Travel Portland is a site that is used by travelers around the world to find reasons (or should we say excuses?) to visit Portland, Oregon. Based in Portland, creative agency Switchyard had no trouble understanding the project. Switchyard redesigned the site with a clean interface for easy trip planning and a look that reflects Portland’s unique character: a city with a small-town feel, full of makers and doers, with a strong independent streak. The copy and the images were chosen to make the site feel like an awesome personal guide—a seasoned local who remains curious about new places and events.

One of the site’s unique features is that it helps visitors at any stage of exploration, whether they’re first considering a visit, actively planning a trip or on the ground, finding their way around the city with a smartphone. You can create a “MyTrips” page and save events and articles, share the page with friends or use it for easy itinerary planning when you arrive. As an added bonus, MyTrips pages are not tied to a user account, so you don’t need to log in and remember a password when you’re fresh off a red-eye flight. Travel Portland features interactive maps that highlight different neighborhoods, and the site uses geolocation to serve different content to international visitors. There is also an interactive directory of thousands of interest points, which can be filtered by category, neighborhood and more. Switchyard’s favorite feature is the site’s ability to intelligently compare your hometown’s weather to Portland’s. At different times of the year, you could see “Portland is 15 degrees warmer than Boston” or “Portland is 21 degrees cooler than Phoenix.” Of course, it’s no mistake that these comparisons usually end up being favorable to Portland’s comfortable year-round climate.