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2017

It was a busy year at Brand New Box.

We try to treat every client like they're our soulmate - and sometimes that means we forget to talk about all the other cool things we're building. In fact, we're often asked: “You're so responsive, do you... uh... have any other projects?”

So this year, we wrote a real recap: Brand New Box 2017.

Our friends at CPPR made a nice intro video about the newest tool we built for them, IRIS - the Integrated Referral and Intake System. IRIS lets social service agencies make referrals, and get families connected to the services that benefit them.

That’s all a bit abstract, but here’s the layman’s version: If you’re a client of some kind of social service agency (like a home visiting program, or Early Head Start, or SNAP, etc), then odds are good you might be eligible for others. But getting a referral to those other agencies depends on a network of tacit knowledge, accessible only within an individual caseworker’s head. IRIS is a tool that’s laser-focused on making those connections available and explicit, and making sure that a referral to one of those services never falls through the cracks.

And hopefully, that drives those organizations to talk to each other more effectively - and build a shared picture of how their services help the people in their community.

It’s been a fun tool to build, and the team at CPPR are full of whipsmart, compassionate people.

We went to Iceland

Brand New Box went to Iceland!

To celebrate being in business for the last ten (really, 10!) years, we put all our work on pause and went to Iceland for a week with our families. It was awesome.

We ate exotic northern foods! We watched the northern lights! We spent a lot of time swimming in warm water: lagoons and lagoons and lagoons, hot tubs and pools, all heated by the fires of the earth! We petted Icelandic horses! We embarassed ourselves trying to pronounce Icelandic! We walked in between continents! We saw lots of snow and ice and moss and rock! We marveled at fjords and volcanoes and black sand beaches and glaciers and icebergs and geysirs and waterfalls!

This was an amazing trip, and a very memorable way to celebrate the first decade of Brand New Box. Thanks everybody!

New Year’s Cards

Every year at BNB we produce our official, coveted Badge of Merit™ and card. This year we upped the game a bit: rather than the usual digital print, we went with a solid letterpress print.

The cards were printed by Christy Schneider at Inkello on a beautiful old J.M. Jones 'Lightning Jobber' treadle-powered platen press from 1897.

Christy did an amazing job with this, and let us come watch the process of carefully calibrating each plate.

Seeing this press in action is mesmerizing; it runs with a huge flywheel, and requires the operator to work the treadle with a foot, adjust levers with one hand, and swap in the material to be printed with the other.

They turned out beautifully. Thanks Christy!

2016 Year in Review

Whew! 2016 was a big year for Brand New Box. We grew, we moved offices, we closed out old projects and took on new ones. Here's a look back at some highlights.

We brought Josh on full time! He's been a huge asset this year.

We had four different interns with us: Ashley, Hanan, Hannah, and Rabel. Hanan did great design work with us, and then graduated in the spring. Hannah switched from our development track to working with UX projects this fall. Ashley spent a summer at Google working with machine learning, and came back in the fall to lend her development chops. Rabel lent a hand on several long-term projects through the summer and fall.

We went to RailsConf!

We moved office locations! It’s a bigger space in a converted poultry warehouse. The conference room with the roll-up garage doors is like a second home now.

Projects!

We took on a lot this year. In 2016 we:

Continued development on our large project for the County of Los Angeles, which now includes 2 iOS apps and slew of web tools to manage data.

Continued managing development for Merchtable, an online retailer for indie artists.

Launched b.io, a service to manage your 'professional biography' in one easy-to-manage place

Built and launched a new internal system for Gregorys Coffee that supports their inventory and supply for all 20 stores (and more stores all the time)

Launched three e-commerce stores (including Gregorys) and TREAT’s shop of Chinese New Year jewelry

Designed and ran a map-based feedback activity for the city of San Diego

Launched several other public engagement sites for civic projects in California, Mississippi, and Colorado, and closed out a few completed ones as well

Built a new flexible CMS for those public engagement sites

Built IRIS, a new tool for to help social service agencies collaborate within their community. This is an ongoing collaboration with the very smart people at CPPR - more details on this project later!

Designed a new visual standards library for web applications at (SECRET CLIENT)

Built a new platform for giving surveys within academic communities (launching soon!)

Did field research with users in Los Angeles, New York, and Kansas City

Developed conceptual designs for a new digital badging platform.

And more. Really!

On the side, we did unrelated fun things this year:

Will worked remotely for a month in London, his first trip abroad. He has a slight British accent now.

Matt made a BOOK

Josh bought a HOUSE

Nate had a BABY (hello Quinton Colgate Clark!)

What does 2017 hold? We’ll keep you posted.

We’ve been keeping a lid on this one for a while, but we can finally talk about it! Last year we built a new site for the state of Kansas - our first .gov! KansasMoney.gov is a coordinated effort between a handful of state agencies, to create a single place for their financial literacy resources.

We built a custom CMS for the different state agencies to contribute content, and a flexible, reader-friendly design that’s suitable for long articles, listicles, and big videos.

A big shoutout is due to the great people at the Office of the Securities Commissioner of Kansas - they spearheaded the project, did all the writing and content work, and put up with our reluctance to use sunflowers.

We had the distinct pleasure of working with Push Pop Studio on a new web store for Treat & Company, a pattern & design firm in Minneapolis. The shop just launched today, and they’re making these cool little pins for Lunar New Year.

