Dedicated to unearthing the makers, merchants, foodies, techies and characters that are evolving at breakneck speed, this site celebrates the freewheeling spirit of San Francisco. It’s a unique content offering that’s part magazine, events hub and store. The site recently expanded beyond its local-oriented, experimental roots to address a national audience; the accompanying redesign incorporates the elements necessary to keep pace with the rapidly-evolving needs of its audience.

Making it simple for people to access whatever prompted their visit (reading features, finding things to do or browsing through hand-picked products) content has been organized into three distinct categories—Read, Do and Shop. And since the the site’s biggest source of new visitors is through social media, a global nav stays handy and key pages have samples of related content close-at-hand to make it easier for new readers to get an overall view of site content.

• With a design concept developed by Fjord’s San Francisco office that was refined by The Bold Italic team and brought to life by developer Kevin Trowbridge, the redesign was a gradual build-up of planning, design and implementation that took about six months.

• The site has hundreds if not thousands of media elements; every feature, dispatch and column has its own mix of images and original media.

• A search tool enables filtering by category, neighborhood, keyword and date and returns visual results.

• Visitors can zoom-in on weekend and special events or subscribe to a feed that pulls the events into a personal calendar.

• On the backend is a custom CMS built on Ruby on Rails, running on Heroku.