Sierra Cascade Land Trust Council (SCLTC) is a conservation group to conservation groups—providing resources for education, training, and research to 13 regional land trusts that support voluntary land conservation in the Sierra Cascade foothills of California.
When SCLTC’s website was in need of a revamp, the organization’s coordinator, Susan Kane, looked to Studio Nuñez for help and fresh ideas. With a long-term interest in conservation and land preservation, Studio Nunez was no stranger to the task of communicating the complex role that SCLTC plays in relation to its member groups.
The first step: audit, triage, and revise all the content from the old, shtml-based website, in preparation to move the site to a new host and a dynamic WordPress installation. As part of this process, we wrote new content that more compellingly describes the mission of SCLTC. We also re-designed the organization’s logo and logotype, and carefully selected photos for the site that underscore the importance of SCLTC’s work by depicting the grandeur of the Sierra Cascades.
Several months after the smooth migration to the new site, SCLTC again tapped Studio Nuñez for another major project: providing editorial expertise for its Foothills Area Conservation Report. Three years in development, and involving a team of environmental experts and GIS engineers, the Conservation Report came to Studio Nuñez as a collection of distinct manuscripts, with over 50 document files and 35 GIS map files. We coalesced the work into a 141-page opus with a unified voice and structure, working closely with the authors to make this scientific report as accessible and useful as possible for both a technical and a general audience.
That accomplished, Studio Nuñez collaborated with ace designer Kathy Dotson to shape the report into a print and online document that appeals to the eye as well as to the mind. Studio Nuñez also commissioned custom, deep-zoom code that interactively displays each conservation map with no degradation to page load, and we optimized pdfs of the map collection for easy download. All of this work was accomplished on schedule and within budget for SCLTC—and we demoed the online function of the maps and report for a regional meeting of the Council Board.
The scope, the scientific detail, the number of players involved, and the design and technical challenges of this project could have driven a less-seasoned team… well, quite frankly… batty. But at Studio Nuñez, we enjoy a good challenge for a good cause. You can see the result right here.
