Visit California Website | Steve Or Steven Read

I was the lead Drupal developer and themer on the new Visit California website, working as a consultant with Code & Theory out of San Francisco. The creative director Andreas Tagger and UX lead James Taylor had done a superb job on the design for this one, and I was tasked to design the content model, build the website using Drupal 7, and theme it according to the highly responsive designs. I knew when I first saw the specs I knew this one was special, in that we had to create a system that was designed for content editors to showcase beautiful photography (of which the client had lots of). In my mind at least, this fits in with the idea that web content is art when special care is taken to create a system that allows for further creative acts. That is to say, art begets art... craft a beautiful system that allows for the potential to create beautiful content art. And Drupal, when used wisely, was meant for exactly that! Also kudos to Silvan Reinhold who directed much of the project and technical decision chaos, you won't find better in the business.

Happy to say that besides some decent industry press, our new Visit California website won a 2015 Webby Award in the Associations category, going up against the Oscars.org site amongst a few others in the final round. (seems weird to top The Oscars in an awards game) Also happy to say that this is the 3rd Webby Award of my Drupal software career when in 2012 and again in 2015 I Had Cancer won for Best Community Website.