Next week, the University of Minnesota's Web Standards & Accessibility Workgroup will be discussing the mobile web experience and how to design / style / optimize for mobile users and their various devices.
We meet in 402 Walter Library. Meetings are open to the public, so we invite anyone who is interested to attend (no RSVP is necessary). Date and time: July 18, noon-1:30 p.m.
Related links:
Today's University CSS-Development & Web Standards monthly meeting was about microformats. We had great attendance (30+) and Laurie McGinley did a wonderful job of presenting.
Next month we're taking a break from our regular meeting schedule due to our new conference event MinneWebCon.
I just returned from an invigorating two days in San Diego, immersing myself in the latest social networking developments and talking to industry experts. My head is still reeling....it was a fabulous professional development experience. I also made a lot of valuable contacts for MinneWebCon, including securing O'Reilly as a co-sponsor.
I'll be writing more on what I learned soon...
Since late 2007, I have been chairing the planning committee for a conference that will take place on April 14, 2008. To our knowledge, it is the University’s first conference of its kind: a full-day continuing education event that focuses on standards and best practices for Web design and accessibility.
This week we finalized most of the program details, got the online registration closer to its launch pad, and started posting some basic info to the Web. After the keynote presenter returns a signed contract, there will be a collective sigh of relief as we (hopefully!) watch registrations begin to pile up. Stay tuned here:
Thanks to my office for being the lead sponsor of this event, as well as to the Academic Health Center, College of Liberal Arts, Disability Services, Extension Service, Student Unions & Activities, and Office of Information Technology.
As a designer, I've always loved typography— I guess most designers do. The trouble with web design, though, is that it's often assumed that it cannot incorporate richly-designed typography.
The I Love Typography web site reminds us that this doesn't need to be the case. Wow.
Seeing this today reminds me of how powerful typography can be, and how beautiful. Note to self: don't accept limitations on type too quickly, and live a little! Yes, I need to ramp up my typography a bit. And even though many people tell me that I have a strong and clean web type style, I don't want to rest on my laurels. I want to be strong, clean, and fun, too.
I'm becoming increasingly interested in social networking platforms and applications. Below is a presentation from a conference on the topic last fall; I am looking into attending the spring GSP conference in March.
Since hosting some sites with a new central service, Contribute started acting strangely when I was trying to set up the sites for distributed content management. Each time I tried establishing a new connection in Contribute, I was given the message that I already had a connection to that site. How could this be?
After deleting all of Contribute's site files and starting to set up all connections again from scratch, things went fine with the first site...and then I got the message yet again!
It was not until I looked closely at the web server > web addresses > alternate web addresses panel of Administration (click on image above to enlarge) that I spotted the problem. Contribute was pulling in other URLs from the previously-established connections into these new accounts. Why, I still have not figured out. But once I deleted these, there was no more conflict and Contribute started to play nice with new connections once again.
This week the Orientation & First-Year Programs web site received national recognition, being named the 2007 Outstanding Orientation Web Site at the annual conference of the National Orientation Directors Association.
Beth, Nicole, Bill, and Dan in OFYP played major roles in making sure this project was the success that it has become. Congratulations—it has been a pleasure working with you on the new page template, taxonomy, and site navigation.
A web site to promote the new University Honors Program (UHP) was launched this week. The project was on a fast-track schedule, as it needed to be designed in time for prospective students to consider the program for fall 2008 matriculation.
Special thanks to Jennifer Vee and Greg Gossel at Sassafrass Design, who provided design direction for this project and made it a very enjoyable and successful collaboration!
The Scholars Walk site was completed today and features an embedded Google Map that orients visitors to the various awards monuments, as well as listings of the faculty, staff, and students who are honored there.
This project was designed and produced entirely in-house; special thanks to our journalism and design intern Maria Steffen, who did most of the content and page production under my design direction.
The scenario: the University has two online calendar options. One of them is Oracle-based and quite robust but does not play nicely with other applications, so you can't embed live calendar views into other web sites. The other is a portal tool that has little functionality, and looks bad enough that you wouldn't want to embed a view of it into your web site even if you could!
So...where to turn?
Fortunately, Google does it again! Below is a view of a calendar I've set up for the University CSS workgroup that I help administer. Elegant, attractive, easy to work with, and collaborative.
Eric Mazur, a physicist and educator at Harvard University, was the keynote presenter at the University's teaching and learning conference this spring. I administer the web site for this conference, and have now begun to build a video archive from some of the presentations that took place.
