Chicago Greeter
Web Application
The Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture (COTC) markets the city as a leisure travel destination, both domestically and internationally, through advertising, marketing, media relations, and public information services. Chicago Greeter is a free service that matches visitors with enthusiastic, city-wise volunteers for 2-4 hour guided visits of Chicago. The COTC team asked Mightybytes to help them create a web-based software solution to simplify facilitation of these visits.
Greeter staff came to us with documentation of their existing process, a convoluted amalgamation of faxes, emails, and printed forms on clipboards that necessitated an extensive (and iterative) wireframing process and discovery phase that took up the first few months of this year-long project. During this phase, we weighed options for development tools—Drupal vs. CodeIgniter, for instance—and defined the details of each user group and the tasks those groups must accomplish to facilitate a satisfactory experience.
We rolled the application out in three phases, each building on top of the previous.
We built this web application using CodeIgniter because of the flexibility it offered and wrote a small framework that allowed porting of data objects between each phase of development. This helped developers integrate the yet-to-be-completed site with existing processes so that the COTC could benefit from the updated public-facing portions of their software.
Chicago Greeter supports the efforts of three different user groups:
Visitors to the city can input data on their upcoming visit and interact with Greeter staff about scheduling their guided tour.
Greeter tour givers can interact with staff to manage availability and schedule tours.
COTC staff can administer numerous processes using this software, including:
The new Chicago Greeter system replaces a somewhat archaic offline system with online software that can be administered in an organized manner from anywhere, thus streamlining the tour process and saving untold amounts of time, money, and frustration.
]]>John G. Shedd Aquarium
Animation and Video
A Holiday Fantasea features waddling penguins, singing beluga whales, roaring sea lions, and acrobatic dolphins set to holiday-themed music from a live band. The show, which runs from November 25th through January 2, 2012, takes visitors through many facets of daily life at Shedd Aquarium, including scientific research, animal care and training, and what makes ‘Shedd moments’ special. For the second year in a row the aquarium creative team partnered with Mightybytes to fill their 120 foot wide screen with holiday-themed graphics, video, and animation that serve as the show’s dynamic backdrop.
Coming back to a project is always so much easier the second time around. For the 2011 show, we shot several additional greenscreen elements and created two new animated segments. Thanks to a new display system at the aquarium we were able to provide single rendered movie files rather than split movies with five pixel overlaps as we did last year. This year’s show featured a live band which made animation timing extra challenging over last year, where everything was pre-recorded.
Matting, rotoscoping, and keyframing for A Holiday Fantasea were done in After Effects using layered PSD files and rough video animatics provided by the Shedd team.
The two new animated segments include:
Last year’s show had record attendance numbers so we are confident that A Holiday Fantasea 2011 will be a big draw as well. After all, the show features Frosty the Snowman and Santa in a flying boat. What’s not to love about that? Interested in seeing the show? You can purchase tickets online!
]]>Illinois Asset Building Group
Website
Illinois Asset Building Group (IABG), a division of Heartland Alliance, is a statewide coalition invested in building the stability and strength of Illinois communities through increased asset ownership and asset protection. The IABG team came to Mightybytes to help them create a digital strategy and build a successful web presence.
We started off our relationship with IABG by offering a one-day seminar on content strategy, social media, and digital marketing. This provided a great stepping stone for helping their team understand the possibilities of what could be accomplished with a new content-managed website. From there we began our standard discovery process of defining user roles, needs, brand objectives, and so on.
The design and development teams tag teamed production of this website to be sure specs were maintained and that design integrity remained consistent with the client’s vision throughout development.
The site was built in Drupal 7 and offers the following features:
Here are some key advantages the site provides to IABG:
Chicago Diabetes Project
Website, Video, Branding
The Chicago Diabetes Project (CDP) began in 2004 and has become a marquee medical research initiative for the University of Illinois Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1935. The CDP team approached Mightybytes with the challenge of reaching a wider audience and solidifying their brand to secure better funding options in 2008 and we have been working with them ever since. The scope of our work with them has included:
Our longstanding relationship began with the fundamentals of a brand overhaul: logo mark and strategic messaging. SWOT Analysis and several in-person workshops formed the basis of a communications framework which we used to develop brand positioning statements, visual aesthetics, and an online communications plan. With a plan in place, we began implementing various strategic elements as time and budget allowed.
