http://jamesbeard.org

for all of you foodies out there, you probably already know the james beard foundation. if you don’t, it’s america’s pre-eminent culinary foundation. they have beautiful member dinners produced by the best chefs of the country, along with the james beard awards and many educational programs. we had the honor of being part of the team that took on the huge project of updating a website with thousands of archival entries and daily updates. we never wrote about it before because our blog wasn’t live in early 2008.

although we finished the first phase of jamesbeard.org in april of 2008, we spent the following 8 months adding to the massive structure built on the drupal framework. the site was beautifully designed by our friend scott of simplissimus (with whom we’ve done other projects) and we did all the multimedia and interactive elements along with the build. the site currently gets about 37,000 hits a month.

anyway, fast forward… the reason we’ve decided to write about it now, is because today is the last entry day for the w3 awards (yes, yes, i’m always running late - but we make the deadlines). we think it’s a really beautiful and comprehensive site and therefore we decided to enter it in the the food and beverage category. so if any of you out there have any pull with the w3 awards judges —-> nudge, nudge, wink wink.

the visual mercenary group is proud to announce the launch of the 2009 MPA Kelly Awards Gallery.  for those of you who voted on MPA’s America’s Favorite Ad at mag-ads.com, the people choice winner has also been announced. at the kelly site you can view all the winners, inspiration videos from the creative teams behind the work, judges’ insights, and case studies from the winning ads. the winning team took home $25,000. there’s some pretty good stuff to check out there.

this is the third year that we’ve helped MPA develop the kelly awards site and the first that we designed and built the polling site at mag-ads.com. additionally we created print and banner ads based on the look and feel of mag-ads. this was truly a multimedia assignment spanning LAMP application design and development, print, video, audio, and flash animation & programming. we love working on this kind of integrated media stuff.

so how did your picks fare with the industry judges at kellyawards.org?