So one of the things that my wife, Melissa, kept saying about my recent redesign idea for WWC was that it reminded her of Northland’s website. This was bothersome to me, as it didn’t start out looking anything like it but kind of grew in that direction organically as I revised it from comments that others made. (I was one of those artsy kids in grade school that would get fightin-mad if you accused me of “tracing.”) Melissa explained that she can hardly blame me, that she felt that the Northland brand image was very close to the Warren Wilson one.

This got me a little obsessed, so I Googled the web in search of Northland’s designer and found him:

Kevin Davis is, hands down, the most talented designer I’ve ever seen working in higher ed. He makes me envious and inspired all at once. The design for his WordPress blog is even incredible. Northland made out like bandits when, in his twenties, Kevin worked with them from ’04-’05 to produce their site after attending school there. Now he’s apparently moved on to Capella University.

Kevin’s higher ed designs have both a clean simplicity and also an attention to detail that makes them fascinating. The subtle use of gradients and colored bands are elements that appear frequently in my own work. However, whereas I struggle with overly clunky beveling or overdoing the gradients, Kevin makes balance look effortless. While I am frequently using photographs, Kevin adds interest to his designs with unique icons, images, whirls, and fields of texture—design elements that can easily look bad if done wrong.

Kudos to Kevin! I’m glad he’s not at Northland so that I don’t have to compete with him anymore :P

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Design, Higher Education. It has been viewed 2181 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!