Might look vaguely familiar, as it is an upgrade of the previous NOAA CSC design, which itself was a redesign. This one definitely takes a more modern feel than the previous. What is interesting – for me at least – is to see how my style has changed just over the course of one year. Two similar yet different designs of the exact same website really illustrate that for me.

Big things for this site is that it is the first one where I really designed on a grid from the very beginning, with a full understanding of what that actually means. I was educated by the “Grids are Good” presentation. If you haven’t seen it, and you are aspiring to do any sort of work in the web world, stop what you are doing and go through it. It will definitely be time well spent.

Logo for my wife’s photography business. She specializes in child photography, so we both agreed that we wanted something fairly playful. At the same time, she did not want the “typical photography logo” which seems to consist of the photographer’s name in a script fot with decorative swirls all around it.

I got the root of the idea from a set of wooden alphabet blocks my wife purchased as a prop. I knew I wanted blue and pink, so I ended up picking their compliments (more or less) for the other two colors. Overall, very happy with it and its execution (so far) in print and web.

Logo for a company that teaches cheerleading at daycares. Tried to keep it playful and simple. One of my more favorite logos I have made.

My latest, greatest design. The team was great. We went from nothing to launch in around seven months, which is wicked fast in our organization. We worked in a lot of cool features that really work to help the audience understand the material, as opposed to being there just to be flashy. Easily my favorite design to date.

Another NOAA site, this time for the Center’s Digital Coast initiative. I am moderatley happy with this design. It has only been launched for a week or so at this point, but I am already working on some different things I want to do with it for v2 and 3. I think the surrounding elements are good, but it is weak in the content area, mostly because that was a moving target throughout most of development. Hopefully the changes I have in mind will take this from good to great.

Redesign of my employeer. This took well over six months to go from concept to production, and as with most government organizations, had to have quite a few people sign off on it. It was a significant visual upgrade from all of the previous designs. Though it has only been out there for less than a year, we are already working on redoing some pieces of it.

Menu on the right again. My first application of such a thing that would actually hit the streets. Again, this is run with Joomla, and I actually took the time to pull out a lot of the table code (Joomla 1.0.x) so I could design purely in CSS.

Looking at my web design work up to this one, I would say that they can be grouped into a “drop shadow” phase, and this marks the beginning of my “gradient” phase. I really like the way this website turned out (running Joomla underneith). I was especially proud of the “baseball card” pictures at the top, and how well the logo looks behind the girls.

My wife was part of this organization, and my mother-in-law still runs it, so they get design work for free. Most design folks don’t particularly like this logo, but I did my research into logos of other cheerleading groups, and it really does fit well. We went through years of various logos before finally settling on this one, which was the first time I had looked at it since being in school. Funny what an education can do for you.