Blog

Designers subscribe to various philosophies, especially in determining the magic number of design options for a client.  Here at Schoolyard, we are proponents of the iterative design solution.  A purposeful discovery process leads to a comprehensively thought-out design that best speaks to the identified needs of the client.  This generally results in a singular design, but we do not dismiss those occasions when the project dictates more than one persuasive solution.

When we returned to the independent school web market a year ago this week, for NAIS AC10 in San Francisco, we called ourselves "Newschoolyard." The truth is we never actually left, we just stepped aside for a while. We had always provided support to our old proprietary code-based clients (in fact we still support exactly one school still running our old system). In introducing our new system--the first and still the only open source web CMS for independent schools--we wanted to differentiate ourselves from "old" expensive proprietary Schoolyard.

I attended the PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education) conference in Baltimore last week--a fascinating group of schools and people unknown to us prior to this event. Special thanks to Mordechai Rosenstein, a Judaic artist upon whom we bestow the title of "favorite next-booth neighbor in fifteen years of independent school conference exhibits."