One third nerd, two thirds creative

I designed our new homepage that’s currently in development.  Should be launching this summer.  This is my baby.

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.

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.

They sell fire prevention/detection/alert systems.  Enough said.  Fun little project.

It’s always fun to work with gigantic background images.

Not so much about design, …just a record of my msn messenger icons for the past 2 or 3 years. I like to document these things.

UALR was deeply involved in the events surrounding the 50th Anniversary of the Little Rock Central High Crisis.  The main purpose of the website I designed in conjunction with that involvement was to keep a calendar of all such events. The site included a selection of archival photography  obtained from University Library Archives, as well as a video message from the chancellor.

We launched the website for UALR magazine several months ago. Being responsible for design, I had alot of fun with this project. I worked with two other developers who coded it and also tied it to wordpress content tool. It came together seamlessly in a few short weeks. Definitely one of the smoothest web projects I’ve ever been part of.

We tried to build it in such a way as to allow for future updates, and to make it logically progress through new editions of the magazine.  We’ll see.

The current university homepage I inherited is still active at ualr.edu.  The approach I’ve settled on is to take several crazy wild swings at redesigning it.  Perhaps this swing resulted in a strike.  A foul perhaps?  It’s open to interpretation.  Another preliminary design in a few weeks, hopefully.

Not often do I get to redesign a site from the ground up.  Re-think Everything. Begin with an established pecking order of content priorities, and run with it.  I look forward to more design challenges like this.

A smattering of things from our Summer Enrollment campaign. Read more about it here..

Two or three years ago I was tasked with creating a web banner to promote a certain brand of raincoats and umbrellas, …to a target audience in Bangalore. It’s a long story. Don’t ask. Just know the important details: raincoats and Bangalore.

I had about 5 hours to complete the project, and my initial reaction to the idea was bewilderment and confusion.

The rain gear were big sellers in Bangalore, especially at the beginning of the rainy season, or so I was told. All that was supplied were a few images of the merchandise:

The first thought was to blow something out, quickly, and get this banner over with. But I’d been doing too much of that at the time, and wanted to try and make something to be proud of. It’s nice to have a project like that, at least once a month. Otherwise, we all might as well be laying out quick-n-dirty ads for the yellow pages.

Instead of just placing the merchandise on the banner along with a short phrase or sentence, I could try and include relevant imagery that a guy in Bangalore could identify with. So, find some Bangalore photos. We all have our sources for imagery:

Again though, raincoats. Monsoon Season. I couldn’t find any rainy-day photos that someone in Bangalore would conceivably recognize. So, maybe I could apply some fake rain:

Only one of the images seemed to show the rain droplets the clearest. So I dumped the other two, and then stretched and lens-blurred the right side of the third image to allow a good spot for the product shots:

Then for a finishing touch, place a short phrase about monsoon season in the appropriate language, and apply a few stylized enhancements:

…definitely one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever worked on.

My first job out of college involved promotional/theming design for online contests that Dell ran for their call center staff. You know, incentive programs. Employees who performed well in the contests won “points” that they could spend on cheesy merchandise. My boss would approach me in the morning and say: “Drew, we’re wanting to push broadband packages as add-ons this week. Come up with a theme and promotional materials by lunch.”

Ordinary guy calls Dell to buy a computer, and the sales rep would do his best to sell, well, you name it: printers, extra software, broadband packages, warranties, etc.. And Dell tracked all these stats and kept metrics for each individual employee, allowing for all kinds of interesting internal web based contests complete with live leaderboards.

It was interesting because the add-ons weren’t strictly Dell merchandise. The external vendors like Microsoft and Norton would kick-in funds for the contest payouts and everyone would make money.

Working in that type of environment served as good kick in the pants for kid just coming out of college with an art degree. Seeing the inner workings of the giant sales machine that Dell was, and still is, was a humbling experience.

In the beginning, most of the call centers were stateside, but during 03 and 04 they were popping up in South America and India as Dell caught the outsourcing bug. A call center rep working in say, Bangalore, would participate in the same contest as their counterpart in Round Rock, Texas. Not only were the contest rewards and payouts drastically different based on location, but in my case, attempting to develop sales contests and promotions for a multi-cultural audience, even though they all spoke english, proved very interesting.

Imagine you’re a salesman and your buyers are locked up in prisons all over the world. Similar would be a corporate motivational artist attempting to inspire a confined audience of telephone jockies. Thats was me. Below are highlights from that illustrious 2 - year stage of my design career. Finished pieces were in the form of web banners, posters, also site designs.