Nick and his team at Neoteric Design are a pleasure to work with. I’ve gone through two complex design/build projects with Nick and they both launched without a hitch! He solved tricky problems, offered smart solutions, and made himself and his team available throughout the process. I’ve heard many launching horror stories, but with Nick he made it happen smoothly and it was actually fun.

Nate Padavick, Owner
They Draw and Cook / They Draw and Travel

Situation

They Draw and Cook and They Draw and Travel were founded in 2010 by Nate Padavick and Salli S. Swindell, the brother/sister design and illustration team known as Studio SSS. Initially built on Blogger, the sites rapidly grew on the founding principle of promoting the careers of freelance illustrators around the world.

Nate and Salli needed to transition from a blog to a platform that could handle tens of thousands of illustrators and hundreds of thousands of images — while supporting editors and serving as the foundation for a growing community.

Goals

  • Inspire and support freelance illustrators, art directors, and passionate doodlers, drawers, and students
  • Build a platform to manage artists, visitors, high res illustrations, submission workflow, and ongoing product development
  • Express the brands’ fun and inspiring voice while generating real value for its members

Work

We developed a unified platform architecture in Ruby on Rails to support the brands. On-the-fly asset handling generates web- and mobile-ready images and archives high-resolution assets for print publications. Extensive tagging and searching, unique for each brand, supports discovery and exploration, while friendly user feedback to artists inspires and supports the growing community.

Flexible editorial publishing tools support ongoing product development and testing: design challenges, brand sponsored challenges, illustrators for hire and more.

Outcomes

The complex site architecture includes

  • Multiple cloud-based Rails containers and workers at Heroku
  • A Redis service for caching view fragments, geocoding, and database results
  • An ElasticSearch service for search
  • A SendGrid service for transactional emails
  • Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipelines enable automated code builds, tests, security audits and deployments
  • The platform handles traffic spikes of 50,000 uniques a day during contest periods, and hundreds of thousands of hires images

From day one, Nick led a streamlined, organized, goals-and-results-driven process. His team knocked the redesign out of the park, preserving the voice and whimsy of the original blog while adding cool features and transforming it into clean, scalable, intuitive site. Nick and his team are fun to work with, creative, and they understand that each project has a unique set of needs. I definitely recommend Nick and Neoteric.

Robert Padavick
They Draw and Cook

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