Who We Are: We Are Designers

June 4, 2024
Design is the lifeblood of what we do at Chapter Three. While much of this blog is devoted to development-related topics like decoupled Drupal, all development revolves around the design that supports it. Design is what clients and audiences see and engage with, and it makes or breaks a website as much as the site’s infrastructure.
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Vanessa

Who We Are: We Are Experts

May 28, 2024
At Chapter Three, we have a tight-knit team of experts in strategy, design, development, and project management. Our team members hold Drupal 9/10 developer and front-end certifications, demonstrating our technical expertise and commitment to staying at the forefront of web development best-practices.
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Arlina

How Design Systems Evolve

March 1, 2024
Large organizations with multi-site online ecosystems can be divided into two categories: those who have design systems and those who wish they did. Before the relatively recent advent of the design system, updating a fleet of websites to ensure consistency in components and brand voice was an extremely time-consuming and tedious process.
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Stephanie

Using Storybook for Design and Budget Flexibility

February 21, 2024
Building a website of any complexity requires effective coordination between developers and designers – and between both these parties and the client. In a typical project, designers ideate and build a mockup based on visual, UX, and UI elements, while developers determine if the design is feasible and, if so, get to work coding the site.
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Mike

Web Strategy at Chapter Three

January 31, 2024
At Chapter Three, we focus on building beautifully designed and developed websites that make our clients happy, deliver information efficiently, and are sustainable over the long-term. Because a fantastic end product starts at the beginning, we guide our clients through a collaborative, strategic assessment of vision, goals, technical features, and, of course, content. We start with a wide funnel, where broad statements then get defined, refined, and made into actionable design and development tasks.
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Mike

Visual Design at Chapter Three

January 24, 2024
In the fast-paced digital landscape, visual design is critical to capturing user attention and creating successful websites. Chapter Three’s design team stands out for its innovative, hands-on, and user-centric approach to web design. We believe that the visual design process is not just about creating aesthetically pleasing graphics, but is also a careful undertaking that merges aesthetic creativity with functionality.
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Kirsten

Why Design Systems Matter for Large Organizations

August 18, 2023
If you’re a developer, designer, or content manager with a large organization, chances are your portfolio encompasses not just one website but a whole fleet of them. Governments and other public se...
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Kirsten

A Redesign in Support of Children's Health

March 21, 2023
The California Children's Hospital Association (CCHA) is a membership organization that champions children's health, well-being and quality of care in California's children's hospitals. Like many n...
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Mike

The Redesign of Childress Klein; Part 1: Careers

February 12, 2020
Childress Klein is one of the largest full-service real estate companies in the Southeast US. And while the firm has developed over 50 million square feet of co...
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Mike

Using Background Videos

February 27, 2019
We have designed and built many websites with a background video playing on the homepage. It’s a modern trend and a powerful, eye-grabbing visual asset. Video conveys movement and momentu...
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Kirsten

Chapter Three Launches Innovative, New HDR Site on Drupal 8

June 19, 2017
Architecture and engineering company HDR wanted to bring their web presence into the modern age. Our goal was to bring HDR’s personality to the forefront with their new Drupal 8 website. Through extensive strategy and design workshops, facilitated on-site in Omaha and virtually with distributed team members, we crafted an information architecture and aesthetic that supported internal initiatives while enhancing the general public’s experience.
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Andrea

ADNI3 Launches on Drupal 8

April 2, 2017
Since 2004, the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) has been leading clinical trials for the purpose of finding effective methods of treatment and preventative medicine for...
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Aimee

Web Font Licensing Overview

June 30, 2016
Implementing custom typography on the web used to be hard. We were limited to a small set of "web-safe fonts", provided by Microsoft’s
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Garret

The Slice Template

June 13, 2016
For the past two to three years, we’ve been evolving a flexible design solution for marketing pages. We call it the Slice Template. What is the Slice Template? The Slice ...
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Nica

A Better Way to Administrate Drupal - Part 1

January 14, 2016
I started an internal discussion with the team about the possibility of contributing an administrative theme to the community. Many were eager to help. A new Slack channel was born, and a impassioned flurry of ideas and concepts came pouring out.
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Casey

Persona Best Practices

December 3, 2015
Personas are an insightful deliverable to help create better user experiences. They can be approached a number of ways depending on your end goals—whether you're redefining your brand voi...
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Nica

Wireframing Template for Sketch

September 18, 2015
This was supposed to be Part 3 of my Wireframing with OmniGraffle series but the trouble is, I don’t use OmniGraffle for wireframes anymore! (It is still a great tool for building sit...
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Garret

Goals First, Then Tactics

July 6, 2015
When I kick off a client project, two of my first questions are: What are your project goals? What are your project tactics? Most of the time, my clie...
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Nica

Drupalcon LA Recap

May 18, 2015
DrupalCon LA was a success! Even though our booth got lost by UPS, our team pulled together a make-shift booth in a matter of days, gave three well received talks, led a successful training, partic...
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Nica

What is a Launch Blocker?

