior to that, as part of an all-Flash redesign in October 2006, SimpleBits was contracted to help construct an underlying XHTML/CSS version of MTV.com for Flash-less browsers and devices.

The shiny new version of the site required the latest-and-greatest Flash plugin, and MTV.com found it important to leave no one behind. Readers who hadn’t upgraded to the latest version of Flash would still receive the site’s content, identical thanks to transforming the same XML that drives the Flash version into nicely formatted XHTML/CSS templates. In addition, search engines would better index the site’s content and Flash-less browsers and devices would benefit as well.

SimpleBits applauded MTV’s decision to put resources behind a unique hybrid design. From MTV-designed templates, Dan Cederholm worked with the MTV.com team in creating the working XHTML and CSS that powered the alternate view of the site.

AIGA

In March of 2007, AIGA (the professional association for design) relaunched with a shiny new design by Happy Cog. Dan Cederholm had the pleasure of taking Jason Santa Maria’s brilliant designs and turning them into semantic XHTML and CSS templates that could be plugged into a custom CMS built by Thirdwave (AIGA’s technical partner). Magic and fun ensued.

One could (and should) study Jason’s molecule-level of detail in typography (using just two web fonts and a splash of Interstate via the venerable sIFR). It was a fun challenge getting things right using CSS to create lean, flexible templates.

Congrats to AIGA for renewing their digs with a smart, readable, beautiful design — and a big thank you to Jeffrey, Jason and Happy Cog for partnering with SimpleBits on this.

Read more about the redesign:

• Jeffrey Zeldman: Happy Cog redesigns AIGA
• Jason Santa Maria: AIGA Redesign
• Happy Cog: AIGA Website Redesign