Saturday, July 04, 2009

What we do

4D Projections fuses editorial planning with Content Management technology to create living Internet portals. From start to finish, our services can power your project at a fraction of the cost of conventional design teams.

Our skills

'Futureguy' is a professional writer and former Chief Editor of two of East Asia's largest expat magazines. He is also skilled at building aesthetically pleasing Joomla systems with full functionality that clients can maintain themselves.

Project deployment

An enterprise-scale project typically takes around four months: one month for planning, two for execution, and one for refinement. If a client can offer viable design/editorial/coding support, it may take less.

Enterprise class media development

4D Projections provides ‘enterprise class’ production services. This means that we utilize our technical ability in print, web, and film production, in order to power our core specialty, which is editorial production. We are clinical: editorial production starts with clearly defined objectives. These objectives determine what resources are needed, to achieve the target.

4D Projections differs from an advertising agency in two key ways: Pro media expertise

1As indie producers, we know all the shortcuts to get projects produced as quickly and cheaply as possible, without compromising on the quality of the media.

2Our Editorial Direction specialization allows us to take the burden of ‘working out the fine details’ off of the client. Thus, clients need only to give broad directives and then monitor. We make the whole process easy and efficient.

Here are two of our most recent ‘enterprise class’ successes:

that’s Shanghai magazine

Urbanatomy.com is the online home of that's Shanghai, the city's largest expat mag. Despite excelling in print, that team was clumsy with web media, so they turned to 4D Projections with a very vague directive: ‘please make us a powerful city portal that non-tech people can manage easily.’

For the next 6 months, 4DP worked as a full-time consultant, temporarily assuming the dual roles of Lead Developer/ Managing Editor. Among our achievements:
  • New CMS: erased their existing site and replaced it with a Joomla content management system.
  • Add-ons: added numerous community functions to the Joomla core, customized per client specs, and helped train non-web staff to operate the system independently.
  • Editorial: produced a base layer of content, created initial parameters, and trained the print editorial team to 'run wild' without need for tech intervention.
  • Tech training: trained in-house tech staff to maintain, customize, and manipulate the system, thus ensuring maximum future scalability.

Ameson Foundation

Ameson FoundationAs the that's Shanghai gig was winding down, 4DP met Ameson, who mentioned they were looking for a talented web developer. In fact, they wanted someone to create an entire China teachers’ info portal, to a world-class standard. They also wanted a company brochure site, to highlight their organization’s many sub-projects.

4DP accepted. We quickly excelled, and were then asked to expand our single-handed efforts into print... 

Rising to the challenge, 4DP spun multiple plates (print brochures, company logos, Chinese newspaper advertisements, etc), while at the same time delivering the the goods as promised: a world-class teachers' portal and a solid organizational portfolio site that documented the intricate (and previously undefinable) elements of the company.

On both sites, 4DP did all of the following, solo: creation of editorial parameters and targets; web development; grahpic design; writing and research; photo editing; creative direction.
 

CMS


Several years ago, the Open Source Philosophy brought dozens of the world's finest developers together to create Joomla, a free content management system with a massive user community, robust development, and tens of thousands of free and commercial extensions.

Design

Rockettheme makes the best templates (skins) on the planet. They are easy for novices to customize, extremely flexible, and packed with built-in functions that enhance user experiences with slick sophistication.

Hosting


For all 4DP sites (including our client sites), we've always relied on Siteground. They have very competitive prices, excellent customer service, and their connectivity within China is among the best in the business.

4DP portfolio

  • Asia platform: HelloNanjing.net Our latest project is a community portal built to cover the expat scene in Nanjing China. It has all the trimmings: listings directory, free classifieds for registered members, a newsletter service, members'...
  • Asia platform: Planet Asia magazine In 2002, Planet Asia magazine was proposed to Japanese media types (in Osaka) as a print media publication. It didn't take. Years of struggle followed. In 2006, our lack of capital finally drove us to...
  • Enterprise class: Urbanatomy.com Urbanatomy.com is the online version of that's Shanghai, the city's largest expat rag (60,000 issues printed every month). Despite excelling in print, this team had been using an antiquated ColdFusion...
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4DP's Asia platform

How to deploy a project


Media blog

  • Guerilla biz cards: HelloNanjing We recently launched a new Nanjing city portal. Launched by Futureguy and Patric Clarke (neither of whom are pro designers by trade), it was...
  • Simple 8-page project booklet Design done the 4DP way begins with an editorial framework, which leads to a rough page layout, which then leads to image selection and refinements....
  • Chinese newspaper advert A subproject thrown at us recently was to create some advertisements intended for publication in Chinese newspapers around Jiangsu Province....
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