Temple University’s Fox School of Business is kicking off something of a coming out party this week for the Center for Design and Innovation, which debuted last fall. To do so, the center is hosting a Design Week challenge for its students and, on Friday, hosting a free, day-long conference around innovation, called incitexchange [RSVP here].

Led by eager Director Youngjin Yoo, the center is meant to offer students “cross-disciplinary, action-orientated education” programs and feature driven research meant to foster a better Philadelphia through design, management and technology.

“[The Center] attempts to bring design, technology and management together to re-think our management education and practice,” Yoo said. “In particular, we are very interested in leveraging design and innovation in order to transform our cities.”

Kicking off this afternoon as the first major CDI initiative, the Design Week North Broadband student challenge has nearly 100 students from six schools working in teams competing to create the most actionable, innovative solutions for job creation and infrastructure concerns along North Broad Street.

On Friday, the Design Week comes to a close with incitexchange, a day-long conference on design, innovation, management and technology by way of short, individual presentations, panels and collaborative acts. The conference is free, RSVP on Facebook. Speakers include Mayor Nutter, Electronic Ink CEO Harold Hambrose and former City of Philadelphia CTO Allan Frank, who is involved in the CDI planning.

“This is about sharing ideas and making real change,” Yoo said.

Google celebrates Valentine’s Day by using Robert Indiana’s LOVE theme, which, of course, Philadelphia has plenty to say about.

Updated, 5/13, 4:11 p.m.: Added Partner Gavin Potts details.

At interactive design firm WellFed‘s office space at 2424 Studios on York Street in Fishtown, on a cold, late winter day, the firm’s excitable puppy, Bella, runs from desk to desk.

Founded by Wick Vipond, Ty Burrowbridge and Gavin Potts—who got their start at agencies like Red Tettemer and 1 Trick Pony—WellFed, which opened earlier this year, is a friendly place for Bella, who huffs up and down the steps of the two-floor loft to visit a handful of employees and interns, like partner and technology lead Gavin Potts.

Unlike the larger agencies where the founders got their start, Vipond, 30, says that WellFed’s small team that gives them an advantage.

“We’re small, lean and able to be more efficient,” he says, his hair curiously gray for his age. “This year will be interesting. It’s our first full year where we’ve been a brick and mortar shop.”

So far, the group has done well for itself. Its clientele is split between New York and Philadelphia, with local clients like Print Liberation and the Paines Park Project and larger clients like Reebok and well-known Philadelphia based jazz musician Melody Gardot.

The firm recently launched a new version of Gardot’s official Universal Records site.

Though it utilizes a snazzy Flash-based feature on the musician’s landing page, because of Gardot’s international audience, its foundation is on standards-based development.

“We’re really known for our large, heavy Flash experiences, but because [Gardot] is more popular around the world than in the U.S., we had to make sure it was a more standard space and usable on mobile platforms,” Burrowbridge says.

The firm also recently designed a site for Weathervane Music and WXPN’s Shaking Through music and video showcase, which lets users watch recording sessions of selected artists. It’s another example of WellFed’s standards design flexibility.

Yet, a quick look at WellFed’s portfolio could tell you that Flash is its bread and butter. The Flash element on Gardot’s page—which shows dynamic “bubbles” coming from a illustrated bathtub [pictured above]—is impressive in its own right. The elements are dynamically generated by an embedded music player. Burrowbridge says that WellFed completed a heavy analysis of her songs to create a less static experience compared with a more standard looping animation.

When we followed-up with WellFed in late April, Flash was all over the news. And in trouble.

In a public statement, Steve Jobs slammed Adobe’s proprietary media platform, stating his reasoning for dropping it from future mobile Apple products. Flash has issues with reliability, security, performance, battery life and mobile platforms, he wrote.

“Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind,” Jobs concluded in the lengthy letter. There was no doubt that Apple—which owns a huge share of the mobile conversation—was moving ahead without Adobe.

So, how does this larger-picture decision weigh on small design firms like WellFed who, though versatile, lean heavily on Flash for production?

