Web design & development for NGO using Joomla April 5, 2010 1 Comment

NGOs (Non Government Organisations) play an important role in the world. Team Web Design Creative understand the importance of such organizations. We were approached by a Upakar Foundation to enhance their website. Upakar helps Indian-American students realize their educational goals. They provide annual scholarships that acknowledge academic excellence and consider financial need.

The goals of Upakar website:

  • Communicate the importance of why Upakar exists and why it needs support from donors and volunteers
  • Attract potential scholars and create a user-friendly system for processing applications online
  • Attract potential donors (individuals and companies) and create a user-friendly system for processing online donations
  • Profile current and past scholars
  • Acknowledge the support of donors, board members and volunteers
  • Communicate latest updates on Upakar’s activities (e.g., events, partnerships, board updates, annual reports, statistics on Indian-American students, etc.)
  • Optimize the public’s ability to find the Upakar site through Internet searches and through links to partner organizations
  • Store financial information, scholar applications, scholar information, and other data as requested, in a back-end database. The web-enabled database should have keyword search functionality and the ability to export and import data, produce clear reports based on selected data items.

Upakar was looking to overhaul its current website to make it more user-friendly and engaging. They wanted it to be simple, functional, and attractive but not too jazzy, flashy or fussy.

Upakar Foundation

We decided to do provide this solution using Joomla. As the website needed to be customizable and business requirements. We believe Joomla CMS solution is user-friendly so the client can regularly update the content with a simple backend editor.

The overall work is divided into two phases and we have worked on phase 1 so far.

Phase 1 which covers:

  • Customized User Interface Design.
  • Online donation functionality using Paypal
  • Editable content pages
  • Newsletter design & implementation

Phase 2 will cover:

  • Blog section with custom theme template.
  • Events section automation
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Apply online for Scholarship system
  • Dynamic news & media section

Making of a Movie Poster No Comments

Hello from Sandeep! Today, I would to like to share you the story behind a fake movie poster ‘Miasma’. The concept of this scary movie poster came across to me while I was shooting pictures of some abandoned area in a foggy morning with my Panasonic FZ-28. I was on vacation, on a visit to my relatives outside Delhi. It would be wrong to say that I only got scary images all around; some of pictures were really cool.

After seeing a perfect location, I immediately doodled a layout in my mind and clicked few pictures with help of my wife. “Are you crazy!! People like to see their faces in their snaps and you are just doing the opposite.” She said.

After coming back to home, I jumped to Photoshop. I had no idea about the size of a movie poster so, I googled some movie poster and created a new document of 717 x 1024px filled with black background.

Treatment with original image: As you can see the original image is colorful but it doesn’t suit to a horror movie so I Desaturated the image, adjusted the Levels, and changed the entire image to somewhere warm reddish yellow color with Hue/Saturation. Also, I saw some leafs coming over the backside of blazer making my subject a little messy with other object so I removed them also with the help of stamp tool.

Poster .psd: I  dragged the main image in the newly created document and aligned my main subject a bit to right so that I can put the ghost element almost in the center of the document.

Right now everything is visible, to make the whole composition tight and focused I draw a big feathered circle with a dark yellow color….hmmm looks good. I added one more green color in the background areas making it more hazy.

I used a beautiful font LeviBrush for the heading and SF Movie Poster font for the credit text.