Monkey Do
- Standards Driven
- User Focused
- Content Is King
Monkey Do builds web sites that bring you to your users.
Client Work
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An Event Apart
On December 1, 2012, we launched a brand new, fully responsive site for An Avent Apart, the design conference for people who make web sites.
Among the redesign's goals: become a destination, update the brand and distinguish it from sibling companies, and, of course, work well across devices of all screen sizes.
Read more about the An Event Apart redesign on our blog.
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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 ExpressionEngine, 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.
Monkey Do Projects
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Got a few minutes?
Got a Few Minutes is a small web application built to take advantage of social sign-on and user-generated content.
Built with responive breakpoints for medium- and small-sized screens, Got a Few Minutes allows you to find something more constructive to do with a spare few moments than watch cat videos on YouTube. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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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
An internal effort, 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.
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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.
It's the Little Things
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Notes on the 2013 Redesign of An Event Apart
When Jeffrey Zeldman approached Tim and I about working on the redesign of An Event Apart, we were happy to take the opportunity. more »
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On Designing in the Browser
It's impossible to avoid discussion of a browser-centric design process now. A quick search engine query for "designing in the browser" turns up dozens of well-argued blog posts, articles, and presentations about the pros and cons of creating design systems in HTML and CSS. more »
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The Price Gap: Is the era of the $1000 web site over?
This is a black-and-white look at a situation in which there's plenty of grey, but I think it's clear there's a price gap in web development services for small businesses. more »
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New project announcement! Got a few minutes?
Taking two days for design, one day for HTML/CSS/JS, and one day for setting up the backend (and a week of fiddling around with details, like responsive break points), we present to you our new project: Got a few minutes? more »
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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 »
Screencasts
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. Tim can be found on Twitter at @murtaugh.
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. Mike tweets as @mikepick.