“We actually talk about this on a weekly basis,” Vipond says. “There’s not a lot of systems out there to deliver the type of experience that Flash does. I don’t think we’re going to move completely away from it.”

“We certainly are paying attention to HTML5 and CSS3. It’s what we do. When there’s new technologies out there, we try to stay on the front of the wave and not the back,” he says.

And a big wave it is.

The Walnut Street location today and its proposed look upon opening.

Updated 4/8/10 @ 2:14 p.m.: Brownstoner has an interior shot of the current location.

The “computer illiterate” architect based outside of Scranton that helped envision the Apple retail store aesthetic and who is leading plans for the company’s much-heralded first Center City location was profiled by the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron recently.

While Saffron’s profile focuses much on Peter Bohlin’s noted Fifth Avenue “cube” location in Manhattan, the piece did touch on the 1607-1609 location that she reports is scheduled to open in July:

The Philadelphia store won’t be a signature design like the Cube, but it will incorporate key elements of the BCJ prototype, from the minimal scrim of the glass facade to the strict linear arrangement of the tables and products. A second-floor seminar room should help make it a gathering place.

We reported the store was hiring as far back as December.

Seems like ditching the record label for the branding and design firm was the right way to go.

Mason and Megan Wendell, the husband-wife team behind Mount Airy-based Canary Promotion + Design, met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“We started our own record label (Solarmanite Records) to release our own music and some other artists, and more and more bands started coming to us for advice on everything from how to publicize a release to how to get a barcode,” says Megan, 35, who handles the marketing side of the firm.

So they started a business doing just that outside of New York City, where she was working for a dotcom and Mason was handling Web work on Wall Street. By early 2002, the duo moved to Philadelphia and found a niche in the region’s arts and culture community.

Now they have a heavy hand in the look and feel of the Philly arts scene and open source content management system Drupal is their tool of choice.

“Between our work in PR and marketing and Web design and development for cultural institutions and artists in the Philadelphia area, I feel that we have had an impact on the community and how several organizations tell their stories,” Megan says. Though they both still consider themselves musicians, their business, branding and two-year-old daughter Lyra has managed to take hold.

In addition to the Web work, the couple lists branding development for groups like Girls Rock Philly and Mauckingbird Theatre Company. The team is currently working with the Temple University Theater Department on their new summer repertory theater.

Mason Wendell loves Drupal

But beyond the marketing, it all comes down to Drupal, and that’s where Megan’s husband Mason, with a specialty in Drupal theming, takes hold. Mason oversees another full-time designer and the team works with freelancers — “we’re on the lookout for some good freelance Web designers and Drupal site builders and themers right now,” Megan says.

In recent months, the team has launched major redesigns for the Rosenbach Museum & Library, the Future of Music Coalition, Ars Nova Workshop, Nichole Canuso Dance Company and Drupal development for The Wilma Theater�s new site. They’ve also launched a new site for R5 Productions and a refresh on the site they created for Johnny Brenda�s.

Below, Mason, who is helping to organize Drupaldelphia in May and is heading out next month to DrupalCon in San Francisco to spread the good word.

But before all of that, below, we corner Mason and get him to show off and share the geeky details of three of those bigger projects.

ROSENBACH MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

Mason's Design nerd notes: "Features a custom Javascript menu, lots of tiny examples of progressive enhancement, including css3 shadows and gradients"

Talk to us about the Rosenbach redesign and specific challenges.

We created a full redesign from the ground up for the Rosenbach Museum and Library site… We wanted the design look to acknowledge the museum�s history and collections while presenting it in a fresh way.

The Rosenbach does a lot of different things with their collections, including exhibitions, various types of tours and special programs and events.� It would be too easy to try to showcase it all at once and confuse visitors. Because of their many different events, we had to make a very complex and busy event schedule understandable on one page, while showing the differences between normal events, their annual signature events, and an active series of themed tours.

We decided to make the home page very simple and highlight one major item at a time but drive visitors to delve further into the site. Once you�re into interior pages of the site, we used Drupal to find connections between what you came to visit and other related content, encouraging people to follow the rabbit down the hole.

