Tales from the Team (Part 1)

At Contentra, some of the most meaningful work we do is not defined by scope or timeline. It is defined by the problems we get to solve alongside our clients. Over the next several weeks, we are launching Tales from the Team, a blog series highlighting a few of our team’s favorite projects. These are the kinds of engagements that pushed us to think differently, collaborate more deeply, and ultimately deliver work we are genuinely proud of.

To kick things off, we are sharing two very different projects that reflect the range of challenges our teams take on across editorial, design, and production work.

Building a Composition Text from a Blank Slate

Revered author Toni Morrison once advised, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

That idea resonates strongly in this project story shared by Shelley Evans Marshall, our ELA Director. As a former secondary and postsecondary composition teacher who created all her own classroom materials, she was surprised (and delighted) to be presented with just such a challenge by a client.

While working in the educational publishing vendor space, I was tapped to lead the development of an open-source composition text.

What differentiated this project from all others (and makes it my favorite project to date) is that my team was granted a blank slate—no existing guidelines, prototypes, templates—nothing.

The client trusted the team to do its research, find out which composition texts were bestsellers in the market, analyze them for commonalities and differences, and then design a text that was both competitive and better.

We certainly encountered unexpected issues along the way; but for the most part, my team of carefully selected college rhetoric professors and our editorial staff discussed, collaborated, and consulted outside the group to resolve these issues in ways that maintained the integrity of the project.

In the end, we may not have produced a perfect composition text, but we certainly produced one that empowers all writing students by recognizing them as writers—even if they have never previously thought of themselves in this way—and allowing them the luxury of autonomy in the way their classroom writing assignments take shape.

Expanding into Interactive Learning Experiences

This project story is shared by Paul Brinkdopke, our Art Buyer, Production Artist, and Illustrator.

Visual images are essential components when it comes to learning. Thoughtful and strategic design layouts combined with top-notch editorial content help cover all the bases to communicate in a way that reading only written content cannot.

Typically, I work with static visual content.

Once, Contentra acquired an unusual project to advance teachers’ professional development. The client required us to use digital software tools we had not used before, utilizing two different computer operating systems at the same time.

I worked closely with our creative director to quickly learn how to use these new tools in an operating system I don’t normally use.

I was able to navigate setting up feature-rich interactive presentations using simple programming abilities such as variables and true/false statements to add functionality, and editing and combining a variety of media types, such as audio clips, video clips, staging button rollovers, and animations, while our creative director simultaneously designed the appearance of the layouts.

The experience helped me absorb what I needed to quickly and get a solid understanding of how this new and unfamiliar software tool worked and understand its capabilities while the design layouts arrived.

In the end, our team was able to successfully build and deliver three interactive programs that included aesthetically pleasing screens with smooth animations, activities, audio and video clips, and self-tests for teachers to stay engaged and learn what they needed to help advance their careers.

And it seems in the end that I learned something new to offer our clients as well!

Looking Ahead

Both projects reflect the kind of work that continues to define how our teams operate at Contentra. In one case, it was the opportunity to build a composition resource from a completely blank slate, relying on deep research, collaboration, and subject matter expertise to create something both original and grounded in the realities of the market. In the other, it was a fast-moving, technically unfamiliar interactive development effort that pushed the team to quickly learn new tools; bridge design and functionality; and deliver engaging, media-rich learning experiences for educators. While the formats are very different, both projects highlight the same core themes: trust from our clients; close collaboration across disciplines; and teams that are willing to adapt, learn, and push through complexity to deliver meaningful outcomes.

These projects are just two examples from a much larger set that reflect the kind of work we are fortunate to do every day—work that requires creativity, precision, and close collaboration with our partners.

Check back for more stories like this in the coming weeks as we highlight the people and projects behind the work we do at Contentra.

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