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.

Long-time Utopian.net hosters and friends from up north, Woodward Design, are in the midst of a site redesign to show off more of what makes their work so sought-after. We helped out with a light development project to transform the firm’s layouts and existing HTML into a WordPress theme for their new “Birdhouse” studio blog, launched last week. Amanda, Dana, Kristin and Anders will be using the easy-to-update space to give glimpses into the process that delivers such beautiful illustration, design, logo, and brand work to Woodward clients, and to provide interaction with fans and customers through comments, syndication, and other features built-in to WordPress at Utopian.net.

Stop by and say hi!

We’re more than excited to welcome a writer who can give us the most masterful creeps, Kelly Link, to Utopian.net hosting.

Kelly’s new book, Pretty Monsters — Link’s first Young Adult work – will be published by Viking on October 2nd.

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…

Von Glitschka launched Federal Bureau of Illustration today, a site for illustration case studies with one of the most fun metaphors we’ve ever had the pleasure of implementing into WordPress.

Von Glitschka's Federal Bureau of Illustration

In Von’s words:

“I’ve seen a lot of case study sites. Most are kind of boring and far too serious so I wanted to avoid that when I created my own. The site is done as a tongue-in-cheek play off the metaphor of the FBI. There are a total of seven case files in the archive right now and I’ll add more as time goes on so if you subscribe to the RSS you’ll be notified when I post new case files.”

Entrance to Dancing Elephant Studio

Our friend Jenny Kostecki-Shaw recently launched her new book My Travelin’ Eye, took off on a signing tour, and produced a brilliant new website design for us to implement. Somewhere she found the time to send us an autographed copy of her new children’s hit (Thanks Jenny!), even while we raced the clock to develop her site for her publication date.

Work on the ambitious Dancing Elephant Studio site continues - Jenny and Patrick have a lot of cool work and experiences to share - but we were too excited to get our own copy of My Travelin’ Eye to resist mentioning it. While the new site offers the excitement of “more to come,” it already features a lot of info about Jenny and her work, and you can even buy your own signed edition of the book there.

Jordan Hull is a young performer with an unexpected Americana blues panache. (But if you hear a surfy-sounding thump or two on his debut record, don’t get confused.)

Utopian.net developed a site concept based on Jordan’s show postcards, provided the programming and hosting, and implemented WordPress for easy updates of new tour dates, photos, and new sounds. Jordan’s new site launched over the weekend along with his new CD. Go have a listen!

Our friend and Utopian.net customer Gavin Grant and his Small Beer Press have been in the vanguard of open publishing, with the well-respected indy imprint releasing several books in dual paper- and free-electronic- editions. The latest Creative Commons-licensed masterpiece of speculative fiction from Small Beer Press is John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Success. (Link via Boing Boing.)