We built upon Drupal�s taxonomy system to allow site administrators to easily categorize anything they create on the site and use those categories to automatically draw connections between content across the site.

This allows the site to flesh out pages with related content from other sections of the site, which helps visitors find more on the site that interests them. This in turn increases the time visitors spend on the site and increases their level of engagement with the Rosenbach.

The result is a site with content that is much more up to date, because museum staff can now easily update it with the latest news and events, and greatly increased SEO, with traffic up more than 480 percent on average, to-date.

NICHOLE CANUSO DANCE COMPANY

Mason's design nerd notes: "The swirls and assymetrical crop on the home page image are done automatically within Drupal. NCDC just needs to upload a standard jpg. No photoshop required."

You must have had different needs and objectives for the Canuso Dance Company.

… We created a website for Nichole’s company with subtle design elements that give a nod to her unique whimsical and dark artistic style, while keeping the images of her dance pieces and the latest news front and center.

Nichole came to us with a site that was hard for her to update and that didn’t fully represent her aesthetic. This project needed to come together with a fairly small budget while still having a good amount of customization.

NCDC has an active performance schedule and typically produces one new original work per year. We’re using a very large feature image on the home page to help showcase what’s next, or the most important thing coming up in the future.

This is handled nearly entirely automatically through a system that will� feature the next upcoming event or production, while also letting the site administrators override that feature when they want to.� We try whenever possible to create simple workflows that only require site owners to create content once and let Drupal do the hard work.

THE WILMA THEATER

Mason's design nerd notes: "We needed to integrate with their existing ticketing service provider, so we had to restyle their entire checkout process in an effort to maintain a seemless experience when purchasing tickets."

Maybe the highest profile of your new sites is for Avenue of the Arts mainstay Wilma Theater. Tell us about the new redesign.

We’ve been working with The Wilma Theater as a PR client for five seasons, so we were excited to develop a new site for them, in collaboration with the theater’s graphic designer.

Canary handled the functionality of the site and created the content management system, which allows staff to make updates quickly and easily � from adding new production videos, to promoting special events, to posting the latest play reviews.

The major attention-grabber is the custom animated image feature on the home page. We used a lot of custom Drupal functionality and javascript to build this section, which allows each slot in that rotator to feature an image, text, or a video. This all comes together to create a highly flexible and useful tool for the Wilma to promote the next show or season, or anything at all.

In the few months that this site has been live it’s already been used in a number of creative configurations, including one where multiple striped images were tiled together to create a continuous banner.

There is also a lot of Drupal customization on the backend to help tie together the volume and breadth of their content. That required a good amount of Administrative UI customization so their staff could easily use the site with very little training. We take a lot of pride in making complex operations simple for both site users and administrators.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia�s technology community. See others�here.

Update tweeted:

The Philadelphia region’s most powerful cheerleader will unveil a sleek new Web presence and re-branding effort today.

At a Center City hotel this morning, the primary online home of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. will be recast as VisitPhilly.com, which is dominated by big photos and better integration of other content. This fifth redesign for GPTMC is also their first step away from their 13-year-old GoPhila.com. GoPhila.com now redirects to VisitPhilly.com.

The new design, led by Web design firm Happy Cog East with offices in Center City, features a cleaner navigation with more interactive drop-down bars, a trend in development moving away from the more cluttered, screen-wide top navigation bar the last iteration GPTMC had.

The now replaced, fourth generation of GoPhila.com

In addition to the new Web presence, GPTMC will debut 25 new advertisements in its With Love, Philadelphia XOXO campaign and a new winter TV commercial, another step in its recent $1.7 million campaign at attracting more overnight visitors. Part of the further integration is putting content from Philly Fun Guide and GPTMC’s popular separately branded arts and culture blog uwishunu.com a drop down away. [Full disclosure: this author is a past uwishunu contributor.]

As promoted, moving branding to VisitPhilly from GoPhila offers the benefit of being easier to remember, offering an actionable step and, yes, simpler better search engine optimization. In 2009, nearly 75 percent of GoPhila.com’s traffic came from search engines, according to a GPTMC release, and visitors are presumably more likely to search ‘visit Philly’ than ‘go Phila.’

