This year marked the first that we made it to php|tek, an annual conference for PHP developers that has been held in Chicago for the past several years. We weren’t sure what to expect, aside from sore brains and deep dish pizza, and we were pleasantly surprised by just about everything.
Perhaps you’ve been here before: you want to show all of the categories in a particular ExpressionEngine category group, while also highlighting only those categories to which a particular entry belongs.
This is not something EE’s category tags can do natively, so I set out to find a way. I’ll show you what I discovered in this short tutorial.
Black Hawk is a scenic mountain town 32 miles west of Denver renowned for its casinos and rich history. Recent growth and changes in gambling laws have poised the city to blossom into a tourism destination on a national level, but their former website did not reflect this. So the city came to us needing a new website to help update their image from a local casino town to a modern gambling mecca with national appeal. The team at 3 Roads Media restructured their web page using updated graphics which accentuate the entertainment opportunities that Black Hawk has to offer.
3 roads incorporated a better sense of organization to the website so that first-time visitors develop a strong first impression of the city as a tourist destination. By having “Gaming,” Lodging,” “Dining,” and “Travel” the main drop-down menus on the homepage, the city instantly asserts itself as a resort area centered around entertainment and service. The former Black Hawk website contained much of the same content, but it wasn’t organized in an accessible or enticing fashion for prospective vacationers browsing the website.
3 roads also designed a new Black Hawk logo: it features the city’s name with a pivoted die in the middle which brands Black Hawk in a definitive and meaningful way to the public by identifying the city’s primary selling point.
We also equipped the website with a content management system (CMS) that allows the client to manually update, edit, and add certain content to the website at their leisure and completely independently. The new website is easier to use for visitors, and allows them to find information more quickly.
Weather conditions, traffic reports, and a live webcam also serve as meaningful features and supply visitors with other pertinent and timely info that makes the new site as useful and interactive as possible.
Check out the new website for yourself and take a peek at the city’s new cyber real estate at visitblackhawk.org.
It has been awhile since we have released a desktop wallpaper, so with Halloween fast approaching, I thought I would illustrate a nice desktop Halloween wallpaper for the occasion.
This designer wallpaper shows the best part of Halloween: Trick-or-Treating! A classic, muted color palette, some fun costumes and a spooky ghost following up the pack all bring back memories of this classic American holiday. Whatever your plans this year, I hope you enjoy this free Halloween desktop wallpaper. Happy Halloween!
Font: “Canaveral” by Riley Cran for Lost Type Co-op
Good ol' fashioned Trick-or-Treating
Cliché as it might sound, it’s hard for us to believe that another year has gone by, and that our second Bordo Bello experience is already in the rear view mirror. While we seriously enjoyed ourselves at last year’s event, the event coordinators really outdid themselves this year. The four hours we spent at BB ’11 flew by in no time.
This year’s event was held at the much more spacious Redline Gallery (24th and Arapahoe), which gave us plenty of room to mill about, and also provided plenty of wall space for this year’s entries. We can’t be sure, but it felt like there were more boards on display this year (and the overall quality of submissions was definitely a step above 2010′s).
A view of the event in its early hours (photo courtesy of AIGA Colorado)
As mentioned a year ago, Bordo Bello is an annual skateboard art fundraiser which takes place right here in our backyard, beautiful Denver, Colorado. This year’s event is happening this Friday, September 30th, with participants from all over the country. We here at 3 Roads Media were very excited to once again jump on the chance to design some more decks for such a great cause! We will post a recap of the event after this Friday (See our Bordo Bello 2010 recap here), but for now we thought we’d give a preview of our submissions.
Our lead graphic designer, Brennan, designed & illustrated this radical pink and green zombie deck aptly titled “Run, Kids, Run!”.
Lead web designer & developer, Ryan, designed this deck (“Le Tweet”) which pokes fun at Twitter and social media culture, his twittering bird fully equipped with beret, baguette, and self-importance.
If you have not yet done so, be sure to grab tickets for Bordo Bello 2011 over on their website: BordoBello.com (tickets are $15 online, and $20 at the door). Last year was a great event, and we can’t wait to see how the fine folks with AIGA have topped themselves this year!
When you combine a love for Photoshop brush designs with a plethora of boxes, you get a nifty brush set. At least…that’s how things work in our studio. In our first foray into the world of PS brushes, we scanned labels from some of the boxes laying around our workspace, tidied them up, and packed them into a neat little set of 11 real-life box stamps and seals.
A sample of the brushes in this pack.
We are proud to announce that we have designed a new website for Steamboat Lodging and it has been released into the wild. The Steamboat Lodging website was designed to showcase amazing deals on lodging and vacation rental properties in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Visitors can search different categories of lodging including On Mountain, Downtown, Homes or Condos. Vacation-goers looking for great deals on a wide range of rental properties, from affordable to 5-star luxury lodging can search the website to find a variety of options. Continue Reading »
To coincide with the complete overhaul of our studio website (3roadsmedia.com), we were recently lucky enough to get new headshots from an extremely talented and well-known photo-journalistic photographer in Denver: Jackie Nuxoll with Selah Photography. The photo shoot was extremely fun and relaxed and provided us with some great shots. As the company grows, we can’t wait to use these to promote our endeavors as a forward moving design and interactive agency in Denver, Colorado.
Continue reading to check out some of our favorite photos from the shoot, and view more on Jackie’s blog: http://www.selahphotography.org/creative-headshot-photographer-denver/
On a recent client project, we decided to use Cufón font replacement on the website’s main navigation. This navigation included some drop-down menus, where the main link was font replaced, but the nested list items were not. We also had a couple of other requirements, and getting them all implemented was harder to pull off than I expected.
In an effort to save my fellow developers some time, I present the following solution.
Before you get into the solution, you might want to view a working demo. This demo meets all of the requirements laid out in the next section.
Continue Reading »
php|tek 2012 Jun 01, 2012
ExpressionEngine Tip: Highlight Only Active Categories in a Category List Mar 12, 2012
City of Blackhawk Website Goes Live Mar 02, 2012
3 ROADS MEDIA is a full service Denver marketing agency specializing in web design, graphic design, and strategic marketing services.
This blog is one of our creative outlets, and focuses on bringing resources and information to graphic designers, website developers, and small business owners.
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