Discovering Today's Israel: A New Website Offers a Virtual Tour of a Nation in Transition
rayogram dramatically extended The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today's Israel beyond the original published project—into a lush, layered website.
DiscoveringTodaysIsrael.org is a celebration of Israel’s diverse cultural, artistic, agricultural and scientific accomplishments as published in a boxed set produced by Chronicle Books, the San Francisco-based publishing company known for its exceptionally creative offerings. The story of today’s Israel is told through photographs, films, animations and books to reveal the richness of a country many know only through front-page headlines.
Authors Lin Arison, Diana C. Stoll, and Neil Folberg turned to rayogram to adapt the content of the printed page to a website offering a self-guided tour of Israel. Our creative concept uses blog posts tagged with keywords that generate “word clouds” allowing visitors to explore the myriad connections between the work of world-renowned artists, educators, and innovators.
rayogram extracted and edited the content of the projects’ five books to use as web and social-media-length articles, pulling still images and video to illustrate them. We conducted extensive photo research to illustrate content not previously accompanied by images—sourcing images directly from tech companies, universities, cultural institutions, restaurants and retailers. We also solicited and edited new content to add to the site post-launch through a newly created partnership with a nonprofit Israeli news agency, Israel21C. The site was built on the proprietary platform, SquareSpace for ease of use.
We managed Instagram, Twitter and Facebook social networks post launch, and helped the authors live-blog their return to Israel to promote the project.
