DESIGNSENSORY | www.knoxville.org
Knoxville, Tenn., is a surprisingly diverse community with an absorbing mix of culture, recreation and attractions, according to Joseph Nother, principal and CD of Designsensory, the firm that developed the city’s new website. “Often,” he says, “one must do a little digging to find the variety. Once found, the uniqueness of Knoxville becomes apparent.”

In creating the site, Designsensory was challenged to replace the legacy content management system with something completely new and custom built. “The previous implementation did not provide a great deal of information the further you went into the site,” Nother says. “We revised the architecture to accommodate fully editable pages for all tourism partners and vendors. Now, every destination, attraction, event and location has a page of information beyond the secondary listing pages,” such as those for “Museums” or “Outdoor.” Yet while the new site offers much more depth of content, Designsensory went further, re-envisioning the site’s design language around two themes: “Uniquely Knoxville” and “Seek and Find.” What Nother describes as a “hard-edge collage language” allows visitors to experience the diversity of the community and piece together a unique experience for themselves.

The standards-based code is clean, making the site search-engine friendly and easy to maintain, he says, but “the informational and editorial content is its raison d’être.”
Tom Biederbeck

WORLDWAYS SOCIAL MARKETING | www.e-worldways.com
Worldways Social Marketing is a community of socially responsible professionals committed to making the world a better place. Working exclusively for socially responsible organizations, what they do for clients is decipher their challenges, connect them to their proper constituents and cultivate their ideas.

“We want the Worldways website to be as accessible as it is informative,” says copywriter Adam Cote. “The work we do is often based in a lot of weighty health behavior research and social change theory, but the point of it is to help people live better lives. We want laypeople and literati alike to walk away from our site knowing that our clients do a lot of good for a lot of people.”

Highlighting the work of their many clients on the website, Worldways plays up the concept “We Take Sides” in content and design. To that end, the firm developed a two-panel approach for layout, offering lots of text, for people who like to read, and lots of graphic elements, for those more visually oriented. “Something unique about our site,” says Cote, “is that we have real-world examples of how social marketing has helped make people and populations healthier.”
Dana Rouse

GRZEGORZ KAPIAS | www.grzegorzkapias.com
Although his site serves as a showcase for client work from recycling firms to real-estate brokers, it will probably come as no surprise to Grzegorz Kapias if most visitors are drawn to the numerous websites he’s designed for films. Especially for English-speakers, it’s fascinating to see how movies like Crash (Miasto Gniewu) have been portrayed in his native Poland.

The large volume of projects exhibited on his self-promotional site are presented in a rolling gallery that can be halted with a click to examine an item of interest. This opens a window with a larger view of the project and a link to the actual site. The manner in which the work is presented, however, is to Kapias just a means to an end. “In this world full of images and signals, I’m trying to draw attention to interesting content transfer, with pervasive and intelligent humor,” he says. “My aim is to create innovative projects which are unique and absorbing.” Consider the goal accomplished.
Tom Biederbeck

METHOD | http://fest07.sffs.org
With 2007 marking the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco International Film Festival, the organization’s website is a fount of information, offering much more than just listings of venues and show times. Method was given the challenge of emphasizing the festival’s big 5-0 in all media pieces while retaining its dynamic, energetic and progressive persona. “To emphasize the nature of the anniversary,” says project manager Alicia Bergin, “gold takes its place at the core of the color palette, directly contrasted with a vibrant, deeply saturated hue of magenta.”

All of the showcased films are presented in depth with synopses and director bios. For film festival buffs, the juicy content elevates the site to spine tingling from merely informative. The site, explains art director Sean McGrath, “echoes the design motivation and direction for the overall festival: to be innovative, modern and forward-thinking while also honoring and respecting the great heritage of the festival’s past.” With so much to present, function and usability took precedence over any particular artistic sensibility. “We strove to balance the need to drive and facilitate festival attendance,” says McGrath, “with the desire to create a rewarding visual experience celebrating the significance of the festival’s golden anniversary.”
Dana Rouse

ADAMSMORIOKA | www.mohawkpaper.com/via_site/index.html
“Anything that uses a talking horse to show you your paper selection can’t take itself too seriously,” says executive creative director Sean Adams of the website AdamsMorioka designed for Mohawk Paper’s Via line. However, this tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek approach was a seriously strategic way to transmit a whole lot of information to a particular audience.

Via is a high-quality, high-value, sustainably manufactured paper that comes in a dizzying array of colors and finishes. The site is structured to direct newly minted designers—“Who come out of school not knowing anything about paper,” according to Adams—to the paper they need, by asking a series of simple questions in the purposely clichéd argot of yesterday’s youth culture … and then having a horse, squirrel, dork or slacker provide the perfect paper solution. “All these companies that are trying to market to young people fall on their faces by trying so hard to be cool and ending up with things that are laughably uncool,” he says. “So we just made it laughably uncool ourselves so they know Mohawk is in on the joke.” The site’s hyper-saturated colors correspond to printed materials. “It’s really difficult to talk about paper online,” Adams notes, “because it’s a tactile object. So instead of using print to drive people to the web, we’re using the web to drive people to print.”
Laurel Saville