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Bakersfield History Interactive history prototype

Sixteen scenes.One city's story.Sixteenscenes. Onecity's story.

Collins Creative researched, wrote, and art-directed a 16-scene history of Bakersfield, California, from the Kern River and Native homelands to the city today, and built the content file, editor, and image pipeline that keep it accurate and easy to change.

See the scenes
The opening card of the prototype: Bakersfield History, a one-sentence introduction, and a Start Here button over an aerial photo of the Kern River running through the city
SubjectThe history of Bakersfield, California
StatusWorking prototype
Scope16 scenes, 53 production images
Our roleResearch, writing, content architecture, art direction, editor and image pipeline

The story, scene by scene

Start with the river.
Then move forward.

The first scene sets the place before any dates: a 1901 bird's-eye map of Bakersfield and a short note on how the city grew where the Kern River leaves the Sierra. Fifteen more scenes follow in order, through settlement, rail, farming, oil, migration, the 1952 earthquakes, the Bakersfield Sound, and growth.

Static proof from the working prototype

Scene one: the 1901 bird's-eye map of Bakersfield on the left, and on the right the headline A City Shaped by the Kern with two short paragraphs about water, work, and reinvention
Place before chronology. We chose a map for the first scene so a reader sees the river, the grid, and the fields before the timeline asks them to remember dates.

Why it is static The prototype is not published, so it is shown here as captured screens instead of an embedded preview.

What we did not build The side-scrolling viewer, its motion, and its image controls come from an existing third-party page that the prototype loads at runtime. Our work is the history inside it and the system that manages that history.

The challenge

A long history, told in short scenes.

Bakersfield's story runs from Yokuts and Tübatulabal homelands through mining, rail, irrigation, oil, Dust Bowl migration, segregation, two earthquakes, and a music scene heard worldwide. A list of dates could hold the facts but would make every era look the same.

Each scene had to say one idea in a few sentences, carry the right photographs, and keep its dates and credits straight.

One idea per sceneReal archival imagesDates kept in order
The 1930s to 1940s scene, Newcomers, Work, and Segregation: a documentary photograph of a migrant family beside a dark panel with the headline and a short paragraph
Color set per scene. The 1930s scene uses a darker palette than the oil boom, so the mood changes while the reading pattern stays the same.

The content system

Every word, date,
and photo in one file.

The opening card, navigation, palette, and all 16 scenes live in one content file instead of in page code. We built a local editor on top of it that lists the scenes in the same order a reader sees them, so a change to a headline, a date, a color, or a photograph is made in one place.

The editor runs only on a local machine. The production build removes it.

The local editor with Scene 8, The Oil Boom, open: fields for the 1899 onward label, the headline, and the description, and six scene color settings below
The scene editor. Label, headline, description, and six scene colors sit in one panel for The Oil Boom, with Save Changes and Discard changes always in reach.

Art direction

The archive, ready
for a large screen.

We selected the photographs and maps for every scene and prepared one optimized production image for each, 53 in all, from full-resolution masters kept outside the website. Damaged scans were restored conservatively, and each restoration is recorded with its source scan and the instructions used.

Source, credit, and rights notes are kept for every displayed image.

Scene 9

Text and photo, one field.

The 1889 to 1930 scene, A City Rebuilt in Brick, with a short paragraph about the 1889 fire beside an archival photograph of people on the steps of a civic building
A City Rebuilt in Brick pairs the 1889 fire and the rebuilding that followed with a period photograph, in a few sentences.
On a phone

The same story, stacked.

The opening card on a phone, with the aerial photo above the Bakersfield History title, introduction, and Start Here button
Scene one on a phone, with the 1901 map on top and the headline and paragraphs below it
On a phone the image sits above the copy, so each scene reads top to bottom without shrinking the map or the text.

What we made

A history you
can keep editing.

  1. Research and writing

    A complete research file on Bakersfield's history, distilled into 16 scenes with dates, headlines, and short descriptions.

  2. Art direction

    Photographs and maps chosen for each scene, with a color palette set scene by scene.

  3. Content file and local editor

    All copy, colors, and images in one file, edited in scroll order and left out of the production build.

  4. Archival image pipeline

    One optimized image per photograph from full-resolution masters, with documented restorations and image credits.

Not an archive of the city.
A way to move through its history.
Brendan Collins

Project lead

Brendan Collins

Brendan led the research, writing, content architecture, art direction, and the editor and image pipeline for Bakersfield History.

The main judgment was editorial: what each era could say in a few sentences and one or two photographs, and which images were reliable enough to carry it.

Meet the studio

Your next chapter

Have a long story to tell?

We can turn a large body of history or research into scenes people will read, and a system your team can keep up to date.

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The first Bakersfield History scene with the 1901 map

Have an idea? We'd love to hear it.

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