Treat’s work is gorgeous in general, and the packaging and styling details on these pins are great.

In January we launched a new mini site for the City of San Diego, in order to gather feedback about transportation needs and improvements they’ve got planned for the future.

It’s a simple site with some fairly traditional form elements, but the centerpiece is a new map-based feedback tool that we’ve built, and we’re pretty excited about. Users can simply drop a pin on the map, and give tell the City their idea for an improvement that would make their lives easier.

The best part: people have been giving a ton of feedback.

We really enjoy this kind of ‘public engagement’ work. Anything that makes it easier to work with your local government is worth doing!

drawingis-magic

Today is the official release of Drawing Is Magic! This sketchbook is full of games, exercises and inspiration- perfect for young doodlers, art students, teachers, weekend artists and illustration professionals. Buy it from amazon here!

mattkirkland

Hey! My friend John’s new book is out today, and it’s great. Go buy it!

2014 Year in Review

It's January 31st; is that too late to review last year? Nah.

2014 was a big year for us here at Brand New Box. Here's some stuff that happened:

We hired a couple of smart people to help out with development (more on that soon, with proper introductions)

We threw a pretty serious 8-year anniversary dinner, with our staff, families, and friends.

We continued our tradition of Annual Badges of Merit

And we continued work with lots of really great people and projects.

It was a big year for Matt and Nate personally, too:

Nate had a new baby! Toby is adorable.

Nate built a whole house, practically

Nate found a venue for his deep archive of funny stories at Story Slam

Matt sold his weird old haunted house and bought a slightly newer one

Matt took a graduate-level course on John Milton and found out that a second career in academia is not in his future

Matt visited the Charles Williams Society in Oxford, and hung out with some other friends and clients in London.

Some notable projects we did last year (some of these are confidential or not yet launched - sorry, no links):

Built a big web application that helps teams inspect buildings for maintenance issues - then estimate costs for future maintenance and build capital plans around those. (It's actually a lot more complicated and interesting than that, really, but I'm simplifying)

We upped our indie cred doing dev and UI support for MerchTable, and launched their new mobile checkout.

Built a new site for Gregorys Coffee, and watched them grow from 5 to 12 locations in Manhattan.

Built an interactive scheduling site for TritonDay, the freshman orientation event at UC San Diego

Built several internal-only projects that we can't link you to, but are rrrrreally interesting. (Ask us in person sometime!)

Built Anonymuze, a platform for to manage fair, blind music auditions

Built several new sites for our military clients

Built a new elearning platform for Kansas Project Success

Designed a UI framework for some internal apps at the Salk Institute

Built a new site for a consortium of Los Angeles area Police, Fire, and other first- and second-responders.

Started big new projects with [redacted], our favorite privacy-conscious client.

And that's just the list I can think of from the top of my head. What a year! As always, we feel lucky to be doing this kind of work - but somehow we also ended up doing interesting projects, and collaborating with really great people. Thank you!

mattkirkland

We made a big wooden sign for Brand New Box!

We were going to attend a Career Fair at my alma mater, and wanted to create some signage that stood apart from the bland, polished graphic banners of the other booths. It turned out nice, and now we’ve got a big obnoxious wooden sign in the office.

We started with some 100-year-old beams taken from an old chicken house (long story).

We shaved off a 1/4 inch veneer, and then glued that to the box structure.

The final piece is rrrrreally heavy.

Another small site for our partners at AECOM, recently launched! The Longhorn Ammunition Plant is a big superfund site in Texas - and the Army has been working to clean it up for a long time. This informational site serves as a repository of project documents and status updates for that process.

A quick fun project for our friends at UC San Diego: a large format poster for the UC Computing Services Conference.

The theme for the conference is "00100000 Years of Collaboration" (0010000 = is 32 in binary). Clever brains at the UCSD Campus Web Office came up with the concept: a timeline of the last 100,000 years, with highlights of the last 32 layered over the timeline.

UCSD does one each year for the poster gallery, usually a very serious, text-heavy poster describing all the impressive accomplishments from the past year. This year however, we took an actual visual approach with this timeline ribbon. The posters are hung in a smaller room at the conference, so we can expect people to be up close and in a reading mood.

I've got a serious bent for research, so it was extra fun to make my own hundred-millenia history document - even if I played fast-and-loose with the imagery on the ribbon.

We can't share details, but we had a great time this spring helping The Salk Institute for Biological Science with a new internal app. They're great people, doing important work.

Salk is a great institution - besides Salk's historic work in developing the polio vaccine, they're currently working on cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS, and other scourges of the human condition.

If you ever get a chance to visit their utterly gorgeous campus in San Diego, you should. The building is a treasure, and it's worth the trip to stand in that courtyard.

Where to Find Serious Coffee in New York? Everywhere

If you want to see just how much has changed in New York’s coffee scene in the last few years, stop by Gregorys Coffee.

We're obviously super excited to see our new friend & client Greg Zamfotis featured in the Times, in an article about Serious Coffee. Look at this guy! Then go buy some seriously good coffee at one of his stores in Manhattan.

There is a lot to like about this app, including its clear, good-looking interface and great in-app instructions.

The New York Times gives some love to PaceDJ. Nice to see them get some good press!

Also Matt is quietly freaking out about a minor compliment in the NYT.

We forgot to mention this! Our updated designs for our friends at PaceDJ, the your-own-music-at-your-own-pace running app, are available now.

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