Last night at a private event in downtown Washington, D.C. among family, colleagues and press, Francis Collins and the team at The BioLogos Foundation unveiled the new BioLogos website; http://biologos.org. I was pleased to be among the group as for the past four months the nclud team has been working intimately with the foundation on this ever-important launch.
It’s a project whose subject matter intrigues us backed by an impressive team of PhD who’s who. You know it’s a fascinating project when even the program director has studied theoretical physics at Cambridge and the philosophical foundations of physics at Columbia – so, it doesn’t surprise us how quickly they picked up something as simplistic as HTML and CSS. The BioLogos Foundation is founded by Francis Collins, who used to run the Human Genome Project – talk about an intimidating client meeting. His landmark discoveries of disease genes aside, you have to respect a man who holds his own against the likes of Steven Colbert and the Colbert Report.
The BioLogos Foundation reached out to nclud because of our unique style and attention to detail. The objective was to create an online experience that was not only representative of the foundation’s mission but also helped facilitate frequently asked questions about science and faith.
Can you believe in religion and science? Can Adam and Eve co-exist as historical figures with Darwin’s ideas of evolution? Extremely fascinating questions for those interested in such theological and scientific discussions, and for those of us who are not so much. The BioLogos Foundation “promotes the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives”.
We worked with the foundation in a full services capacity: from creative strategy, to branding, information architecture, visual design, front-end development as well as full integration into the ExpressionEngine CMS. We even squeezed in a bit of print collateral as well.
Read more about our role with The BioLogos Foundation website within our portfolio.
Mike Brenner
April 29th 2009
Nice work guys. Love the attention to detail, all the way from the input backgrounds to the “questions” image-borders.
I’d be interested in seeing your process for taking the boxed EE and getting it ready for your client sites. Refresh DC topic?
“Don’t Chapter, Verse Me Man”
Martin Ringlein
April 29th 2009
I think we can bring that topic up to Baltimore for you guys! Dan is the man behind the EE customization; he did some amazing things behind the scene to make management much easier for the foundation—it is slightly amazing.
Stefan Hartwig
April 29th 2009
Really nice site. Good use of subtle texture to add detail.
Sean Singleton
April 29th 2009
One of the toughest types of sites to create is an information heavy site… you guys did a great job of pulling it all together with some great visual organization
Alex Giron
April 29th 2009
@Mike @Stefan Thanks! Subtle details like that were key in the design, we took inspiration from Renaissance era prints etc.
Justin Thorp
April 29th 2009
Congrats guys. The site looks hot.
brad
April 29th 2009
Very nice. Did you run into any issues using HTML 5? Any particular reason you decided to go with HTML 5?
Martin Ringlein
April 29th 2009
Brad,
Great question. Alex did both the visual design and front-end development for BioLogos—there were (are) some issues with using HTML5, which we are trying to find the time to do a proper write-up on.
The short answer is that there is no reason not to use HTML5. We are not totally sold on <section>, <footer>, etc ... but we decided to use HTML5 for this project simply to be cool.
No seriously, we just wanted to use it on a client site (nclud.com is technically “HTML5”). I think we’ll continue to develop most of our client sites in HTML5 to be more forward thinking than anything else. We still code for IE6, so keep that in mind too.
Tom
May 29th 2009
Really Good Job….....
Andrew Cornett
May 29th 2009
Wow it looks great guys, love the textures too. There’s a lot of subtle goodness in this one.