Logo, messaging, and style guidelines provided the first set of deliverables. We then set forth building the organization’s web-based communications hub and developing content and media elements with which to populate it.
We built two websites for CDP, both using ExpressionEngine with custom theming and functions. The first website, launched in 2008, won an American Graphic Design Award in 2009. The second site launched in 2011.
The CDP’s website serves as a collaboration tool and repository for updated information on all the important work done by members of their global community. An initial Discovery phase drove information architecture and content guidelines. We created all the site content concurrently with its design framework, allowing each deliverable to inform decisions on the next. Then, we designed and implemented a content-managed solution that could be expandable over time, facilitate donations to the organization, and support many video and rich media elements. The site also provides:
We also wrote all the content for the original website and updated the new site with keyword analysis tools. The new site is compatible with mobile devices as well.
While website production for the first site was in full swing, we followed the CDP team to a 14th century castle outside Geneva, Switzerland to cover the organization’s annual meeting. There, we interviewed scientists from around the world on new research developments and the importance of CDP’s groundbreaking work. These videos and the photos we took while at the conference became key components of the website’s content strategy.
The CDP team also asked us to create collateral materials to help them share their important work with a wider audience. The brochure we created features pockets for including a rotating array of printed materials that can be targeted to the specific needs of donors, researchers, and grant applications. It was produced in tandem with business cards that were distributed globally to all key CDP team members.
The original site was awarded an American Graphic Design Award from Graphic Design USA magazine in 2009. Tools included in the new site gives the CDP team access to critical site performance data which helps them make key marketing decisions based on performance benchmarks, a critical component of a successful online non-profit strategy.
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Arts Alliance Illinois
Web Application
Sponsored by Arts Alliance Illinois (AAI) and numerous other Illinois arts education organizations, the Arts and Education Exchange helps educators associated with 879 school districts in the state of Illinois find programs for their classrooms while also connecting arts providers and arts organizations with educators.
We kicked the project off by defining a clear list of business goals for building this robust web application. We then set about creating an extensive set of wireframes that outlined specific user task flows necessary to meet each business goal. These documents inspired a streamlined visual design that focused on connecting providers and educators while still being “artistic enough to appeal to a creative community”. With approved designs in hand, our development team set to the task of building the system.
We devised a Drupal-based solution that empowers the team at AAI to create, edit, and manage important site data and content while engaging two distinctly different audiences. Easy-to-use tools allow users to share data, build profiles, and make connections based on common interests.
The Exchange helps educators:
Arts Providers and Organizations can use the Exchange to:
A robust search tool allows users to find various criteria on:
The Exchange also yields data for the statewide arts education community so they can:
Over one hundred arts providers signed up with the Arts and Education Exchange in the first week after launch, putting the exchange well on its way to meeting an annual goal of 250 providers. Users appreciate the ability to create profiles and add programs, audio files, video, and other elements. We are partnering with other organizations to bring new functionality to the exchange and help all the organizations involved reach a wider audience.
If you are an arts provider or Illinois-based educator, you can register and create a profile on the Arts and Education Exchange at the link above left.
]]>Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Website
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) educates and organizes statewide immigrant and refugee communities on their rights and informs member organizations, news media, and the general public about immigrant and refugee contributions. With thousands of pages of content on their existing site, users had little success finding the information necessary to make informed decisions on policy, research, and many programs the coalition offers. ICIRR turned asked Mightybytes to help them streamline content and improve user experience overall via a website redesign.
The primary business goals for the new ICIRR website were:
To meet these goals we kicked the project off with several work sessions to flesh out details of content strategy, information architecture, and user experience. These workshops included up to fifteen members from different ICIRR initiatives and occurred over the course of several weeks. The results from these sessions were:
In order to meet business goals, the ICIRR site underwent a complete overhaul from design to code. On the front end, a new interface made content much easier to find and navigate. On the back end, the old content management system was replaced in its entirety by the more flexible, scalable Drupal 6. An improved admin interface enhances the ability of ICIRR staff to spread the organization’s mission and provide resources to their user groups.
The new site allows ICIRR to easily and effectively explain the organization’s programs and benefits. The new design highlights ICIRR’s mission through news, videos, blog posts and resources, and provides a strong call to action for ICIRR’s audiences to get involved and get assistance.
