Reading Trails is the brainchild and coding work of our friend and colleague Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, along with his pal Nick Romeo. The two bibliophiles wanted a community reading and sharing site with something different than anything they’d found, so they built their own.

A reading trail is a set of books linked in an interesting way—it might be a journey through the underworld of crime thrillers, a tour of the books that influenced Milan Kundera, a professor’s introduction to French existentialism, or anything else you can think of, serious or whimsical.

Unique to Reading Trails, these trails intersect: you can find new books to read by skipping from trail to trail — from organizing theme to organizing theme. It’s like browsing at the library, except that next to every book on the shelf are other books by the same author, and from the same period, and with the same mythological characters, and that your favorite author was also influenced by, and with whatever other shared characteristics readers have chosen to highlight as they create their trails.

To create their vision, Nathaniel and Nick called in logo and icon design from our frequent collaborator Penelope Dullaghan, gathered structural and programming advice from lead Utopian.net developers, and incubated the project through the design and build phases at Utopian.net Labs.

We’re happy to see Reading Trails fly off into the world, and we hope you’ll stop by their site, or check out the Reading Trails Facebook group, for more info or to join up with this close-knit and cultivated group of passionate readers.

The new Scott Hull Associates site

Scott Hull Associates is a respected representative for a varied and lauded stable of talented artists. When Scott and Co. needed a site that would deliver more control to each of the artists they represent, we worked from a beautifully simple design by our frequent collaborator, and Scott Hull-represented illustrator, Penelope Dullaghan. With Penny’s gorgeous look-and-feel, user interface collaboration by the brilliant Josh Sears, and lots of input from Scott, his staff, and their represented artists, we crafted a new site with a new look, powered by a multi-user site manager in the form of WordPress-µ.

It’s open-source foundation software that can empower many team members — and, with commenting and RSS syndication throughout, associates outside the team — to contribute and craft their corner of the site into their best face forward for the organization. We tried to build Scott’s vision of the most immediate, informative portfolio preview in the business. As each artist grows their sample work and their blog in the new format, we hope the site will be almost like a sit-down interview with an artist you might hire for your logo, brand image, or design project.

More…

Over the last few months, we’ve consolidated at Utopian.net Labs the experimental or open-source scripts and software we work on. Brianna’s punbb -> bbpress converter script, for example, has moved into our labs/wordpress project, along with the themes and plugins we’ve created or modified for the WordPress software.

Utopian.net Leitmotif provides complete WordPress themes matching the detailed designs of the artists we strive to serve. It got an official name and a mini-launch today, which you can see in the differences at the Utopian.net services page, and in the how-to documentation for creating your Leitmotif site design.

We’ve added some more tips and explanations we think will be helpful, especially for new users just getting started with a site hosted at Utopian.net. The biggest changes are at http://utopian.net/doc/web/wp/, for using WordPress to manage your site and your blog; all utopian.net documentation can be found under http://utopian.net/doc/.

You might notice we’ve made some minor but important updates at the main Utopian.net web site. While the front page retains the classic look adopted when we launched it in 2003 (how’s that for design longevity?), the rest of the pages feature an even-more-simple single column layout. Many of those content pages are new or significantly updated, like:

• A page about our company and the people who work there (right now just a blurb about each of the principals, but more coming soon.)
• A little more detail on some of our main services
• Updated info on the software we use
• Documentation for using utopian.net email with your domain

We’re also working hard on our buildguide, a tutorial for using our WordPress cms-themeing service. It’s cool, but it’s not complete, and (like this blog) is living at the labs while under development.