Canary Promotion + Design is seeking qualified freelancers for web design, Drupal site building, and Drupal theming projects. We have a busy schedule of active projects for a variety of clients in the Arts, cultural and nonprofit sectors. We’re looking to find people who can demonstrate their ability to get up and running quickly and deliver excellent, creative work on deadline.

Web Designer

Responsibilities

Develop site maps, IA, wireframes, & moodboards
Design graphical layouts and interfaces
Cross-browser quality assurance testing
Deliver designs as clean semantic markup with progressively enhanced css & javascript + source files

Core Skills

• 3+ years of design experience or an exceptional portfolio
• A strong understanding of visual design and how it can shape and influence user experiences
• Strong conceptual design, collaborative, interpersonal and organizational skills
• Ability to rapidly design mockups
• The ability to hand code HTML/CSS/JS
• A working knowledge of the Jquery library
• Familiar with the general front end development best practices
• A familiarity with content management systems
• A dedication to detail and deadlines
• A demonstrated ability to effectively manage projects from concept to completion

Pluses

• Familiarity with Drupal
• Experience with Sass & Compass
• HTML5
• CSS3
• Experience with Arts, Education, and Cultural Institutions

Drupal Site Builder

Responsibilities

Develop build plan from site map and wireframes
Install and configure Drupal
Select, install and configure appropriate contributed modules
Build content types & views
Deliver a working site ready for a designer/themer

Core Skills

• 1+ years of experience or an exceptional portfolio
• Familiar with the “state of Drupal” & best practices
• Familiarity with Subversion VCS
• Ability to write simple custom modules
• Strong collaborative, interpersonal and organizational skills
• A dedication to detail and deadlines
• A demonstrated ability to effectively manage projects from concept to completion

Pluses

• Active within Drupal community
• Familiarity with Drush
• Familiarity with Panels, Features
• Appreciation for semantic markup
• Theming / front-end development skills
• Complex module development
• Experience with Arts, Education, and Cultural Institutions

Drupal Themer

Responsibilities

Develop a site theme on a working unthemed Drupal site
Build theme to match supplied design and HTML / CSS on key site pages
Write custom HTML / CSS for all other pages
Install and configure theme-specific modules
Configure Views 2 for markup
Write/modify custom template files (tpl.php)
Some content entry
Cross-browser quality assurance testing
Deliver a finished site ready for launch

Core Skills

• 2+ years of front-end development experience or an exceptional portfolio
• Familiar with the “state of Drupal” & best practices
• Familiar with front end development best practices
• The ability to hand code HTML/CSS/JS
• A working knowledge of the Jquery library
• Appreciation for semantic markup
• Strong collaborative, interpersonal and organizational skills
• A dedication to detail and deadlines
• A demonstrated ability to effectively manage projects from concept to completion

Pluses

• Active within Drupal community
• Familiarity with advanced theming techniques (preprocess functions, other theming frameworks)
• Experience with Sass & Compass
• HTML5
• CSS3
• Familiarity with Drush
• Familiarity with Panels, Features
• Familiarity with Subversion VCS
• A strong understanding of visual design
• Ability to write simple custom modules
• Experience with Arts, Education, and Cultural Institutions

About Canary Promotion + Design

Canary Promotion + Design is committed to working with nonprofit and mission-driven clients.  Our clients include education and advocacy organizations such (Philadelphia Young Playwrights, Future of Music Coalition), museums and art institutions (Rosenbach Museum & Library, The Design Center at Philadelphia University), major arts festivals (Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe, Philagrafika 2010), theater and dance companies (The Wilma Theater, Bristol Riverside Theatre, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Nichole Canuso Dance Company), music venues and presenters (Johnny Brenda’s, Ars Nova Workshop), authors and literary publications (Neil Baldwin, American Poetry Review), national television shows (The Colbert Report), and various other nonprofit organizations and businesses. We believe in building personal relationships and long-term partnerships with our clients, many of whom have continued to work with Canary year after year.

Established in 2001, Canary Promotion + Design is founded and run by people who are truly invested in the nonprofit, cultural and creative communities. Co-founders Mason Wendell and Megan Wendell bring to each project over 12 years of experience working in various fields of the arts & culture, entertainment and technology industries.

