Select Examples and Methodology

Rebecca Malamud-Evans is one of the earliest practicing web designers on the Internet, publishing her first website for a client in 1991. Designers from that era gain insight into elegant and functional design solutions that work over unnecessarily complex architectures. She has experience on many large-scale web projects, building components or directing creative, as well as creating complete websites.

Below is a very short list of recent and relevant projects. See Projects for more best practices and work in progress.

Save Our Lighthouse 💡❤

"Save Our Lighthouse" is a microsite for the Cape Blanco Heritage Society to help save the Cape Blanco Lighthouse, a historical treasure on the Southern Oregon Coast. The site lays out the situation concisely for the audience and informs supporters of the lighthouse on how to get involved. It features photography by the lighthouse docents in the Cape Blanco Weather Station Archive plus links to an interactive map of lighthouses all over the world to put things in perspective. Work in Progress. [Visit Website]

Cape Blanco Heritage Society

The Cape Blanco Heritage Society's website was redesigned to have a more flexible architecture, a responsive design (for mobile devices), and to appeal visually to modern sensibilities without sacrificing the sense of history. An animation of Darren Evans' murals provided the perfect touch. [Visit website]

Soulpie.TV

Soulpie.TV was created in 2018 and was a perfectly executed example of brand identity across web and print media (view our beautiful autographed poster). It even won an award — http://sixes.net/soulpie-winner.png! Unfortunately, the band broke up shortly thereafter. 😔

Rural Design Collective

The Rural Design Collective was a mentoring program sponsored and organized by Point.B Studio (2006-2018). Currently, it is in hiatus, however we have hopes to start it again someday as time, funds and tenacity permit. 😃 You can read more at https://sixes.net/allnewrdcHQ/rdc-rnd-lab.htm. Also, here is one of our favorite photos of the Cobwebs Crew just because — https://sixes.net/allnewrdcHQ/assets/IMG_9201.sm.png ❤

New Artists Productions

New Artists Productions is our favorite youth theater group ever. We were quite fortunate to build their website during our mentoring program. You can watch a video about that here: https://vimeo.com/392373395.

The New Artists Productions Website was created during The Rural Design Collective Summer Mentoring Program. Above is a prototype built in GIMP designed by participants in the program. The project page is at https://sixes.net/allnewrdcHQ/new_artists.htm and you can see the resulting site at http://newartistsproductions.org

Melkite Eparchy of Newton

The Melkite Eparchy of Newton contracted Point.B Studio to create the graphical interface for this iOS app as a visual complement to their website, also designed by Point.B Studio (the initial visual design by Point.B Studio has changed since. The content and website structure remains). The website project encompassed a wide range of publishing solutions, including designing a cohesive identity for all print materials and automating publishing processes using tools such as PrinceXML. The iOS app was developed in a virtual setting in Xcode and distributed OTA.

A World’s Fair For The Information Age

The 1996 World’s Fair was a major undertaking which involved book design, print collateral, a web site and CD rom. It has the distinction of being one of the earliest websites on the Internet that indeed still works (described as "probably the most advanced webpage of that year")! — https://www.404pagefound.com/2009/05/31/internet-1996-world-exposition/ 😃 NOTE: For some reason, Rebecca is not mentioned in the design credits for this project. (Complete project page coming soon with proper attributions).

MORE STUDIO VINTAGE: Early websites for the Duke Ellington Society of New York, Ella Fitzgerald Tribute, and RETRO Magazine all designed in the early 1990s.

Specific Web Techniques

The following examples were coded entirely in HTML and CSS (and minimal JavaScript in some cases) which remains the nuts and bolts of any well-designed website.

The Thing System

This website was built entirely in fundamental web markup languages. The design is responsive and requires only one set of files to be viewed on mobile and desktop devices. The color wayfinding system was designed to be modular so new sections could be readily added as the developer docs were written by the engineering team. Point.B Studio also designed the user interface toolkit for the steward working with JavaScript guru Danny Goodman remotely (we also worked with Danny on his Spam Wars launch). The user interface toolkit was constructed so that anyone could design their own UI for the system.

This elegant table cataloging specific things that compatible with the system is noteworthy (uses JavaScript for the sorting feature): http://thethingsystem.com/dev/supported-things.html. All icons and graphics were designed by Point.B Studio: http://thethingsystem.com/dev/things-at-a-glance.html

Public.Resource.Org

Point.B Studio designed website templates to facilitate construction of this website in addition to custom-designed pages. Some noteworthy designs are below:

View this design as code here.

View this design as code here.

... and About Our Website

This sandbox is a work-in-progress experiment to catalogue our 35+ years of internet design work. We will begin with adding detailed pages outlining our most recent projects first and add additional project pages over time. Thank you for your interest. ❤

The new site is built entirely in Markdown using a rapid deployment framework affectionately called Hugo. We decided to use it for our “Design Sandbox” due to its flexible structure and extensible framework and quite frankly we are weary of all of the security issues involved with other popular CMS platforms. Because this is a static website, much like good old-fashioned HTML and CSS, it isn’t prone to all of the problems with malicious hacking and continuous upgrades. We love learning and working with intelligent new technologies vis-a-vis The Rural Design Collective in its heyday. 🔗

The 351-Building Centennial Poster. 🏠 🏡

More projects are described here. (Contact us for a full reel as we continue to work on documenting historical projects).