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.

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.

Latest elearning that I have done, which at this point is a couple of years old. Taking my experience from the previous two, I think we hit a nice balance between too interactive and not enough. Still too much text on the screen for my liking, but overall a very solid product.

My second elearning. Definitely tried to take a different approach than I did with SCORE. Again, I feel we missed the mark, but a bit too much in the opposite direction. I do like the look of it, and building the 3D backgrounds was fun but challenging.

One of the last ecological characterizations I would design, and probably the best looking design.  These projects tended to be a nightmare in terms of information architecture, which didn’t bother me at the time, since I was only beginning to gain an understanding of what those words actually meant to web design. This is also still live on the internet.

While working on the SCORE Elearning module, I also had the opportunity to redesign their website. I took some visual elements of their original website and incorportated them in to the new design, helping users make the transition from one to another. I feel this design has held up nicely, and SCORE is still using it today.