Focus: Design

This includes freelance client work as MartinKelley.com.

Apr 27

Future of Quaker media at Pendle Hill next month

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I’m part of a dis­cus­sion at the Pen­dle Hill con­fer­ence cen­ter out­side Philadel­phia next month. Everyone’s invited. It’s a rare chance to really bring a lot of dif­fer­ent read­ers and media pro­duc­ers (offi­cial and DIY) together into the same room to map out where Quaker media is headed. If you’re a pas­sion­ate reader or think that Quaker pub­li­ca­tions are vital to our spir­i­tual move­ment, then do try to make it out.

Youtube, Twit­ter, pod­casts, blogs, books. Where’s it all going and who’s doing it? How does it tie back to Quak­erism? What does it mean for Friends and our insti­tu­tions? Join pan­elists Charles Mar­tin, Gabriel Ehri and Mar­tin Kel­ley, along with Quaker pub­lish­ers and writ­ers from around the world, and read­ers and media enthu­si­asts, for a wide-ranging dis­cus­sion about the future of Quaker media.

We will begin with some wor­ship at 7.00pm If you’d like a deli­cious Pen­dle Hill din­ner before­hand please reply to the Face­book event wall (see http://​on​.fb​.me/​q​u​a​k​e​r​m​e​dia). Din­ner is at 6.00pm and will cost $12.50

This is part of this year’s Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions con­fer­ence. QUIP has been hav­ing to re-imagine its role over the last ten years as so many of its anchor pub­lish­ers and book­stores have closed. I have a big con­cern that a lot of online Quaker mate­r­ial is being pro­duced by non-Quakers and/or in ways that aren’t really rooted in typ­i­cal Quaker processes. Maybe we can talk about that some at Pen­dle Hill.

Mar 15

Tract Association of Friends

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Tract Association of FriendsThe Tract Asso­ci­a­tion is ven­er­a­ble Quaker pub­lisher dat­ing back to the early part of the Nine­teenth Cen­tury. They had a web­site but wanted a new one built with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that would allow for eas­ier edit­ing. The new site is built in Word­Press. Befit­ting the organization’s ethos, the site is rel­a­tively plain but there’s a lot going on under­neath the surface.

Many peo­ple use the site to print out copies of the tracts. There’s a spe­cial print stylesheet–created by the tem­plate designer and cus­tomized by me–that means print-outs of these pages will be very clean and unclut­tered, per­fect for per­sonal pho­to­copy­ing. There’s the abil­ity to make tracts avail­able as PDFs through Scribd and there’s a inter­face in the Word­Press dash­board to allow embed­ding of these in the sidebar.
Jan 07

Discover Thyself / Earlham College

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Discover Thyself featuring the Discern-o-Matic QuizDis­cover Thy­self is a “dis­cern­ment” site for Quaker teens. Spon­sored by Earl­ham Col­lege, it fea­tures resources, videos and the all-new “Discer-o-Matic Quiz.”

The design is all orig­i­nal. We went through six rounds of the con­cept design mock­ups made up on Adobe Fire­works. Because the site is built on Word­Press used as a CMS, Earl­ham Col­lege staff was able to add and arrange con­tent even before the design cod­ing began. The site uses the excel­lent The­matic theme, a blank tem­plate that allows for quite sophis­ti­cated designs using Action Hooks and com­plete CSS markup.

The most excit­ing ele­ment of the site is the “Discern-o-Matic” quiz, which takes users through a series of ques­tions. At the end the ques­tions are reor­ga­nized and pre­sented to the user to help them under­stand what it is they want to do. The quiz is pow­ered using the open-source LimeSur­vey. Results are out­putted via a cus­tom PHP script that polls the LimeSur­vey data­base and out­puts in a nicely-worded and for­mat­ted Word­Press results page. The tem­plates for Lime Sur­vey were altered to mim­ick the look of the rest of the site; the aver­age user won’t notice the pass-off from Word­Press to Lime Sur­vey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, indi­vid­ual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invited to share their results page via Facebook.

Visit Site: http://​www​.dis​cover​thy​self​.org

Dec 15

Catherine Lockwood MFT

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Catherine Lockwood, MFTCather­ine Lock­wood is a ther­a­pist in the Los Ange­les area who had built a site in the since-discontinued Google Page Cre­ator ser­vice. It had a nice design but she could never get her domain point­ing to it and she was frus­trated that Google had closed the ser­vice. She wrote me say­ing “I would like to have a web­site address that WORKS. I have never been able to give any­one my address because appar­ently the address is not con­nected to my web­site. So instead I have to tell peo­ple to google me!“

We rebuilt Catherine’s site using the ever-trusty Word­Press. The col­ors and con­tent were brought over into a fairly stan­dard design. And now Cather­ine can print Cather​ine​Lock​woodMFT​.com on her busi­ness cards!