Our services encompass both the visual and verbal communications needed to effectively tell our clients’ stories.  Our personalized publicity, branding and marketing services specialize in integrating new media strategies with traditional techniques to create wide-reaching media campaigns while encouraging more personal audience interactions.

Our custom websites feature beautiful, functional and friendly design using the Drupal content management system and framework. We’re pragmatic, inventive, and equally at home designing and writing code. We look for challenges and find solutions.

To Apply

Please email resumes, portfolio sites, and other relavent links to: mason@canarypromo.com

We are happy to welcome Melissa Brice as the newest member of our team. Melissa joined Canary in September as a PR & Marketing Assistant, and she’s already worked on some of our biggest campaigns and has been a valuable addition to our staff.

Melissa is a graduate of Albright College in Reading, PA where she completed a duel major in Theatre/Communications with an emphasis in Public Relations & Marketing, and was awarded the Shirk Scholarship, Department of Theatre Award, and inducted as a lifetime member of the Jacob Albright Scholars, in addition to earning multiple Irene Ryan Nominations as well as graduating magna cum laude.

Melissa has previously worked in public relations for the Wyomissing Area School District and did event planning for Albright College. She also has several years of in-depth volunteer work experience with Reading-based non-profit organizations including Years of Tears, a Reading area victim-advocacy organization, and Kids Count Club, a challenged youth mentor program.

In addition to Public Relations and volunteer experience, Melissa has been a major contributor and integral force to the nationally-recognized Domino Players Theatre Company as a main-stage director, actress, and production team member under the study of Jeffrey Lentz. She has also served on the Executive Board for the company as Treasurer. Her fondest work includes: Lucy in The Threepenny Opera, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, Cathy in The Last Five Years, Matt Damon in Matt & Ben, originating the role of Lydia in the World Premiere of You Are Here, and acting as a director for the productions Tick, Tick, Boom!, Shelebration, and Words, Words, Words.

Other fun facts:

• Recently married June 27, 2009 to Justin Trupp
• Studied voice lessons for 8 years
• Favorite Music: The Format, Jason Mraz, Johnny Cash, Damian Rice, Robert Plant, Nina Simone, The White Stripes, Lifehouse, Broadway Musicals….I could kind of go on forever…. It’s easier to ask what I don’t like. Answer: death metal and songs with poor grammar.
• Has performed in both Disney World and Disney Land
• Favorite plays are Matt & Ben, Becky Shaw, and Waiting for Godot.
• Favorite Musical: The Last Five Years
• Favorite Movie: Hamlet 2, The Birdcage, Funny Girl, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and The Hangover.
• TV: Boy Meets World, Glee, The Office, Clone High, How I Met Your Mother
• Siblings: Two brothers, 20 and 18.

The best thing about working at Canary: I’m at my best when working as a part of a team on something that I am passionate about, so the team, the environment, and the clients we represent provide the opportunity for me to learn and work to my highest potential.

Google Chrome lets you search lots of sites from the address bar in addition to Google.com by default. For example if you type “youtube” and hit tab you can limit a search to only youtube. I wanted to search drupal.org more quickly so I did a little hunting around for how to add my own list of frequently used sites to the list. Here’s the step-by-step for the mac version. I’m sure PC is very similar.

1. Open the Options panel by choosing “Preferences” from the Chrome menu, or by hitting “command-,”
2. Next to “Default Search”, choose Manage. This brings up the Search Engines management window.
3. Click the “+” on the bottom left to add your site. Below are the options I used to add Drupal.org

Name: drupal.org
Keyword: dr
URL: http://drupal.org/search/apachesolr_search/%s

Easy!

It’s official, the inaugural year of the Philadelphia-wide Philagrafika 2010 international print festival (a Canary PR client!), which celebrates the vital role of print in contemporary art, has made an imprint on The New York Times’ art critic Ken Johnson!

In Johnson’s review, which hit newsstands today, he calls the works presented in the festival’s core exhibition, The Graphic Unconscious, “provocative,” “entertaining,” and “fantastic.”

In his review, Johnson reflects, “Is printmaking dead, or is it reborn? Is it a meaningful category at all anymore for contemporary artists who revel in mechanically produced imagery of all kinds and fearlessly use and misuse whatever tools are at hand? If you think these questions matter — and there are good reasons to think they do — you need to plan a trip to Philadelphia.”