It should be noted that GPTMC focuses on the five-county region – Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery – with its slogan “Philadelphia and the Countryside.” Yes, that puts Upper Darby in the countryside.

In February, the release also said, the Independence Visitor Center will also begin to link directly to VisitPhilly.com, further solidifying GPTMC as the region’s top booster. The regional marketing group also pledged to continue partnerships with Google for dynamic mapping features, Travelocity for on-site booking capabilities and PhillyFunGuide for a comprehensive events calendar. This summer, the group plans to integrate visitor comments from TripAdviser to offer user-generated insight.

At this morning’s event, GPTMC will also release a new 16-page Philadelphia tourism industry profile, featuring facts and trends in the region, including growing international visitorship.

Every designer, developer and critic we have, what do you think of the change from this to this? [Credit for keeping the older version around so visitors can still navigate what they know when looking for something specific, at least in the beginning of the transition.]

When major Philadelphia Web sites change, Technically Philly will find out why in The Redesign. Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

Click to enlarge

It turns out the Liberty Bell doesn’t have to be lame.

After the city’s new logo — featuring that cracked ringer — was blasted and we issued a challenge for submissions that were better, we didn’t expect much to come the way of Independence Mall’s most famous attraction.

But more than one of the submissions did, including the eventual winner: Sara DeMarco, as voted on by you in comments and tweets. As depicted above, she submitted how an array of citywide departments could get their own design, while conforming to a general theme. (We’ll be drinking to Sara at our meetup tomorrow)

Great thanks to all our submissions, particularly our two other finalists, RJ White with ‘the Richardson Dilworth‘ and Larry West with ‘Birthplace.’

Below, we remind Sara what she won and again share her example of how the mayor’s office stationary might look like with her design.

First, what we promised Sara:

• Pride in winning TP’s first hastily thrown together contest.
• One cold, tasty local beer purchased and served to you by the TP staff at our next meetup — either tomorrow or in the future.
• A promise that we’ll submit your idea to the appropriate persons at City Hall — we’ll get back to you on this, seriously.

Sara gave an example of its use on city stationary and business cards, too.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge.

Many of you joined in the criticism over the city’s new logo.

We figured that if it was that bad, our community could put together in five days of a holiday week a slew of better choices. So we challenged you. Others put out the word until last night, when we closed the door.

We at Technically Philly narrowed down the submissions to what we’re calling our top three. Now it’s up to you by way of a day’s voting.

We’ll count each tweet and comment as a vote. By 5 p.m., we’ll close the polls, as it were, and hire an overpriced accounting firm to audit the tally. Or just count ourselves. Oh, and we absolutely encourage politicking.

Wednesday morning, we’ll announce the winner.

Thanks to everyone who submitted! We hope you’ll see more of these contests — with better prizes to boot. For now, check out the three finalists below and let us know which is your favorite.

Sara DeMarco

Click to enlarge.

Sara used the Liberty Bell as the citywide image and offered icons within to differentiate departments.

Click to enlarge.

Sara gave an example of its use on city stationary and business cards, too.

Click to enlarge.

R.J. White

on Tumblr

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps a brilliant use of irony on our city’s frustration over being outshined by its younger brother up north in the last half century. And, if we can, we’d like to quote RJ from his e-mail: “I believe that the deeply, deeply professional and artistic nature of my entries speaks for itself.”

See some of his other drafts of his here — and yes, we do think that’s a flying cheesesteak fighting a dragon.

Larry West

Click to enlarge.

Former mayoral candidate Larry West says that without any hesitation Philadelphia should boast being the birthplace of America, with a proud eagle looking upward. If that’s not enough classic American imagery for you, Larry notes that those 13 stars do indeed represent the 13 original colonies.

Honorable mention to Clifford Stevens for his tagline: “City of Philadelphia: Author of Liberty, Agent of Change”

This “contest” was all in good fun, so don’t worry about taking this too seriously.

OK, so who’s going to win this thing and our lame prize package? Tweet us or below post your vote in our comments.

Web designer in 1999

As the first decade of the 21st century closes, the Internet continues to change everything it touches.

