I’m in a redesigning mood. Last night I started getting that itchy, driven feeling. It means that I know that the current Warren Wilson website does not represent my best work. I know that, very likely, my best work will verge too closely on some edge of artsy that isn’t going to fly with the powers that be, but I need to at least feel that I’ve given it my all.

I’ve already talked to the bossman. I presented him with these links, which I think represent some pretty nice designs as far as higher-ed goes:

http://www.choate.edu/
http://www.goucher.edu/
http://www.smith.edu/
http://www.ups.edu/
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/
http://www.colgate.edu/
http://www.gustavus.edu/
http://www.middlebury.edu/
http://www.northland.edu/

(Nor am I the only one, as most of these got mentioned as being excellent in GCF’s focus group study.)

One of the common threads among these sites is that they are colorful. The color pallete of the Warren Wilson website is just kind of disappointing to me. We’ve kept black-on-white as the mainstay of the site for years on the logical, if untested , notion that it is more accessible, and we continue to use dark green and blue that look nearly black against the stark white. The whole time we’ve been sending out nice, full-bleed print publications with color everywhere (allbeit mostly in pictures).

The bossman thought that our minimal design set us apart—made us different from that list of sites. In some ways I feel that’s correct. We haven’t yet felt the need to decentralize our navigation into topical/audience, and there is a certain spareness to the design that has an appeal. At the same time, while our site is “different” compared to that list of pretty nice websites, I think it would be “just another site” when viewed against a list of mediocre-to-bad college sites. This is probably my self-criticism talking mostly (I hope).

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 9:09 am and is filed under Design, Marketing. It has been viewed 1488 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!