We recently worked with Bad Feather to help Paula Murray Cole and the folks at rasaboxes develop a web site for building community around their innovative performance technique.

What is “rasaboxes”? I’m not a dancer, so i’ll quote from the new web site:

Devised in the 1980s and 90s by Richard Schechner, rasaboxes offers performers a concrete physical tool to access, express, and manage their feelings/emotions within the context of performance. Useful as performer training, rasaboxes also has many other applications in various fields including (but not limited to) therapy, business, and education.

Paula and co are off and running at rasaboxes.org, managing all of their site content and developing their membership. The site is built on WordPress, features informational, news, and “members-only” content, as well as tying-in to rasaboxes’ existing mailing list and donation services.

The site is rasaboxes.org.

We built a web site for the Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier project (VUHID; pronounced “view-hid”) a year and a half ago. Since then, Global Patient Identifiers, Inc (GPII) was formed as a parent company for VUHID.

Working with Bad Feather, we created a new identity and logo for GPII, updated the VUHID logo for visual consistency, and reworked the web site to be the combined home for both GPII and VUHID. See the new GPII identity, and the latest on the VUHID project, at gpii.info.

Through VUHID, GPII hopes to improve healthcare through a slew of benefits to all the related stakeholders, while taking privacy concerns very seriously.

Keep up the good work, GPII!

Earlier this year the Popular Science web site was rebuilt with Drupal to much fanfare within the community. The new popsci.com is an example of how Drupal can perform at the “enterprise level”, and I think it’s fair to say that the site set a new gold standard for Drupal. So, I was thrilled to recently have the chance to work on the 2008 Best of What’s New “microsite” for popsci.com — BOWN is an annual event for PopSci, but obviously this was the first time it was built on Drupal.

I was working with Bad Feather, who had a contract with the Bonnier Corporation, publishers of Popular Science, to develop BOWN 2008. The project had to come together fast, but thanks to the hustle of Heather, Brad, Josh and I, and the PopSci editorial and technical teams, we launched BOWN 2008 on-schedule within the existing Drupal framework.

Obviously the heavy development work was already done thanks to the excellent existing Drupal site, but we had our work cut out for us adjusting the Drupal configuration, modifying the existing theme, and managing all of the BOWN content. On the Drupal side, we used the expected Drupal pillars: CCK to create a new content type for BOWN and make some small extensions to a few existing content types to hook into BOWN; and Views to create all of our custom node lists. On the theming front we created new page templates and theme functions to make BOWN match the graphic design spec we were given, including BOWN navigation, block and ad placements.

Check out the write-up of the original Drupal migration for background, then dig in to BOWN 2008!

Dtek is excited to be working with a new partner! Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team Heather Marold Thomason and Brad Thomason, AKA Bad Feather, provide graphic design and web development services focusing on brand identity, print work, and Adobe Flash.

Bad Feather’s services are the perfect compliment to our own, which are focused on non-Flash web development and coding, usability and user experience consultation, and web-specific graphic design. They’ll also help us keep pace on the web development front as The Media Spot continues its exciting work.

Bad Feather’s web site is on the way. If you’re curious in the meantime, check out Heather’s previous company, HM Projects.