Welcome to the first issue of our new project, Currents. You may notice that our old blog is gone (bye!), and we've replaced it with this. Every so often we'll share some of our recent projects, great work from others, inspiring things we’ve read and a playlist of music from our #music-room slack channel. Think of it as a web magazine that we release every so often. You can even sign up below to have it delivered to your inbox on the regular.
2016 was a weird year for the world, but a good one for Upstatement. We launched a TON of new work, from the new WBUR.org to gsd.harvard.edu, Milk Street Kitchen, ESPN's The Undefeated and somehow even more. We also celebrated our 8th birthday and welcomed some new faces in design, production and engineering. We had a fun internal hackathon over the summer. We won some SPD medals, Webby honors, and assorted other pricey statuettes. We built a site cataloguing causes that need our help following the US elections. And in a few months we'll cut the ribbon on our new studio expansion and have you all over to celebrate. But first we gotta go on out annual holiday break to recharge the batteries. Hasta la vista 2016, see you all in the new year!
We've built a lot of sites in our time now, but this is one of our dream projects. The GSD hired us to help them showcase their content and build a brand new platform to serve their community. The result is a forward-looking site filled to the brim with top-notch ideas powered by an API and comprehensive digital platform our engineering department cooked up. Read more on our case study page.
+ Sports & Culture
We helped ESPN create a new content pillar in the mold of Grantland.
! Pass the pie
Our collaboration with Chris Kimball: a fresh approach to the online recipes that makes cooking fun and easy.
* We did it for the kids
A modern web app for the world's largest book publisher makes their kids catalog accessible to all.
& Our Wordpress Phenom
Timber hits 1.0, has a spiffy new site and some helpful video tutorials.
In-house designers can feel marginalized in a design conversation that revolves around agencies and high-profile startups. Keri once worked as an in-house designer at a publisher, and makes the case for why working on an internal design team can be a great experience. Over at our Medium page.
Emily explains her take on the role of producer and her experience as she helps us define this department.
What to expect when you're expecting (a website). If you're thinking about hiring a digital firm, start here.
We included this book in our client gift pack last year — it's an inspiring read and thought provoking. Can digital things have wabi-sabi? Does software-rot count as beautiful decay? We're not sure, but we enjoyed arguing about it.
