Helsinki Design Lab launches "Dossiers"
We just helped the fine folks at Helsinki Design Lab launch a major new piece of their site: Dossiers.
From the HDL blog:
We needed the ease of use of a blog, where content is stored in a database and easily manipulated, with the flexibility of a sketchpad, where the presentation is freeform and maleable. And since this is a tool that we intend to use in the daily course of HDL's work, it needs to have a sense of history as well. It needed to be able to keep track of time by allowing versions which the user can then "scrub" back and forth between.
Helsinki Design Lab in the press
The local press in Helsinki, Finland have taken notice of Bryan Boyer and the launch of Helsinki Design Lab.
From We Are Helsinki:
Designer-architect BRYAN BOYER, originally from California but now settled into Helsinki, is puzzled by the misuse of terminology. "Strategy often gets mixed up with planning. To be strategic, you have to also make difficult decisions and produce results," ponders the Harvard graduate, who has been working on Sitra's Helsinki Design Lab project since the fall of 2008.
Read the rest here.
Helsinki Design Lab Launches
It's been a busy time here at XOXCO. I am very happy to announce our second launch of the month, Helsinki Design Lab. It was our first time working with an organization on another continent, but HDL's Bryan Boyer and his nightowl tendencies made it easy for us.
HDL's mission, in part, is as follows:
We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working - we call it strategic design.
HDL is collecting case studies of strategic design projects to be featured on the site and at their conference later this year. Applications for inclusion to HDL are accepted through the site.
We wanted the website to do justice to the beauty of HDL's identity and collateral, so we partnered with Andy Pressman at Rumors Studio, who did an excellent job of creating the website's design.
We're especially proud of bringing to life the special features around the site:
- Subtle animation effects in the case study and around the site highlight portions of the content.
- Case studies "come to life" as they are created using the submission tool thanks to tons of fancy CSS and jQuery magic.
- Each time the page is loaded a randomized version of the logo appears!
- "Exquisite" PDFs are generated through a custom javascript-based pagination function.
- Behind the scenes, all of the editorial tools feature autosave!
Of course, PeoplePods is providing the community components necessary for running the intense multi-user creative and editorial process Bryan and his internationally distributed team use to craft the case studies they feature. Thanks to Bryan, Andy and their teams for their hard work on this!