Warren Wilson College recently underwent a change in leadership with a new President. At the same time, the exciting changes happening all over the internet have finally managed to trickle into higher ed. The many projects underway made Karine Joly, in her University Business article, declare 2006 “the year of the redesign.” […]

It’s out now and will be all over the world in less than a month. Go grab it.

Internet Explorer 7 will be delivered through Automatic Updates - customers should complete preparations by November 1
To help customers become more secure and up-to-date, Microsoft will distribute Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates and the Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites. Internet Explorer 7 will be available for users of genuine […]

This is my report on “Breaking the Frame of Web Design” Presented by Fritz McDonald.
Fritz is the Creative Director at Stamats. He supervises web and print designers as well as writers. His ideas regarding breaking out of the web design “frame” are influenced in part by author Brendan Dawes.

(Fritz McDonald begins his talk.)
After […]

So messing around with video in general is new to me. So I’m trying to figure out how to use Flash to create embedded video in nifty, YouTube-style players on a website. (Yes yes, I’m WAY behind here. Tell me about it.)
So here’s a horrid quality video I shot with my phone […]

After receiving many, mostly encouraging, remarks on its “public beta” of the new Brown website via the University Web Developers list serve, several Brown x-staffers and alums have stepped in and gave them a round thrashing over it.
It seems that Brown has made some web design faux pas over the years. One of the […]

The redesigns are coming hot and heavy this morning as Andrea of Interllectual announces the new Humboldt website. Forefront to me in this refreshing design is the font treatment. Lucida makes a classy-yet-understated change to the sparer Verdana or Arial usually found in higher ed designs. The logo type, alphabet spread […]

Brown University announced a public beta of their new homepage design this morning. Coming at a time when many college homepages are reaching a kind of threshold of usability and design challenges, Brown has been one of the first to step through with a refreshingly different approach.
The design uses JavaScript to allow for […]

When engaging in the conversation between media and audience that instills the sense of your brand, trying to boil it down to a memorable and effective home page can be daunting. This is especially true of colleges and universities, which have so many faces and audiences to represent. When faced with choosing that […]

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 […]

Here I was all ready to fire-off a nightly rant when I find myself eating crow. I was getting tired of those who seemed to worship the colleges that can/choose to afford Stamats (*cough* Furman *cough*). I think Stamats does okay with print materials, and their presentations at conferences have frequently been informative. […]

Well here’s what I’ve come up with after tinkering with it all day. I’m not sure I’m sold on it yet, but it seemed to make the bossman pretty excited about the possibilities, and that is always a plus.
Now to let it sit on a shelf for a bit and mull […]

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 […]

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]