We designed con­tent sites for The Branch Libraries of The New York Pub­lic Library, and cre­at­ed and led a train­ing pro­gram that changed the way The Library con­ceived, designed, and exe­cut­ed its sites. The train­ing pro­gram cov­ered con­tent devel­op­ment, usabil­i­ty, and web stan­dards. Per­haps most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, we col­lab­o­rat­ed with dig­i­tal lead­er­ship at The Library to cre­ate and share an online style guide, years before cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions were doing it.

Design For All The People

To help The Library reach as many of its patrons as pos­si­ble, design projects empha­sized clear archi­tec­ture, web acces­si­bil­i­ty, and full com­pli­ance with XHTML and CSS. We also con­sult­ed on con­tent to ensure that text scanned, and could be under­stood by non-native Eng­lish speakers.

Click­On @ The Library, an access and out­reach pro­gram designed to nar­row the Dig­i­tal Divide, typ­i­fied and was among the most suc­cess­ful of these projects. With­in weeks of that sites launch, the Librarys free class­es were filled to capacity.

A Style Guide for The Library and the Web

At the con­clu­sion of the train­ing pro­gram, we col­lab­o­rat­ed with dig­i­tal lead­er­ship at The New York Pub­lic Library to author and pro­duce the NYPL Style Guide, an online tuto­r­i­al that taught web design­ers and devel­op­ers how to work with XHTML and CSS.

Although the Style Guide was cre­at­ed to help shape ongo­ing Library web devel­op­ment projects, it was also wide­ly read and used as an edu­ca­tion­al tool by thou­sands of non-Library design­ers, devel­op­ers, and stu­dents eager for infor­ma­tion on seman­tic markup and best prac­tices in stan­dards-based HTML.

As the Style Guide was pub­lished pri­or to Design­ing With Web Stan­dards, it took on out­sized impor­tance to what we now call the front-end design com­mu­ni­ty. It served as a resource that helped devel­op­ers, design­ers, and con­tent spe­cial­ists great­ly improve and future-proof their web­sites. But that was only part of its influence.

Further Influence of The Style Guide

Our client rather pre­scient­ly under­stood that shar­ing The Librarys inter­nal resources with the web com­mu­ni­ty was anoth­er way of ful­fill­ing its over­ar­ch­ing mis­sion to bring knowl­edge to all, regard­less of loca­tion or cir­cum­stance. By almost 15 years, this col­lab­o­ra­tive effort pre­ced­ed (and is the spir­i­tu­al god­fa­ther of) the kind of style-guide shar­ing now per­formed at larg­er scale by for­ward-think­ing orga­ni­za­tions like GOV.UK, US Gov­ern­ment, Star­bucks, and Google.

Our responsibilities on these projects

Strat­e­gy; research; writ­ing; design; front-end devel­op­ment; pub­lic­i­ty & promotion.