November 21, 2014
With almost every aggressively-timed project launch, the race to the finish line can easily become a game of task resolution whack-a-mole. With anxieties running high, the pre-launch to-do list can...
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Andrea

Our Industry Needs Digital Experience Directors

October 2, 2014
Our industry needs a new position. A person whose entire job is owning, directing and overseeing a website. We need a new title for them. I propose we call them Digital Experience Directors...
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Nica

Drupalcon Austin 2014 Recap

June 9, 2014
For those who didn't get to attend Drupalcon or are looking for our session videos or slides, they are posted below. The Drupal Association did a great j...
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Nica

Chapter Three Website Redesign 5.0

May 28, 2014
It is with great pleasure that we can finally announce the relaunch of the Chapter Three website! A year in the making, this site represents a culmination of efforts encompassing our evolution as a...
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Nica

An Event Apart SF 2013 Recap

December 13, 2013
I just got back from An Event Apart San Francisco and my brain is about to burst. I’ll do my best to summarize my most significant lea...
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Garret

Sketch vs. Fireworks

December 10, 2013
Our design team was shocked and dismayed to...
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Darius

How to Create a Winning Website

October 24, 2013

Creating or redesigning a website can be an overwhelming task to take on. Most people don’t know where to start, or get stuck along the way.

To make this process easier to understand, we produced this infographic to illustrate the steps required to create a beautiful and meaningful Drupal website.

View the full infographic to learn:

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Nica

Presentation: Wireframing Smarter

October 21, 2013

As the sites we build get increasingly complicated, the wireframing phase is increasingly important. Solving high-level usability challenges early in the process is less expensive and faster for you and your clients! In this talk, I'll share the techniques and tools we use at Chapter Three to quickly produce high-quality wireframes and maintain your UX sanity.

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Garret

Wireframing With OmniGraffle, Part 2: Tips and Resources

July 22, 2013
Now that you’ve got a basic framework for your wireframes, you’re ready to dive in! You should have a fat stack of paper wireframes to work from, so the hard thinking should be done already. ...
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Garret

Death of skeuomorphism and the future of design

June 26, 2013

The future is now

At the Design4Drupal camp in Boston there was a lot of talk about responsive design the state of design and where the future of design is headed. There was much discussion about what types of devices we may soon be designing for and how people will interact with them.

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Darius

How to Give Design Feedback Like a Pro

June 14, 2013
Giving design feedback is hard, but with a few quick tips you do it like a pro. The Design Feedback Sandwich. The best way to keep designers happy is to use what I call the&nb...
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Nica

Helping Tintri revolutionize the VM-aware storage market

May 16, 2013

To expand and gain a stronger foothold in the VM storage market, Tintri turned to Chapter Three to create a new look and feel for their business. As a team, the two companies built a stronger content structure that spoke more effectively to Tintri’s primary audiences.

The project was a resounding success, resulting in an immediate 30% increase in traffic and a significant uptick in lead generation after just one month.

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Darius

Xyratex Case Study

February 6, 2013
We created a new site for Xyratex to better communicate with its target audiences, and reflect its evolution into a solutions company. A new website for a broader audience
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Nica

10 Great Places To Source Images For Your Website

January 8, 2013

Finding images for your website can be a daunting task. We thought it'd be useful to compile a resource of sites we use to help people tasked with this responsibility.

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Darius

Presentation: How Therapy Helped My Client Relationships

October 12, 2012

Learn how to make your clients love you. This session will uncover tips for successful collaborations and share how mastering human interactions is the key to happiness, success and job satisfaction.

Knowing how to collaborate effectively with clients and co-workers largely accounts for the success of our projects. Yet navigating these waters is not always easy. All of us have encountered sticky situations where clients or co-workers miscommunicate, leading to different intrepretations of reality, which can lead to conflict.

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Nica

Content Strategy is the Missing Piece

May 18, 2012

In lieu of the fact that I was unable to go attend Confab this week, I wanted to represent the Content Strategy movement by sharing a notion I've been thinking about for quite some time. I believe there are three key ingredients to making an amazing website:

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Nica