municipal Archives - Brown Bear Creative

Northeastern Connecticut Council of Governments (NECCOG) Logo and Responsive Website

Role: Graphic Designer / Web Designer / Web Developer

The Northeastern Connecticut Council of Governments (NECCOG) provides a wide array of services for its sixteen member towns. NECCOG contracted with Brown Bear Creative to design and develop an all-encompassing website and a new logo.

NECCOG’s new logo is simple and sleek, using a modern color palette of grays and burgundies. The graphic alludes to the type of towns the council serves without being completely literal and overly cluttered.

NECCOG’s new website is powered by WordPress, an open-source content management system. In this way, staff can easily update the site to provide the latest information and photos using an intuitive, browser-based admin panel.

Brown Bear designed and developed the website theme to be responsive, which means the layout adapts gracefully depending on the screen size. This allows the information to be easily readable and accessible on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones alike.

According to John Filchak, NECCOG Executive Director, “This web site will enable NECCOG to better communicate with the public in northeastern Connecticut – allowing them more informed opportunities to comment on our activities and the future of the region.”

Brown Bear has also designed and developed a standalone site and logo for NECCOG’s bus system, the Northeastern Connecticut Transit District (NECTD), which provides schedules, maps, fare information, and more.

Launch the Northeastern Connecticut Council of Governments Website »

New Look for Discover East Lyme Website

Role: Web Designer / Web Developer

Launched in 2006, Discover East Lyme was due for a makeover. Brown Bear created a fresh, open look for the website, while still retaining the site’s original charm.

The new design showcases more beautiful photos of the town and focuses more attention on local businesses. The new navigation across the top provides an intuitive experience for visitors and frees up space in the main body of the website.

The homepage highlights the latest news and upcoming events so that visitors can quickly and easily find information about seasonal happenings such as the Light Parade, Restaurant Week, the Memorial Day Parade, the LobsterFest, Celebrate East Lyme, and more!

Launch the Discover East Lyme website >

Midsummer Festival 2013 Brochure & Responsive Website

Role: Graphic Designer / Web Designer / Web Developer

The Midsummer Festival is a celebration of arts and culture that has taken place every summer in Old Lyme for over twenty years. 2013’s event is bigger than ever, with seven sites along Lyme Street from the Village Shoppes all the way up to the Florence Griswold Museum.

To showcase the festival’s expansion, Brown Bear created a vibrant brochure that lists all the events over two days plus a custom-drawn map of the festival sites, parking areas, and shuttle bus route.

Brown Bear also made improvements to the website, which was originally developed in 2008, to optimize the site across all devices. Now people accessing the site on their smartphones will have an enhanced experience when looking for festival information. The layout is simplified, text is readable, and side scrolling is eliminated when viewing the site on smaller devices.

This type of website is called a responsive website. The layout and other elements change automatically based on the screen width in order to create an optimum viewing experience for all devices.

Launch the Midsummer Festival website >

2013 Discover East Lyme Brochure

Role: Graphic Designer

The 2013 Discover East Lyme brochures are out! These brightly colored brochures promote the attractions and businesses in the villages of Niantic and Flanders. The inside folds out to a business directory and custom-drawn map of the area so visitors and residents can easily locate restaurants, shops, art venues, and more!

Look for the new brochures in local storefronts and check out Discover East Lyme online for town news and events.

Visit Old Lyme Brochure

Role: Graphic Designer

Brown Bear Creative designed bright and welcoming brochures for the Lyme-Old Lyme Chamber of Commerce. These trifolds showcase information and photos about Old Lyme’s scenic and cultural hotspots. The inside provides a custom-drawn map and business directory of all the chamber’s members.

The brochure ties in well with the chamber’s website, Visit Old Lyme, which Brown Bear Creative also designed and developed. Read more about the web design project here >

Visit Old Lyme: Lyme-Old Lyme Chamber of Commerce Site

Role: Web Designer / Web Developer

The Lyme-Old Lyme Chamber of Commerce wanted to strengthen their web presence with a new website. Brown Bear designed and developed a welcoming, yet comprehensive site that appeals to residents, tourists, and businesses alike.

Drawing upon the town’s artistic heritage, Brown Bear used textures and graphics that hinted at fine art paper and brushstrokes. The vivid blues, greens, and yellows in the site’s color palette coupled with a slideshow of various town festivities help create an overall feeling of vibrancy on the homepage.

