Monkey Do
- Standards Driven
- User Focused
- Content Is King
Monkey Do builds web sites that bring you to your users.
Monkey Do Projects
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EEsaver
EEsaver is a free set of ExpressionEngine templates that make use of the open-source Treesaver JavaScript framework.
Treesaver layouts reconfigure themselves for any screen, and ExpressionEngine's flexibility makes it the perfect companion. Bring the two together and you have a very powerful tool for publishing magazine-style content to any device.
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Edible City
The recently-launched Edible City is a Monkey Do project that aims to map food trucks and other interesting food sources in New York.
Edible City was built to be platform-agnostic and is just as useful on your phone as it is in any desktop browser. Edible City will eventually expand to other cities, but at the moment it's still in beta — we'd love feedback!
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HTML5 Reset
HTML5 Reset is a collection of free HTML and Wordpress templates to get any web project started on the right foot.
Like a lot of developers, each time we start building a new web site we start with the same baseline set of HTML and CSS files. They save us a lot of time, and we thought we'd put our files out there for everyone to use. Anyone can download the files via GitHub.
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2011 Holiday Card
We had a little fun with our holiday card this year.
Making extensive use of jQuery, HTML5 and accelerometer APIs, this holiday card is as responsive and animated as we could make it. (Try printing it for a killer easter egg!)
Recent Client Work
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World Science Festival
Monkey Do designed a new site for the World Science Festival; the site features event and schedule information, participant biographies, and schedules for the annual New York City-based festival.
The site also includes a brand new video library, WSFtv, the official archive for the World Science Festival. Behind the scenes: HTML 5 templates driven by Expression Engine, videos distributed via Amazon's cloud services, and the whole thing lives on a Dreamhost Virtual Private Server.
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EconoMonitor
EconoMonitor is a Wordpress-base network of economic blogs designed for Roubini Global Economics.
Founded by economics blogger Nouriel Roubini, EconoMonitor brings together a community of economic, financial and geopolitical thinkers from around the world. Starting with the HTML5 Reset templates, Monkey Do provided a multi-blog Wordpress theme, as well as branding and logos for the new site.
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Scientific American
Scientific American ambitiously decided to redesign both their print magazine and web site at the same time. Famed magazine designer Roger Black was hired to oversee both efforts, and he asked Happy Cog and Monkey Do to work on the digital designs.
Working closely with Roger and Jeffrey Zeldman, Monkey Do provided HTML5 templates designed to complement the new print magazine, including custom web fonts provided by Webtype. Both new designs debuted toward the end of 2010.
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Roger Black
Roger Black wanted a new blog. He needed a way to talk about his new ventures: Treesaver, Ready-Media and Webtype.
Using Roger's own design, Monkey Do was able to quickly set him up with an Expression Engine-driven site, including social commenting enabled by Intense Debate.
It's the Little Things
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Auto-Truncating Article Titles (don't do it)
Designing for the web isn't easy, especially when you're trying to wrangle lots of content. Making it look great is important — but content must always trump appearance. more »
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Edible City Updates: Weather, Markets, Menus
We've been busy working on a nice little set of updates for Edible City and we finally managed to roll them out! We're hoping this new version can make the site even more useful to hungry people in New York City. more »
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Screencast: Where the new Gawker design loses me
Sometimes a Gawker site will push you to a different Gawker site, and I'm guessing it costs them a lot of page views... more »
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“Mobile” versus “Small Screen”
It's very tempting to say that we can adjust a site for mobile users, when much of the time what we're actually doing is simply adjusting a design for small screens... more »
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Softly Clicking: A Better CSS3 Button
Dan Cederholm's CSS3 button is a nifty animation demo showing how you can achieve a great button effect using only a small bit of markup and new-ish CSS3 rules. It looks terrific, but we think we can do even better... more »
Screencasts
@monkeydobiz
- “@murtaugh: IE6 gained market share last month. (No joke.) http://t.co/T8lxwgum”
- @murtaugh: Auto-Truncating Titles (don’t do it): Content must always trump appearance and users treat titles as content http://t.co/UHsKJtgx
- “@h5bp: Confused about which HTML5/CSS3/etc features to use? When to use polyfills? http://t.co/TnHYy2Et is here to help!”
@html5reset
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Tim Murtaugh has been building web sites since 1997 and specializes in delivering standards-based HTML5/CSS templates. His eye for design and serious affinity for clean code allow him to painlessly integrate his templates into larger systems without sacrificing user experience or aesthetics.
Tim started in the non-profit world, moved on to start-ups, shifted to an agency, upgraded to publishing, and from thence: Monkey Do.
Michael Pick approaches web design from the perspective of both art director and front-end developer. He primarily creates clean and concise design systems for websites, but is also known to get his hands dirty with Flash, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript development.
Over the years he has worked as a cog in a large agency, an in-house art director, and a humble freelancer, and has picked up a few awards along the way. He holds a BD in Communication Design from NSCAD in Halifax, Nova Scotia.