One third nerd, two thirds creative

The greatest advantage, I think, of the new university homepage design is our banner image carousel. Over the past year I’ve been called upon to design various promotions for the space.

This multimedia feature consumed me for almost an entire month.  A wonderful opportunity to work with great photography and a compelling story from a university student who returned from Yemen.

I like multifaceted projects like these, …where I’m able to take a crack at multimedia production and digital storytelling.  Step one involved preparing for and recording the interview.  Step 2 required combining that audio with the student’s photography and video assets, and step 3 was designing and coding a website to house it all.  A little bit more about the project…

I designed the new homepage for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which was recently selected as a Wordpess Showcase site.  It was a joy to focus simply on the design, and hand off the html/css and the wordpress integration to more skilled hands on our campus web team.

Significant changes from our current homepage, of course, are an increase in width (going from 800 to 960) and some key changes in the way we release news items and featured content.  Essentially though, this project is simply a redesign, a kind of “extreme makeover” that didn’t really alter much besides look/feel.

I’m my own worst critic, and I wonder how long this “look” will feel new and fresh.  My goal is to design things that stand the test of time and don’t appear dated when certain design trends are no long  in vouge.  We’ll see.

I’ve always been partial to these draft web mockups created for a local PBS affiliate’s arts & culture program. If I’d been given the task of redesigning Austin City Limits, the design approach would have probably been very similar.

A more current design however, would probably be required to feature video content more prominently.

My first real job out of college was for a company that ran online incentive programs for large corporations. Specifically for employees. So these were more or less closed, internal audiences. I designed this mockup for our larges client, Dell. It went over pretty well. A big improvement over the previous look and feel.

We’d coordinate with Dell and run specific contests for the employees, and the top performers would earn points that they could spend in our online store.

I love that wrestling image. I think it was from Getty Images.

Another design from my first job is this one for Nextel.  This one came together in a flurry of stress and caffeine over the course of a single afternoon.

There’s something about working with a limited color pallet that actually makes things easier.  Hmm will this box be yellow or black?  Flip a coin.

This design is pretty crazy and out there. So are the kickballers.

The current site sits at lrkickball.com. …A valiant effort by the site creator to manage everything by himself with no content management system or gallery tools. The crazy thing is, site traffic is off the charts. People use the current site in spite of it’s shortcomings. My fear with a new design is that the site loses some of it’s personal touch. Who knows. We’ll find out.

Another employee incentive website design that I completed sometime in late 2004/05.

The interesting part was the very strict nature of the client’s branding standards.  They scoffed at these initial layouts and if I remember correctly, there were six or seven rounds of back-and-forth over their strict guidelines.  It was definitely a learning experience.

Our marketing and sales needed a functioning prototype for demonstration purposes, and I designed this login screen for a fictitious company. I think we ended up going with a different demonstration method, but I’ve always liked this design.

The goal for me is to design things that stand up over time. I hope that I can look back 5 years and still think something can stand on it’s own. …I dunno. This one is starting to show it’s age.

I designed and coded this little mini site.

Our number one “task” for our visitors was to give us their email address.  It’s amazing  how designating an overly-apparent blue box will double the percentage of users who do so.