Ten years ago, the Web was still working its way into everyday life of everyday people in Philadelphia. Now, it’s finding even more crevices of existence to transform. So, using the Internet Archive, we thought it might be a hoot to look back at the Web sites from ten Philadelphia technology institutions from the end of 1999.

It’s another in our completely irregular Top Ten Tuesday department.

PHILLY.COM

Fed exclusively by Inquirer and Daily News copy, Philly.com circa November 1999 looks all hot and bothered in blue with standard tabbed browsing and a cluttered, three-column format.

COMCAST

The branding and noteriety weren’t there, but Comcast.com in October 1999 may have already showed the signs of what became earlier this year the largest media company in the country. Buried somewhere on the black page and side navigation, there was probably a note announcing the $1 billion investment Microsoft made in Comcast two years earlier that helped propel the MSO into the major content-creation game, allowing the company to purchase the E! Network.

TL VENTURES

Back in November 1999, TL Ventures, the region’s largest VC firm at the time, was flush with dot-com era cash and, apparently, able to boast a sleek-for-the-time black and gold Web site. Ten years later, they’ve gone for a lighter look and are not quite as cash rich.

UNIVERSITY CITY SCIENCE CENTER

The University City Science Center calls itself the oldest and largest urban research park in the country, but interestingly at some point it bought its sciencecenter.org domain off the Harmon Science Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as it was still in their hands in October 1999.

DREXEL UNIVERSITY

Could you expect anything short of big, Serif Ds from the Big Five’s king of computer science and design, like their site had in spring 1999?

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

You have to love those pins and the miles long landing page for Temple circa December 1999.

SUNOCO

Though they’ve recently hinted at again departing Center City, Sunoco launched its Web presence while located firmly inside Philadelphia’s boundaries. Turns out, aside from developing a blue background, 10 years from spring 2000 hasn’t done much to the company’s primary landing page, which takes you to either the Mellon Center-based brand you know or the Canadian firm it spun off in the mid-1990s.

GREATER PHILADELPHIA TOURISM MARKETING CORP.

They hopped on the Web early and haven’t left since, so by November 1999, GPTMC had more than enough time to get every color in the ranbow and every stylized navigation bar on the Web onto GoPhila.com.

GLAXOSMITHKLINE

In spring 2000, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, with 180-year-old ties to Philadelphia, had only a temporary page marking its future Web presence.

REMBRANDT’S

OK, it ain’t have much to do with technology, but Fairmount mainstay Rembrandt’s boasts to have had the first restaurant Web site in Philadelphia. With a three-year-old Web presence by this 1999 widescreen look — which hasn’t changed much at all since — we couldn’t find anyone to unseat the claim.

This is a semi-regular department we may or may not call Top Ten Tuesdays. There’s no judging in brainstorming. See others here.

We tweeted:

Corporate branding Web site Brand New called a new design for the City of Philadelphia one of the year’s worst.

In the spirit of the new year and because we know you don’t want to do any real work this week, we put an open call out to the designers and developers and tinkerers and artists in our community. Make a designer’s design for the City of Philadelphia.

Submit your ideas for a logo that would better suit the City of Philadelphia — yes, it can be sarcastic or heartfelt. It can even include the Liberty Bell or a cheesesteak if you think they sum Philly up well … and you can endure the taunts of your peers. We’re thinking standard display images, but we won’t begin to limit you, the audience. If it fits in an e-mail or can be linked to, we want to see them.

All submissions need to be sent to info [at] technicallyphilly.com [files or links] by the final whistle of this Sunday’s 4:15 p.m. Eagles last regular season game, against those bastard Cowboys.

The best design — to be decided by an incredibly complex algorithm that combines RTing, commenting and how surly reporter Brian James Kirk feels that morning — will win an incredibly disappointing prize package featuring the following:

• Pride in winning TP’s first hastily thrown together contest (maybe we’ll even design you a button… maybe)
• One cold, tasty local beer purchased and served to you by the TP staff at our next meetup, to be announced shortly
• A promise that we’ll submit your idea to the appropriate persons at City Hall… if they would only take us off hold.