Born Weird

What with this being the blog on my professional domain, seems like I ought to occasionally actually post on some work-related topics. Toot my own horn a bit, as it were. So here’s a rundown on a few of the things I’ve been up to in the last nine months or so. (Yes, I realize that’s a pretty broad window of time, but a lot of my work the last six months has been limited to coding, site maintenance and other things that are hard to show off).

Free Press Print Materials: Annual Report, Brochure

While under near-fulltime contract with my longtime employer, I designed a number of print pieces. The most notable are the 2007 annual report (released in fall 2008) and the core organizational brochure.

The annual report puts a face to abstract subject matter — media reform — by featuring portraits of, and quotes from, everyday folks who recognize the importance of the work Free Press does. Photos were taken by myself and one or two other people at the Free Press conference in Minneapolis months before work began on writing or designing the piece.

A significant challenge in creating the piece was coming up with a fresh new approach, after having also designed the two previous annual reports.

The most recent in a long, long line of promotional print materials for Free Press, the brochure is the centerpiece of the organization’s outreach efforts. Unlike other fliers or factsheets aimed at specific audiences or addressing particular issues, the “101″ brochure is aimed a wide swath of folks who know nothing about the organization or any of the (admittedly sometimes esoteric) issues Free Press works on.

The brochure is hard to convey fully online due to its physical shape: the accordion fold plays a large part in sequentially introducing the reader to additional content and ideas.

W. Kamau Bell Rebranding: Website, Promotional Materials

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian based in the Bay Area, who not long ago earned the title of “first person on Comedy Central to tell a joke about Barack Obama” (apparently the network scoured its archives after the election to figure out who’d broken the seal). He’s been performing in the NYC Fringe Festival this August.

When he came to me, he already had a website and some promotional items for the Fringefest. While not terrible, per se, the look and feel of the materials failed to convey Kamau’s style, so I was enlisted to give Kamau a new look that could be carried through the web, promotional materials for Fringe, press materials and other future uses. We quickly settled on a much “louder” and grungier visual vocabulary that more accurately captured Kamau’s no-holds-barred attitude to discussing racial issues.

After agreeing on a basic design approach for the site, we explored several color palette variations before settling on the complementary blue and orange you see on the site. Months after launching the site, I designed a poster and two-sided postcard to replace his pre-existing materials for Fringefest.

ThinkCure! Website Redesign

The official charity of the Los Angeles Dodgers, ThinkCure! is a small and fairly new nonprofit funding collaborative cancer research in Southern California. Their previous site, while containing some good content, failed to portray the organization in the best light, looking outdated and unprofessional. Working within the color palette determined by their pre-existing logo (which I’d also love to redo), I designed a new site with a clean, crisp look that directed the attention of site visitors to a large “feature” area where ThinkCure could use imagery to tell the story of cancer’s toll and their work to find a cure.

Bioneers Redesign

Headquartered in northern New Mexico, Bioneers is a unique nonprofit perhaps known best for their large conferences marrying a concern for the environment with a host of other social values. I first learned of Bioneers while an employee of Free Press — we advertised the Free Press conference in the Bioneers conference booklet several times. And one member of the Bioneers staff was actually featured in the recent annual report (above).

My familiarity with the group made me an ideal subscontractor to conduct the redesign of their site, which was switching from a Drupal (done several years ago by Advomatic) to Plone, the preferred CMS platform of FosterMilo, the firm that had been retained by Bioneers to rework the site. FosterMilo was looking for design help after having already developed wireframes for the site with a different designer. I picked up where he had left off and presented several potential homepage designs that made heavy use of both the pre-existing color palette from the Bioneers logo and the rich collection of imagery that Bioneers had already identified as communicating their values. Of the initial variants, Bioneers elected to go with the approach that retained a bit of the graphic approach from their old site, making the new design more evolutionary than revolutionary and helping users be less disoriented by the site facelift.

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I’ve been working on more than just these few projects over the last year or so, but these are the ones I wanted to highlight first. Soon I’ll try to post with some additional work, such as that done for VoterAction, the Paramount Theatre in Austin, the Elements of Information Control, and a more recent ThinkCure! project.