You can read Ken Johnson’s full New York Times review, here.

And, take a look at the accompanying Philagrafika 2010 photo gallery, here.

To check out the festival for yourself, Philagrafika 2010 runs through April 11 throughout Philadelphia. For participating venues and a full calendar of festival events, please visit: www.philagrafika2010.org.

If you haven’t already heard, whitehouse.gov recently relaunched with Drupal as its new content management system. There’s nothing jumping off the screen screaming “Drupal” when you go there*, but you may have heard the global Drupal community’s shouts of “Woo-hoo” and “w00t!” last week when it launched. You see, aside from the benefits that the White House will receive from having a great open-source CMS, this is one of the loudest endorsements of our platform we’ve had to date. They’ve seen that Drupal can help them manage an incredibly busy site, be flexible enough to let them add new features and try new things as often as they need, all while being able to work well under an immense amount of traffic and living up to the absolute highest standards for security.

This is fantastic news for Drupal and for other open-source software projects as well. The Obama administration has talked a lot about being more “open” in terms of policy, and the open-source software communities have a lot to offer that will help them achieve this openness in their web presence. Launching whitehouse.gov using Drupal is a great move. There have been others (http://www.nysenate.gov/), and I’m sure more and more public sector sites will be evaluating Drupal for themselves.

New York Times: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/drupal-moves-into-the-white-house/

*That’s part of the point. It’s so customizable you can make Drupal do nearly anything you need, and style it to appear any way you like.

I don’t know about you, but I am very excited for fall this year—warm sweaters, falling leaves, pumpkin-flavored everything, and Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe! On October 7, it was officially the 160^th anniversary of the death of Philadelphia’s one-and-only master of macabre. Ironically, this year is also the 200^th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, our client, Brat Productions, has built a 13-room labyrinth of his most famous tales full of the suspense, literature, and violence for which the celebrated poet is infamous, for the world premiere of Haunted Poe.

Dave Johnson as Edgar Allen Poe - image by: Gabriel Bienczycki

To create a truly Poe-worthy experience, Brat has put together a team of note-worthy actors, designers, and consultants including “Philly Poe Guy” Edward Pettit, Barrymore-award winners Bruce Walsh (who gives a terrifying performance of The Black Cat while yielding an axe, yikes!) and the absolutely gorgeous Kim Carson, as well as ex-Eastern State Penitentiary: Terror Behind the Walls designer Brad Helm. Brat has also brought in approximately 4,000, now famous (see the article here!), cockroaches from the Insectarium for that extra-added psychological scare.

Being a lover of the arts, but, admittedly, a big baby as well (I watch scary movies rarely and with the lights on!), I was apprehensive about attending the production, which promises “blood – and ghosts and magic and murder and mayhem.” However, I was pleasantly surprised that, although plenty scary for the thrill-enthusiast, the production is so intriguing and unusually gorgeous as well.

After spending four years working very closely with my college’s small theater company, I am completely in awe of what a huge project this relatively small theater company was not only able to pull off, but execute beautifully, and I am honestly so thrilled to be working on publicity for Haunted Poe!

You don’t have to take my word for it; the whole city is a-buzz about this Halloween season’s most exciting production!

The Philadelphia Inquirer calls Haunted Poe a, “compellingly dark vision of the torments that haunted Poe’s soul,” here.

“Directed with considerable flair by Distefano, Poe has a punk rock sensibility: raw, visceral and roughly poetic,” Says J. Cooper Robb of Philadelphia Weekly. Read the full article here.

Also, you can always check out the video footage on ABC.com featuring the production.

Happy Birthday, Edgar!

This week, everywhere I seem to look, I see Wild Things. The world is gearing up for the release of the much anticipated live-action film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze. And the excitement is growing here in Philadelphia too. Philly’s own Rosenbach Museum & Library (a Canary client!) is the sole repository of the original artwork of Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are and about a gazillion other books.

