Archive | Projects RSS for this section
Jul 14
2008 

Streetfilm about Bastille Day

 

Bastille Day on Smith Street is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s great fun: the streets are closed, sand is trucked in, and a giant Petanque tournament is held.  But the tournament is just an excuse to be there: the real fun is the great food & drink put out by Bar Tabac and other neighborhood restaurants, live music all day long, and hoards of neighborhood folks who come out to spend the day lounging in the streets.

This year, Nick Whitaker from Streetfilms and I spent the afternoon filming the event, and the result is the Streetfilm you see above.  Can’t wait until next year!

More on this year’s event from Pardon Me for Asking and McBrooklyn.  Also, I heard a rumor that there’s a time-lapse video of the setup, event, and tear-down from a few years ago that I’ll try to get my hands on.

Jul 12
2008 

New TOPP Website

Over at The Open Planning Project, we’ve always had a bit of a hard time explaining what we do.  That job just got a little bit easier, with the launch of the new-and-improved TOPP website last Friday.  Reactions from within the staff have been remarkably similar: something along the lines of “Phew, now I can finally tell people what the heck it is we do here!’.

Kudos to Vanessa, Jackie and Cholmes for distilling a lot of information about our various projects and goals into something remarkably coherent.  I’m proud to work at TOPP, and now I have somewhere to point people when I want to show it off :)

Jul 10
2008 

Slip-n-Slide Photo Gallery

A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework, but could easily be adapted to work with others.

More info, download & demo

Enjoy!

Jun 5
2008 

Coming soon… The Livable Streets Network

For the past several months, my coworkers and I over at The Open Planning Project have been hard at work on an important redesign and new product launch. I’m now excited to say that the final launch is, ahem, days away.  Streetsblog and StreetFilms have been hugely popular since they launched two years ago, making an impact here in NYC and beyond, and developing a great community of readers.  The Livable Streets Network, as we’re calling the new, unified effort, intends to take this to the next level, by providing more online tools and new opportunities for collaboration.

We’ve code named the project “Woonerf,” which is dutch for “a street or group of streets where pedestrians and cyclists have legal priority over motorists.”  It’s an apt title indeed for a group of sites that aims to unite and motivate citizens across the country who want to make their cities more comfortable, livable, and sustainable.

While we’re not quite ready to flip the switch, we do have a live demo that folks can check out in the meantime.  If you’d like to see it, just fill out this short form, and we’ll send you a link.

Expect more soon as we approach the launch.  Here goes nothing…

May 23
2008 

Taking it to the streets

(ok, I obviously need to work on less cheesy headlines, but for the moment…)

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of accompanying TOPP’s latest hire, Kim Wiley-Schwartz, on a pilot session for her new Livable Streets curriculum.  She’s developing an education program around Livable Streets that’s debuting in several NYC public schools this spring.

This week’s session took two groups of students from PS 87 (1st, 4th, and 5th graders) out into the neighborhood to do streetscape observations (“do you see a bike lane?,” “do cars slow down at the speed bump?”) as well as radar gunning on Columbus Avenue to gauge traffic speed.  Obviously, radar gunning was the more popular activity, with all the kids clamoring for a turn with Transportation Alternatives‘ Nathan John (above).

This is a really exciting new program, and it was great to see how tuned-in little New Yorkers already are to the urban environment around them.  Go get ‘em Kim!

May 22
2008 

Wanted: Awesome web designer

TOPPHere at The Open Planning Project, we are currently looking to add to our talented design team.  If you’re a web designer with visual design talent, rock-solid production skills, and a strong intuition for user experience, we want to hear from you.  Download the full job description.

Life is good at TOPP — we work on really cool projects and have an amazing team, plus nice perks like five weeks paid vacation and lunch every day.  We’re a “dot-org”: a new kind of non-profit that feels like a dot-com startup.  If you’re interested in working with us, let us know.

May 15
2008 

Streetfilms: Diverter

Elizabeth Press over at Streetfilms has been producing awesome stop-motion animations recently. The latest: Diverter. This short video shows how diverters can be used to redirect traffic flow and make intersections more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists.

This is a great follow-up to Clarence Eckerson’s epic Berkeley Bike Boulevards video, showing some of these ideas in practice.

Elizabeth has also done stop motion films on chicanes and raised crosswalks.

Apr 13
2008 

Welcome to the Undesign

Over the past two years, I’ve redesigned this website about 5 times, but never finished. Talk about frustrating. Eventually, I realized that I was getting nowhere, and that instead of a redesign, what I really needed was an undesign. So that’s what I did. Welcome to wrkng -1.0, my first undesign. Lately I’ve been getting the blogger’s itch (is that like athlete’s foot?), so this undesign is more blog-oriented.

Maybe one day I’ll get around to making an Actual Design, but I have a feeling this will suffice for a while. If you like it, you can download the Undesign WordPress theme. As you can see it’s pretty simple, and there are some known shortcomings: no support for pages (in terms of navigation), and support for tags but not categories. Basically, what you see here and nothing more. Enjoy!

Sep 21
2007 

Carbon Tax Center Redesign

Today, we launched a redesign of the Carbon Tax Center website. The primary goal was to create a more impactful homepage that communicates CTC’s mission quickly and clearly. In doing so, we also reworked the site header (to remove distracting and unncessary graphics), and crispened up the typography.

CTC has been getting a lot of attention [links] lately, and it will be really interesting to see how this issue grabs the presidential candidates. Good luck, guys!

Jun 22
2007 

The Professional Basketball Players at Make Music NY

The Professional Basketball Players were happy to be part of Make Music New York yesterday, the first incarnation of this international music festival here in NYC.

We had a great time playing at the Liz Christy Community Garden on the Lower East Side — thanks to everyone there for having us, and to everyone who braved the rain and stopped by to listen.

The folks from StreetFilms were at our show, and they included us in their video montage of the event:

Also, special thanks go to Adam Bradford, who filled in on guitar since our new guitarist, Ben, was out of town yesterday.

« Newer Entries
Older Entries »