]]>Turnstone Furniture
Photo Booth
Chicago Ideas Week (CIW), which took place in October 2011, brought the world’s top speakers together with Chicago’s best thinkers to create an ecosystem of innovation, exploration, and intellectual recreation. CIW talks lasted about 90-minutes featuring 2-6 speakers presenting on various themes at venues throughout Chicago during the week. Turnstone Furniture was a sponsor of CIW and Mightybytes created an eco-friendly photo booth for the event so people could share their ideas.
Purposely lo-fi and originally created for our sponsorship of the Andersonville Farmers Market during Green Week, the booth is meant to be lightweight, easily transported, and quick to assemble, making it a perfect fit for Turnstone’s show-on-the-go tour bus. For Chicago Ideas Week, we gave the booth a 2.0 upgrade, adding several pieces of hardware, a new camera, new fabric, and Turnstone-specific brand elements both on the booth and in the photos it produced.
Mightybytes team members traveled around Chicago with the Turnstone bus, setting the booth up and making sure all the pieces ran smoothly at each location. We were at multiple locations throughout the city each day following different CIW talks and presentations. Booth participants were encouraged to write their ideas on sheets of paper for use in photos, which were branded with Turnstone and Chicago Ideas Week imagery and uploaded to the booth Flickr feed on Turnstone’s website.
Here is everything we used to create the photo booth:
The booth generated 187 photos during the week and garnered a 180% increase in traffic to the Turnstone site during Chicago Ideas Week. Instant upload capabilities to Turnstone’s slideshow allowed for immediate display of booth photos on an accompanying monitor as well.
Interested in using our booth for your own event? Just get in touch with us.
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Chicago History Museum
Interactive Touchscreen Kiosk
The kiosk is part of a permanent exhibit at the museum, which hired Mightybytes to augment the exhibit’s richness through engaging interactivity and animation that plays on a large touchscreen.
In order to meet business goals, Mightybytes created an interface that:
The kiosk enables users to examine objects in the scenes and learn additional information and knowledge. The application features navigation, transitions between locations, and page animations that create a visual visit to the city’s past.
The kiosk, which was built using Flash, required robust storage capacity due to the many high quality images stored in its content. The interface, with its Romantic Period-style graphic flourishes and color palette, was designed to complement but not detract or compete with the lithographs.
]]>Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture
Website
Every October, the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events coordinate a month-long festival of workshops, tours, art walks, exhibitions, and other events that showcase the talent and vibrancy of the city’s art community. In past years, sharing up-to-the-minute information on events, schedule changes, and new additions to the line-up proved a laborious affair with their existing online infrastructure, so they turned to Mightybytes to streamline their online communications process.
With hundreds of artists and events spread over the course of an entire month, the Chicago Artists Month site required that content exist in multiple locations at once. To accomplish this, our first challenge was to organize vast amounts of event and artist-related data in a visually intuitive manner. We undertook a streamlined discovery phase thanks to clear direction from the CAM team and specific project requirements defined up front.
Our Discovery process included the following:
Having a solid process in place for deployment early on helped maintain the project’s tight schedule.
A significant portion of the site content is populated from another site, Chicago Artists Resource. Integration of content between the two sites enhances user experience and allows users to enter content only once rather than in each individual location. We implemented a content tagging system that allowed individual events and entries to be included in multiple categories.
]]>School of Rock
Franchising Website
School of Rock consists of 75+ locations across the United States, a number that is growing rapidly. To meet the ever-evolving needs of a company in growth mode, Mightybytes built a standalone site that clearly communicates costs and benefits associated with becoming a School of Rock franchise owner and walks potential candidates through the application process.
Based on design standards defined by School of Rock’s corporate site and the company’s brand book, the franchising site serves a different audience than the corporate site and as such was approached a bit differently. Custom wireframes and architecture documents helped us keep content organized and presented in a visually appealing way that makes most sense to users. This was similar to the approach we took for building out the corporate site. For the franchising site, however, we also offered users the choice of taking a more linear step-by-step approach through content with tools provided in the sub-navigation.
The site has the following features:
The site sits on the same Drupal foundation as the corporate website and uses about 100 open-source contributed and several custom modules, as well as a variety of different JavaScript and jQuery libraries, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Hubspot for inbound marketing. Future feature implementations include support for mobile devices.
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