Four highlighted categories on the homepage draw you into the heart of the site: the Chamber’s business directory. Divided into Live, Visit, Dine, and Shop, the business listings include each business’s contact details, an image/logo, a description, a map of its location, and social media links when available. The directory can be further filtered by subcategory or searched by keyword.

The site also includes a calendar of Chamber and town events; information, forms, and news relating to the Chamber; and a description/history of the town.

Launch Visit Old Lyme website »

Brown Bear Creative also designed promotional brochures for the Lyme-Old Lyme Chamber of Commerce. Read about the brochure design project here >

Northeastern Connecticut Transit District Logo & Website

Role: Graphic Designer / Web Designer / Web Developer

The Northeastern Connecticut Transit District (NECTD) offers bus services to the northeastern CT towns of Brooklyn, Killingly, Putnam, Thompson, Eastford, Plainfield, Pomfret, Woodstock, and Union. They approached Brown Bear Creative to rebrand their organization and to produce a website that would house pertinent information about their services.

To reflect NECTD’s diverse service area comprising of both quiet countryside and bustling town centers, Brown Bear incorporated both farm and downtown imagery into a cohesive logo.

Like the logo, the website follows suit with a clean, straightforward look. Visitors to the site can easily access the information they need, including bus route maps, schedules, fares, and other details about riding the bus. Using the latest coding practices, Brown Bear ensured that the website is fast-to-load, search-engine-friendly, and accessible.

Launch Northeastern Connecticut Transit District Website »

Blue Hills Regional Technical School Website

Role: Web Designer / Web Developer

Blue Hills Regional Technical School, a vocational high school located in Canton, MA, was in need of a website that not only highlighted the wide range of shop programs they had to offer but one that showcased student and faculty pride.

Brown Bear Creative designed and developed a WordPress-powered website that captures prospective students’ interest while providing a comprehensive resource for current students, parents, and staff. Staying true to the Blue Hills Warrior colors, Brown Bear used a strong blue and green palette in the design. The site incorporates vivid photos and graphics to help reflect the wonderful sense of community at the school.

To ensure visitors can easily access information and documents, the site is laid out in an intuitive manner. A navigation menu with dropdowns at the top of every page provides a consistent source for page links throughout the site. A list of “Quick Links” located on the sidebar of every page makes popular links immediately accessible. Visitors can also use a search form at the top of the site to look for keywords.

As Blue Hills is a technical school, it was especially important to showcase its various vocational programs. Each shop has its own dedicated page that describes the program and features a slideshow of images of the facilities and students in action.

Using WordPress’s password-protected admin panel, Blue Hills staff have the ability to easily add school news and documents as well as edit the text and images on every page of the website. This capability allows them to keep parents and students up to date on school happenings.

Launch Blue Hills Regional Technical School Website »

Town of Lyme Official Website

Role: Web Designer / Web Developer

The Town of Lyme had shut down its website in the fall of 2008 when a new state law required towns to post meeting minutes and agendas online and on a deadline. The small town simply did not have the the manpower or the know-how to keep their site updated themselves in a timely manner.

After a long hiatus, the town came to Brown Bear Creative for a solution. Brown Bear developed a WordPress-powered website that the selectmen could easily update themselves without any coding knowledge.

Through an easy-to-use admin interface, the selectmen can update text and photos, add pages, upload documents, and post news to the website. Once they hit Publish, the changes to the site are instantaneous. This simplifies and streamlines the process of posting minutes and agendas online.

To capture the Town of Lyme’s unique qualities, such as their deep ties to the land and their rich historical background, Brown Bear designed the site to showcase Lyme’s farms, parks, waterways, and other picturesque town landmarks. A sleek photo slideshow in the masthead of every page allows visitors to manually scroll through the images or sit back and watch them fade in and out automatically. Photos are also peppered throughout the pages of the site and available in bulk in a photogallery.

Launch the Town of Lyme Website »

Medford Public Schools Website

Role: Web Designer / Web Developer

Medford Public Schools in Massachusetts was in need of a comprehensive website that housed information and news not only for the district but for each of their nine schools as well. Brown Bear provided a robust content-managed solution powered by WordPress that teachers and other staff could update themselves.

The website features a clean, intuitive design with a blue and gray color scheme based on Medford’s school colors. The homepage and each school landing page highlight latest news, administrator contact details, and other essential information.

All the content, including pages, news posts, and sidebar data, on the site is editable via WordPress’s easy-to-use administration panel. Site editors can also upload photos, videos, and documents and place them throughout the site.

Launch Medford Public Schools Website »