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.

Google

SimpleBits has worked with Google on two small projects. In September of 2005, we designed two, small icons for their newly-created Blog Search. These icons would further assist in results filtering by searching a specific blog, or showing all posts from a particular blog. The style of the icons was to fit into the overall Blogger site design, where earthy tones and thick, rounded strokes are found throughout.

While the scope of this project was rather small, we feel that the inclusion of these icons will make the world a far better place than it was.

Later, in March 2007, SimpleBits worked with Google’s AdSense team to design new concepts for it’s popular text advertising modules. We delivered several concepts, with the goal being to freshen up the visual appearance of the ad modules, alll the while maintaining the ability for site owners to customize the color pallete of the links and surrounding design elements. You’ll now notice our “little rounded tab” design all over the web, where crafty, semi-transparent PNGs were used to enable color swapping to match any 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

TravelPost

TravelPost.com puts relevancy into travel advice with journals, blogs and clean-and-fast information about cities, hotels, etc. SimpleBits was contracted to redesign the logo, giving more proper emphasis on the site’s focus. In addition, we helped refine the site’s interface with re-usable styles and friendly icons.

Rollyo

Rollyo (short for “Roll Your Own Search Engine”) enables the concept of a personal search engine — load in a list of favorite sites to create a “searchroll” that can be used to target search a specific subject. The site also allows you to share your searchrolls with other users.

SimpleBits handled both the logo and site design for Rollyo, turning the “rolling” and “targeted search” aspects of the site into a friendly, colorful mark.

Flexible site templates were created that borrowed the rounded feel of the logo, while at the same time accommodating varying amounts of content and data. This is not just another search engine, but also a community resource for sharing the best destinations on the web.

The goal was designing an environment that’s clear, easy to use, immediately understandable, and fun.

Odeo

Odeo is a one-stop-shop for creating, listening and subscribing to original audio content, or “podcasts”. The site makes it easy for anyone to explore and publish audio content on the web, utilizing fresh colors, simple iconography and fast, flexible standards-based designs.

SimpleBits had the pleasure of working with founders Evan Willams and Noah Glass in creating the visual design for the Odeo site and blog, as well as the initial XHTML and CSS templates that were based on the three actions: Listen, Sync, Create. The Odeo team could take these designs, add to them, extend them, etc. within their fantastic Ruby on Rails framework.

With a friendly, adaptable, sleek design, Odeo users can find interesting audio, sync it with their device, comment on channels and shows, and eventually create their own podcasts.

Related Notebook entry

Cork’d

Cork’d is a free service for wine aficionados, allowing members to review, share and discover wine. Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin launched Cork’d publicly in May 2005. It was later acquired by internet wine star, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Dan Cederholm designed Cork’d from top to bottom, including logo/branding, illustration, icon and interface design, as well as XHTML/CSS development. The site was expertly programmed from top to bottom by Dan Benjamin using Ruby on Rails.

The goal of Cork’d is to bring wine to the everyday person — to remove the snobbery often associated with the world of wine. The result is a fun, playful, easy-to-use site that’s enjoyable to explore and offers a service that focuses on community for keeping track of and discovering new bottles.

The design’s goal was to bring a readable, flexible and bulletproof resource to wine fans. Bottoms up.

ESPN

SimpleBits was contracted to redesign the search results pages for ESPN.com. A stronger, more cleanly organized design was the goal, while allowing for several new features to be added to the functionality.

A tab navigation system powers the toggling of the search query between ESPN, Web and eventually other channels. Player and team “modules” were designed to be stylish, yet flexible with an unpredictable amount of content contained within.

The entire design was built with web standards — valid and lean XHTML markup, along with CSS providing 100% of the design details. This enables users of all types of browsers, devices and software to be able to access ESPN’s powerful search. The pages are also scalable, in that low-vision users are able to “bump up” the text size of the page, while the design remains intact.

In addition to the Search results pages, a “Most Searched” mini window was designed to match the results — and was linked from the ESPN.com home page.

Along with the new design, an icon logo treatment was developed to further brand ESPN’s search across the site and other media. This icon would influence the rest of the section’s look and feel.

Related Notebook entry