"The fun, informative, exploratory style of this site really brings to life the culinary scene in an approachable and memorable way. The art direction and copy are spot on. This site definitely delivers on the promise 'Celebrating What Makes Oregon Taste So Good.'" —juror Brooke Nanberg

"Super immersive without being heavy-handed, achieved through excellent interaction design. This site makes me hungry. Well done." —juror Mathew Ranauro

Overview: Every year, Oregon celebrates the state's diverse food and drink through the Oregon Bounty promotion. This resource for traveling foodies also announces the Oregon Bounty Cuisinternship Contest (an all-expenses paid trip to be a chef, rancher or brewmaster). Based on a Flavors of Oregon concept, each section is a mouth-watering resource of the tastes of the state—from the microbrews and wines to the feasts from the sea and the farmer's markets. The navigation is organized to allow people to explore Oregon through curated trips involving different flavors and destinations; events involving food and drink; or by geographic region.

• With 130+ video submissions to the Cuisinternship contest, the entries were viewed almost 10,000 times within the first three months of the site being live.
• The Google Maps API is utilized for all mapping locations to create a dynamic, interactive map experience that shows not only a destination, but surrounding lodging and restaurant options.
• Since the Cuisinternship contest had multiple phases in the first three months of going live (announcement, submissions gathering, contest close, announcement of winners), the site structure and CMS had to be flexible enough to handle changes quickly and easily.

Comments by Stephen Landau, Substance co-founder/creative director:
Was the topic/subject of the project a new one for you? "While we've worked with Travel Oregon on a variety of projects, this was the first to specifically involve food. We enjoy a good meal and Oregon's craft brews, but the concept of organizing the state by flavor was something new. Conceptually, we were thinking about foodies traversing the state looking for truffles to dig or exploring Pinot Noir wine country, so our goal was to communicate the different 'flavors' of Oregon and help food travelers follow their taste buds to find what's making their mouths water."

Did you use any applications that you hadn't used before? "We previously used WordPress as a CMS for Ride Oregon, but this was the first time we utilized it to pull in data feeds from different databases, handle the submission and approval of video entries through YouTube's API and create complex search results via our custom Flash map interface leveraging Google Maps API. We'd used certain elements of each of these applications separately, but this was the first time we were asking them all to play nicely with each other."

What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "Most challenging was incorporating data from multiple databases to create a comprehensive experience. Site visitors don't know (or care) that we're pulling data from two different databases, videos from YouTube, map data from Google, RSS feeds from other blogs and blending it all together using WordPress. The challenge was making the complex technology on the backend appear simple on the front-end so that people are inspired to go from the online experience to the real world experience."