HydraCMS
Responsibilities
- Interface Design
- Project Management
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.0)
- Usability
- Some XHTML / CSS / PHP
In May of 2005, openBook decided it was sick of messing with bloated open source CMS products and began the process of planning and developing its own. However, there were more than a few bumps in the road, and I eventually found myself in charge of the design and management of the project. I started by creating these mockups as a roadmap for the developers to follow.
The real power of Hydra is that it is extremely visual - users see the administrative tools overlaid on their actual website design. Users can also move elements on the page with up/down/drag tools - floating boxes can actually be dragged, dropped, and locked in place anywhere on the page with some javascript automagic, and relatively positioned boxes can be moved up or down (relative to each other) with up/down buttons. Very cool.
Another strength of this CMS is that I designed it, at the behest of my boss, to be extremely accessible and usable. Why? First, for users with disabilities. There are currently (to our knowledge) no other CMS products which could slip by WCAG 2.0 recommendations, much less be navigable with a screen reader. Second, it gives us a great edge in going after government contracts. This adherence to usability meant cutting out needless graphics and designing with simplicity in mind. Brodie Rao did a great job taking my design and creating an extremely accessible, semantic XHTML / CSS template.
Artistorm
Responsibilities
- Site Design
- Flash Interface Design
- Project Management
- PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS
I went through roughly 19 designs for Artistorm before I settled on one. After that, my group's experience with e-commerce websites guided the usability tweaks to the final design. The site was designed in shades of gray for the purpose of highlighting the art - I've seen too many "art" websites with distracting, busy designs. There's a reason that real art galleries are so minimalist - if the gallery is flashy, the art suffers.
My involvement with Artistorm's powerful image viewer / annotator and the administrative tools behind it was purely managerial and graphical - I designed an interface and the flash developer, Naveen Nattam, took it from there. He did an incredible job building the application exactly as I envisioned it, even down to the details like replacing flash's nasty raster scaling with an interpolated copy. Tripurari Volpe designed the javascript which generates the XML on which the image viewer runs, and I did some PHP magic to crop/scale the images with the help of Tristan Pemble.
Another important thought which went into the design of this site was usability - sites like Art.com look more like Amazon or Walmart than art galleries. The user shouldn't be inundated with hundreds of text links on an art website, so I made a specific point of never using a text link when an image could be produced.
