Software
TopSoil CMS by Openhill
Pixelgate builds websites on TopSoil, the platform of its sister company Openhill. The TopSoil platform is a CMS (content management system). Its roots lie in the open-source Drupal platform, and TopSoil has been heavily customized to provide the most efficient turnkey solution without requiring extensive hours of back-end programming setup for each website.
For website mockup work, we employ the Adobe Creative Suite - Illustrator and Photoshop. Mockups are provided as a PDF or image format, before being converted to an actual website.
Panic Coda
Coda is our preferred Mac-based HTML editing and FTP management application
Alternative content management system to Drupal, offering more complex layouts but not as light nor SEO compliant as Drupal.
Adobe Indesign
Principal designer Leah Dickey has utilized InDesign as the preferred desktop publishing program since its 2002 inclusion in the Adobe Creative Suite. InDesign's page layout features, excellent image handling, and XML/data merge capabilities make it an excellent and efficient program for high quality print publishing, annual reports, proposals, brochures, catalogs and postcards.
Adobe Illustrator
Logo development and custom graphics are hand drawn or digitally drawn in the vector-based Illustrator application, allowing for small files that are scalable with no limits or loss of quality. Leah Dickey has used Illustrator since 1998.
Adobe Photoshop
Photo retouching and editing has long been managed through the powerful Photoshop application. Print and web images are exported from Photoshop and optimized accordingly. Hand-drawn graphics are scanned then digitally cleaned up and often colored in Photoshop.
Microsoft Office Suite
Word, Exel, Powerpoint. Many templates we create are designed in InDesign and converted to Microsoft templates. Presentations are created in Powerpoint, and presentation templates developed first in Adobe.