As a small (n=1) shop, Scrubjay can focus intently on delivering value for organizations with constrained budgets. Since 2013, we’ve launched more than 200 projects

Here are a few of our favorites.

Preschool Marketplace

  • User experience
  • Visual design
  • Front-end development
  • Content Strategy
  • Django development
  • Product & project management

Scrubjay leads the design and development for this resource that helps Portland parents find free and reduced-cost preschools near them. Working with stakeholders from the program team and parent accountability groups, we helped choose the name, and designed the logo and brand. We crafted the user experience to be as simple as possible, beginning with just a location. We built the website with integrations into Mapbox for geolocation and mapping services.

MicroMentor

  • User experience
  • Visual design
  • Front-end development
  • Django development
  • Product & project management

Scrubjay led the visual and user experience design for MicroMentor, a global platform in five languages connecting small business entrepreneurs with mentors around the world. We spearheaded a full redesign and redevelopment of the platform, dovetailing with an organizational strategy to bring the product in-house from an external vendor.

TolaData

  • Visual design
  • Front-end development
  • Django development

TolaData is Mercy Corp’s homegrown results monitoring platform. It is a complex product that tracks progress against key indicators and produces reports in multiple technical formats. Working closely an in-house software team, we cleaned up the visual design and re-architected its front-end, paving the way for a highly interactive experience using React.

Fat Pencil Studio

  • User experience
  • Front-end development
  • Content Strategy
  • Django development

Fat Pencil Studio is a small collection of brilliant visual storytellers. Their challenge is to describe to potential clients how they can use architectural and data visualizations in court (and elsewhere). We worked together to develop a deep content strategy, and then paired it with a compelling visual design and custom Django/Wagtail backend to produce this sharp website. Geek note: we migrated seven years of content from a Wordpress site with complex custom migrations!

Miradi Share 2.0

  • User experience
  • Visual design

Miradi is a complex conservation-management software platform developed by our longtime clients and collaborators Sitka Technology. Miradi Share is Miradi’s online tool for sharing conservation projects. We architected and designed geospatial visualization tools for Miradi (both desktop and online), and then we designed Miradi’s online footprint at Miradishare.org. With Sitka Technology

Stagecoach Digital Redesign

  • User experience
  • Visual design
  • Front-end development

Backend (Drupal 8) and front-end web development, design and user experience support. Scrubjay provided significant design support and completed the art direction and user experience support. Based on designs & user experience by Stagecoach Digital.

Audubon Gift Center

  • Visual design

We crafted an improved user experience for Audubon’s symbolic gift site — which also features real gifts like plush toys and binoculars. Visual design based on existing Audubon art direction. The result is visually appealing and easy to navigate. The site provides Audubon relevant merchandise without feeling like a sales pitch. Drupal 7 backend using Drupal Commerce. With Stagecoach Digital.

Helen’s Gifts

  • Visual design
  • Drupal development

A new personalized concept in meaningful donations. Givers can select specific symbolic amounts and see its impact — for example, $130 funds two cataract surgeries. The gift recipient receives an eCard or printed card. We developed the site in Drupal 7 using Drupal Commerce. Sliders allowing donors to choose an amount was the most challenging part of the build, but the results are fluid and layered. With Stagecoach Digital.

United Way of the Columbia-Willamette Reboot

  • User experience
  • Visual design
  • Front-end development
  • Content Strategy
  • Drupal development

A completely rebranded, rebuilt, and rebooted website for our longstanding client. We are especially proud this one. We upgraded to Drupal 8, creating a completely new content-first user experience. Rebuilt entirely from bottom-to-top, the site highlights current programs and specific opportunities for people to join the United Way community. We provide ongoing maintenance and small project support for United Way of the Columbia-Willamette. Art direction and design direction by Lenore Ooyevaar, content strategy by Megan Zabel-Holmes.

Cel Tower Records Visualization

  • User experience
  • Visual design
  • Front-end development
  • Django development

Fat Pencil Studio provides compelling spatial visualizations for lawyers and public agencies. For this case, their client needed to visualize the complex movements of several people, as recorded by their phone calls and texts, using cel tower data subpoened from the phone companies. Such data are constrained in unusual ways. The actual content of the calls or texts isn’t recorded, and neither is the real location of the phone. But the cel company records what tower what pinged, at what time, what number was connected, and some other information about the connection. Scrubjay helped Fat Pencil Studio produce a Django + MapBox + D3 web mashup that they could use to explore those movements. An anonymized and simplified demo of the software we built is available at arbutus.scrubjay.works. Click on a map dot to see its corresponding record on the table. Highlight a section in the timeline to see only the calls in that time slice. Longer calls have longer bars. Click the checkbox to highlight only specific calls. Note: this demonstration site uses anonymized data.

Saturday Academy Online Class Catalog

  • User experience

Although we prefer to work iteratively from protoypes, a smooth boxes-and-arrows user experience design project like this can yield excellent results. Saturday Academy needed to bring their PDFs-and-printouts class catalog online for a major user experience overhaul. With OMBU; visual design by Jansen Creative.

Oregon Metro News

  • User experience

Unusual for a government body, Oregon Metro is filling a void for local, townhall-style reporting. Their nature news has always been popular, and they’ve been adding original reportage for land use, transportation, and waste management issues. We strategized, architected, and designed a full user experience to leverage this unique and valuable asset. We’re especially proud of the rich long-form potential as evidenced in pieces like “You are here: A snapshot of Portland-area housing costs.” With OMBU.