As someone who also teaches part time, I found his presentation to be very informative—and I also found him to be an oustanding lecturer, despite his criticism of the traditional lecture approach to teaching!
Visit the U's teaching and learning conference web site to view these videos online.
We are working on a new web site for the University's Scholars Walk, and mapping the walkway and monuments is one component of this project.
I decided to utilize the Google Maps API (Applications Programming Interface) for development, both for its functional elegance and its familiarity to most people who have used online mapping tools. We are also using Mapbuilder to help generate some of the code.
In early February our office launched a new faculty recruiting web site for the University, and the results have been fun to track:
Our group is preparing to design web sites to support several new undergraduate academic initiatives, including a new Office for Undergraduate Research headed by Marvin Marshak (left).
To quote the press release about his recent appointment, "Marshak earned his doctorate degree in physics from the University of Michigan in 1970. He then joined the University of Minnesota and has since won every teaching, advising and service award offered by the university and the Institute of Technology."
More about these developing academic initiatives here. It should be a pleasure to work with Professor Marshak!
I have been working with the Office for Student Affairs (OSA) and University Counseling & Consulting Services (UCCS) to record and produce a series of podcasts entitled Achieving End of Semester Success. The series is designed to bridge the gap between University counselors and students who do not want to have traditional counseling appointments. The podcast format instead allows the counseling advice to be downloaded and played on a personal computer or MP3 player.
The series currently includes the following topics:
Special thanks to key collaborators on this project including Scott Slattery (director of Student Academic Support Services), who coordinated the podcast content contributors, and Timothy Kunau (bass, National Lutheran Choir), who voiced the intro and outro audio segments.
Click here for the OSA web page that hosts these podcasts. A second series is planned for production in fall 2006.
This fall the Provost's office and the deans of the Twin Cities campus have been involved in preparing for the re-accreditation of the Twin Cities campus by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. My part of the project has been to design a self-study assessment in both print and online formats.
The online component of the self-assessment is essentially a web site, albeit one that has been designed for a very specific audience of accreditation reviewers. The online component was completed in October, and we recently learned that the re-accreditation has been successful. In fact, re-accreditations such as this are typically successful but usually are granted conditionally, with specific recommendations that then need to be met to achieve full re-accreditation with no reservations. Because this re-accreditation of the Twin Cities campus was concluded with no recommendations from the reviewers, it is considered to be a highly successful effort for those of us who participated and prepared the various assessment data and reports.
The creative project for my MFA thesis is a web site about my research interest in Finnish design history; specifically, the interpretation of Modernism that has been unique to Finnish architects and designers since the early twentieth century. The finished protoype demonstrates how video and photography could be integrated into a seamless and elegant Flash interface design. Most of the web site's visual content was collected during a research trip to Finland in May 2002.
As a disclaimer, I will note one major shortcoming of this working protoype: because I had initially planned on using the interviews that I had recorded for source material rather than web content, I recorded the audio with a laptop (but without an external microphone). This resulted in relatively poor audio quality, especially after file compression for web delivery.
Visit the Human Modernism web site, and have your speakers on to hear the audio (video section only).
This is another short piece designed in Flash for my digital animation class.
Click to view, and have your speakers on to hear the audio.
This is a short piece done in the style of a web ad, and designed in Flash for my digital animation class. It is designed to be used as a transition from one web page to another, which is how such ads are typically used in news web sites.
Click to view, and have your speakers on to hear the audio.
A Flash game that I designed in my second year of graduate school. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but the goal was to design something that a younger child could play. And I think I was revisiting an interest in astronomy at the time. The song was also a factor— Norah Jones had just made it big, and it was fun to use one of her songs. So sometimes projects came out of odd combinations of things...
Note: Do not click on the "back to games" link in the game; this went to a menu of games done by the whole class, but does not work in this archived version.
This assignment was completed in spring 2002 for Rhetoric 5112 (Message Design) as part of my graduate minor in rhetoric. The goal was to design a multimedia project that clearly communicated a political issue and provided a means for the audience to take action. The issue I chose for this project was the political detainment of Suu Kyi, a prisoner in Burma.
The intranet site designed for Woolpert LLP was recognized by the Society of Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) with an award for first place in its category. The national awards ceremony was held in Orlando, FL.
Screen shots of the site's main pages are below (click thumbnails to enlarge):
In going through old files, I unearthed a copy of the CD-ROM that I designed as part of my application to graduate school. I thought it would be fun to put it online.
Here it is, with a few minor changes to enable it to work better in modern browsers.
Please note that some sections are not fully operational, but there is enough that works to give you a sense of what I was doing from 1993-2000.
