Artgig Launches Turtle Pond Website Portal

When we first sat down with Craig Hatkoff and ESI Design at the Turtle Pond Tribeca offices over a year ago to discuss the Turtle Pond family of websites, miza.com, owenandmzee.com, knute.com and now winterstail.com, one thing became abundantly clear – they needed a central web location to link the family together and a general hub to broadcast news, provide resources and sell their products.

And, in keeping with Craig’s dynamic personality, it needed to be flexible so Turtle Pond could update news and events on the fly in a number of categories.

And it had to be modular and ready to expand, as the ever-growing Turtle Pond family continues to branch out in new areas of story and product development.

We think we’ve accomplished all of the above in the new Turtle Pond Website Portal.

The Classroom is awaiting some final adjustments before we open it up but the News categories are live and the Store is open for business.

Read all about it:

Turtlepond.com

Chris Tarry Includes Artgig In His Plans For World Domination!

He's at it again.

Our musician-slash-author friend, Chris Tarry has gone and written a book, "The Wedding King of Vermont," and we've created a companion website to go with it.

There's no limit to the madness of Tarry–he's even gone and recorded original music in the voices of fictional characters from the book. Crazy.

Unfortunately, we can't show you the website just yet because you need a special decoder ring to get in and he's only giving the ring to hand-picked prospective publishers. So, you'll have to take my word for it, the "Wedding King of Vermont" Drupal site is dope. Or better yet, take Jim's word for it, because he's the guy laughing his ass off with Chris in the trenches.

And if you don't believe Jim, well, there's always the man himself...

"When I needed a company to invent a hilarious, easy to navigate, functional, and fictional world for my novel "The Wedding King of Vermont", I called the Website Kings of New York—Artgig. No one does it better."

–Chris Tarry

A quote that good deserves to be big.

Thanks, Chris–now go sell that book!

Mars Attacks!...Australia

Lis sent these pics of the dust storm in Sydney - she says it's red all the way to Canberra.

Artgig Launches Psynergy.org Website Redesign

It's always nice when our hard work finally gets to see the light of day–I'm sure the good folks at Psynergy, a California-based community living solution for individuals with psychiatric problems, will agree.

And I'm sure you'll agree this isn't your typical bare bones institutional website.

We designed the new site front to back, so Psynergy can showcase their different options for community living at three unique locations–each with specific content detailing the services offered.

This site is deep!

We made a real effort to balance all of the information in design with the generous use of images from the actual programs and properties. Believe me, Psynergy has been working hard to make sure there is no shortage of information for people seeking out community living options in the San Francisco Bay Area and California's Central Coast.

The entire site is backed by our custom CMS so Psynergy can manage their own content and update their website as needed.

Check it out:

Psynergy.org

Winterstail.com Joins Turtle Pond Family

Miza.com, OwenandMzee.com and Knute.com have a new aquatic cousin–Winterstail.com, the latest website to join the Turtle Pond family.

After working on webby award winner, Miza.com with our good friends at ESI Design and Turtle Pond Publications last year, it was only natural that we dive in again when Turtle Pond laid out their plans for the companion website to the children’s book, “Winter’s Tail.”

“Winter’s Tail” is the true story of a baby dolphin who, after being seriously injured in a crab trap, learned to swim again with the help of some dedicated folks at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium and a custom-made prosthetic tail. That’s right – Winter is practically a bionic dolphin.

The book and website are designed to educate and inspire adults and children alike, especially children who are amputees themselves. Interestingly, the same technology used in Winter’s Tail is also being used to develop prosthetics for Iraq war veterans.

The interactive Flash website features activities and games that include:

• Interactive video maker that lets kids make audio/video mash-ups of their favorite dolphin clips
• Fish pattern matching game
• Ocean Jammer activity where kids combine music and elements to create underwater scenes
• A live Winter webcam, videos, resources, sing-along activities and much, much more...

Of course, no Turtle Pond site launch would be complete without a big game reveal:

The Winter’s Tail game is a multi-level horizontal-scrolling game where users compete for high scores by helping Winter to navigate an ocean maze, avoiding obstacles and racing the clock to get to the whirlpool finish line.

The website is live but we’ll be updating and adding features as we go.

Check out Winter’s website here:

Winterstail.com

Tune in for a live Winter Webcast on October 7th at 1PM EST with partner, Scholastic:

Live Winter Webcast

Artgig History Lesson - The Constitution

When we met with the Weekly Reader News team back in June to discuss their idea for an educational website to teach the Constitution to kids all we had was a basic concept and high expectations, this being the first in a planned series of digital e-issues for a business traditionally rooted in print.

Today, just 12 weeks after our first brainstorming session, I’m happy to announce the release of the Constitution e-issues for Weekly Reader–and they got not one, but three different websites for three different age groups.

The look of each site is essentially the same but the content changes specifically for each audience.

Our animated host, the Town Crier, leads users into five primary activities: the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Framers, Time Line and the “Constitutional Challenge” Game. Each section offers a different interactive activity to engage learners and helpful tools like a hot glossary reinforce learning as kids discover embedded terms and definitions while they explore the content. Each of the five activities also includes an assessment component relevant to each section.

The activities are designed for maximum fun, like the Framers, where one can’t help but pick up interesting facts about each of the Constitution’s creators as their portraits come to life, or the Constitutional Challenge game where users earn points as they test their knowledge of the Constitution in a Jeopardy-style game show format.

Artgig created the general UI design, produced the Flash animation from supplied art, created all of the functionality to specs we developed, and we took care of all audio production & VO.

If early testing and feedback is any gauge of success, we’ve got another hit on our hands.

Check out one of the three versions here:

The Constitution