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Sources and credits

Where every word and image came from, and what no longer exists.

This is an independent rebuild of the Crowdasaurus website. The original at crowdasaurus.com is gone: the domain has been parked since 2021 and serves a placeholder today. Everything here was recovered from the Internet Archive, from the companies that covered the business, and from the platform’s own archived stylesheets and images.

There was no LinkedIn page to read. linkedin.com/company/crowdasaurus returns a 404. The company’s record is its own 2013 site, three published articles, and the recovery of its brand files.

Where each part came from

  • The product description — the 2013 site’s home page, captured by the Wayback Machine on 16 September and 24 October 2013: “Crowdasaurus is a different kind of crowdsourcing website…”.
  • The three audience lines — the same page’s three cards: Hosts, Project creators, Nonprofits, each with its one-sentence pitch.
  • The founders — Tech.co, 6 December 2013, which names Josh Lucas, Jason Philips and Tim Palko, and quotes Lucas at length.
  • The Pittsburgh detail — the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 17 June 2013, on The Hardware Store at 744 E. Warrington Avenue.
  • The regional partners — Tech.co again: the Pittsburgh Foundation, WQED and C-Leveled.
  • The logo, the three egg marks and the three icons — the site’s own assets/ files, recovered from the archive: ca-title-header, ca-logo-host, ca-logo-individual, ca-logo-nonprofit, how-it-works-blue, submission-guidelines-blue, submit-a-project-blue.
  • The tartan background — plaid2.png, the original tile, used here as banding rather than as a page background.
  • The colours — the original stylesheet: links #389AAB, buttons #38c7e0, banners #1e1e1e on #ededed.

What was lost

  • Most of the site. Only two pages of the Rails app were ever archived — the home page and a placeholder About page. The host, nonprofit, project-creator, submission, press, team and FAQ pages were never captured, so their text is reconstructed from the home page’s own summaries and from interviews.
  • The explainer film. The home page embedded vimeo.com/75040645. Vimeo now reports the video as unavailable. No copy survives, and no substitute is used.
  • The typeface. The site used Myriad Pro, which is proprietary and cannot be redistributed. This rebuild uses Source Sans 3, an open humanist sans in the same family of shapes.
  • The layout. Only the CSS survived, not the rendered pages of the inner sections — so the arrangement you see is a redesign around the recovered brand, colours and marks.
  • Any photograph of the team or the work. None was ever published on the site as far as the archive shows.

Photography credits

Every photograph on this site is licence-clear, and none of them was published by the company. The street photographs are of the real block: East Warrington Avenue in Allentown, photographed in 2025. The full machine-readable record is at _tools/archive/stock-credits.json.

  • pittsburgh.jpg — “Pittsburgh Skyline from Mount Washington” by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons and Openverse.
  • coworking.jpg — “Modern office, green workplace”, CC0, via Openverse.
  • meeting.jpg — “Business People” by Direct Media, CC0, via Openverse.
  • storefront.jpg — “old-fashioned storefront brick facade”, CC0, via Openverse.
  • laptop.jpg — “Office Work” by energepic.com, CC0, via Openverse.
  • housing.jpg — “Houses Apartments” by Oscar Nilsson, CC0, via Openverse.
  • neighborhood.jpg — “Row Houses, Bond Street, Brooklyn”, U.S. National Archives, CC0, via Openverse.
  • audience.jpg — “Free empty chairs hall”, CC0, via Openverse.
  • allentown.jpg — “Warrington Avenue at Beltzhoover Avenue, Allentown (Pittsburgh), 2025” by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
  • warrington.jpg — “Warrington Avenue, Allentown (Pittsburgh), 2025” by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
  • warrington-740.jpg — “740 East Warrington Avenue, Allentown (Pittsburgh), 2025” by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
  • warrington-801.jpg — “801 East Warrington Avenue, Allentown (Pittsburgh), 2025” by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The logo, the three egg marks, the three icons and the tartan tile are the company’s own files. The typeface is Source Sans 3, self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License.

Deviations, stated plainly

  • The domain had two later lives. From 2015 it served Elements, a Pittsburgh organic meal-delivery business; from 2021 it was for sale; since then it has been parked. Neither later use belongs to the crowdfunding company and neither is reproduced.
  • This is the 2013 company, not the 2015 site. The meal business reused the domain, not the brand — its pages say “Elements” throughout, with a different palette and product.
  • Some page copy is a summary. Where a page of the original was never archived, the words here are this rebuild’s, drawn from the archived home page and the interviews. The company’s exact sentences are always in quotation marks or marked as its own.
  • The form does nothing. There is no server behind it; it validates in the browser and says so.
  • No analytics, no external requests on load. The original ran Google Analytics and loaded Myriad from its own server. This rebuild serves everything, fonts included, from this folder.

Independent site

Built from Crowdasaurus’s published material. Not affiliated with Crowdasaurus, its founders, The Hardware Store, or any organization named on these pages.

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