The National Coffee Association of USA hired Studio 23 to redevelop its website that serves the coffee trade as a resource of timely information, events and governmental affair initiatives. The site uses a proprietary content management system with components for member accounts, registrations and store. The original site contained considerable archived articles but distinguishing the archives from the current articles was a challenge to visitors. Also, the original site had limited navigational items and poor organization that inhibited access.

NYC Swim, an organization that raises money by organizing swims in the waters around Manhattan, wanted a way to communicate with participants quickly and easily to promote their events and to give them updated information about swims. While they already had a Twitter account, it was underutilized and bore no resemblance to the organization's yearly promotional campaign graphics.

Studio23 created a fresh look for their Twitter page based on the established graphics that were to be introduced for the upcoming season. With this idea in mind, the page was conceived to change annually and, during the off season, would be replaced with photos of the previous year's events.

Studio 23 is proud to announce its poster submission to Core77.com's Sustainable Refrainables competition has been awarded a jury prize by the design community. Ours was voted fourth most popular and the poster was produced for use in transit shelters in San Francisco during Design Week San Francisco 2011.

Core77 collaborated with the San Francisco chapter of AIGA to support their fourth biennial Compostmodern conference. The conference, dedicated to promoting and inspiring sustainable design solutions, is geared to established design firms and advertising agencies, emerging designers, design students and strategists who are interested in cultivating sustainable design by becoming catalysts for cultural, social and ecological transformation. Compostmodern 2011 will explore the current and future potential for ecologically sustainable growth and responsible design, focusing on real world solutions and practical applications of design thinking.

Today, Studio 23 launched a new site called Disfluency.com which contains bits and pieces of design postings from around the web loosely tied together on the theme of disfluency—the art of making things difficult. Disfluency is a break or interruption in a visual flow of elements. It implies a disjointed nature of elements which can lead to effective or disastrous communications as a result. On the one hand, creating messages that challenge the reader can make those messages more effective and memorable. However, too little structure leads to chaos and anarchy. The right balance is the goal of any good designer. Stay tuned.

Along with our usual web design and developement services, Studio 23 now offers custom mobile website design for our clients. Mobile-optimized sites are created to load faster, navigate easier and read better than a traditional site which often requires pinching and zooming to view content.

But is this an iPhone app? No. But that's a common question. Some clients ask us to build iPhone apps when, really, what they want is a mobile presence. iPhone apps are great but they're also proprietary and only work on the iPhone, iPod Touches and iPads.