I love working on publicity for the Rosenbach, especially on projects using materials from the museum’s Sendak collection (which includes over 10,000 pieces). Growing up, we always had a ton of books in the house, including Sendak (thanks Mom!). My favorite copies of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue are worn and tattered. I played out my VHS tape of Really Rosie cartoons and scratched up my record of Carol King singing Sendak classics, and my Wild Things stuffed animals have now bit the dust. So for me, at 26 years old, it’s pretty cool to get to work on something I loved so much as a kid, and still do now.

Final drawing for Where the Wild Things Are. Pen and ink, watercolor. © Maurice Sendak, 1963. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library

How did Maurice Sendak’s work come to the Rosenbach Museum & Library? Sendak first met Clive Driver, then Director of the Rosenbach, in 1966 at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Sendak was invited to speak, along with other artists and scholars, at a conference hosted by the library on Beatrix Potter in celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth. From Clive, Sendak learned that the Rosenbach had one of the best Melville collections in the world, among other artists that he loved, like William Blake, John Tenniel, and George Cruikshank. The relationship was cemented in the early 1970s when Sendak decided to give his pictures to the Rosenbach on deposit, marking the start of the Sendak collection at the Rosenbach.

In a 2007 interview, Sendak said, “Clive and I got to talking and he began to tell me about The Rosenbach and the virtues of The Rosenbach, and I was then looking for a place to give my stuff to, but I didn’t want it to go to a university… Because they were buried in sealed vaults and whoever got to see them? The point of giving something away and then treating it as it were death of the family was hardly what I was looking forward to. So I was saying where was a place where people could, if they wanted to, make an appointment and see the pictures. So Clive would say, that’s just what we do… They had people I love, artists I love. They had the Alice illustrations….I remember I would lay in The Doctor’s room – Dr. Rosenbach – and Clive would bring me in some drawings for a French novel by Fragonard and they would be in the bed with me. And there was a big fur, animal fur blanket, and I used to lay under it with my Fragonards all around. Hey – that was living! Of course, they took it all back in the morning, that’s the way of life. So anyways, I concluded that that’s where I wanted to be and that’s where it began.”

Watch Sendak talk about his childhood, love of movies and storytelling as a youth, in an interview featured in a DVD by the Rosenbach below. Stay tuned for the Rosenbach’s new website, designed by Canary! Until then, visit www.rosenbach.org and check out the museum’s current Sendak-themed exhibitions and events! “Let the wild rumpus start!” - Emaleigh

Interview clip from the DVD “There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak: A Retrospective in Words and Pictures.”

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, it is if you’re in Philly and you’re a performings arts lover.  Today the 13th annual Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe kicks off in venues all over the city.  Here at Canary, we’re ready for 16 days of performing arts gluttony.

Want to see what we’ve been up to lately?  Here’s a selection of some of the many stories we’ve been obtaining for the Festival. Click here.

Looking for a fun place to hang out after the shows? Come have a drink with us at the Festival Bar and tell us about what shows you saw.

This weekend, I’ll be seeing:

How Theater Failed America, Mike Daisey

STORE, Kate Watson-Wallace

Welcome to Yuba City, Pig Iron Theatre Company

Company, EgoPo Productions

Kill Me Now, Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre

We’re seeking a smart, detail-oriented lover of the Arts to join the publicity & marketing team at our small but rapidly-growing public relations, marketing and graphic design company. This is an entry level position and an opportunity to work in a fun, informal but hardworking office, focusing on campaigns for some extraordinary artists and cultural organizations, from major theater and dance companies to museums, arts festivals and more.

Tasks include: supporting the PR team by assisting with strategy and implementation of campaigns, crafting story pitches and working with members of the press, writing press releases and other press materials, writing marketing and web copy, updating company’s website and client pages, direct communication with clients, tracking and reporting media campaign results and general project research and database management.

Qualifications: The successful candidate will possess strong written and verbal communication skills and will be an expert at multi-tasking. Internet savvy, social media experience and basic knowledge of MS Word and Excel programs are all a must. A minimum of 1 year of experience working in the publicity and/or marketing fields, and knowledge of Philadelphia’s cultural community and the area’s media are strongly desired.

To Apply:
Explore our website and get to know a little about our company and clients. Email cover letter, resume, salary requirements and 1-3 applicable writing samples to info@canarypromo.com. Please submit any questions via email; no calls.