Today I want to talk about the latest design project I did. A brief note before we get started, though – I have updated my Design Portfolio page, if you’re the type of person to check on that sort of thing. I do have two more projects in the making that should be reaching there soon as well.

One of the things that I like about doing this “for a living” is that after several years I can still come across something new. I was recently tasked with coming up for a new design for a website that gets thousands of viewers a day, and has had an established community for more than 5 years. That website is Halflife2.net.

Most of the time that I work on a site, even if it builds popularity, I’m brought in to design it relatively early. Some examples would be a Command and Conquer site, a General Gaming site, and Diablo2.com, some number of years ago. But in each scenario, regardless of how big the place would become, I always had the design done before launching. It was a matter of “Okay, let’s do this right, and we’ll have everything set for a launch”.

With this site – a community of which I’m a member – I found myself nervous because I was no longer just having to please the Webmaster, but I felt an obligation to give each of the members a website that they would be proud to be a part of. The neurotic perfectionist part of me kicked in, and I went through more than 12 designs before reaching the one that’s currently being sported.

The big change that brought around the redesign in this case was a change of focus. Halflife2.net had, for quite some time, been branching out to handle not just more games from Valve, who had created Half-Life2, but other games released through Steam as well.

One of the biggest obstacles as a designer is drawing the vision that the webmaster has. In many cases, they will offer you freedom to go out and let your mind play. There’s nothing wrong with that either, but the chances of you coming back with what they envisioned aren’t exactly in your favour. I try to get as much information as I can from the client ahead of time. Even if it’s just colour scheme, imagery, and style, it can save a headache and several redesigns.

In this case I was allowed to roam free, but to keep the plan in mind, which was threefold.
- Move the focus away from just Halflife2
- Create an area for the Articles.
- Reduce the overall size to save bandwidth.

And of course my own personal task: Make absolutely everyone happy.

During my first few attempts I had tried to stick with the tan / blue style that the website had been going with before. The problem came up, though, that because the website was focused on articles just as much as it was focused on news, that there was always going to be a battle between them for space.

While I started on the right track, what came out felt very cluttered. As seen in the second images, the more I had to add room for other features, the more messy it became. While most of the staff really liked the metallic blue, and the sort of retro look that it gave the site, I wasn’t satisfied.

Look at that final design. How many objectives does it meet? The logo is clear and defined. The icons show the diversity. The articles have space of their own. There are features like discussions, the forums, the podcast, and so on. But the colour behind the news, and the entire way it is laid out doesn’t sit well with me. Your eyes don’t know where to go first. It’s bad marketing.

During the next few attempts, I tried to go much more relaxed with it.

The articles were given their own space away from the news. The news itself was kept with a simple background to keep it readable and centered. I even threw on the little Valve icon to say “Hey, we’re keeping an eye on them”.

But I still wasn’t satisfied with it. And at this point I realised what it was that I had to do. I rounded up about 10 people from the community, not people that I necessarily cared for, but users that I knew cared about the site, and would visit it often, and would speak their minds about exactly what they liked and didn’t.

The general response I got back was that it was nice, and had a lot of little details to it, but that the article window basically felt completely undocked from the entire thing, and the Valve character didn’t seem to fit either. It also came to my attention that the rust background was going to create a large image that I should specifically be avoiding.

Needless to say I went back to the drawing board.

The next incarnation was a complete disaster, but it did help me realise two things. Maneuvering around the old colours and trying to incorporate them as much as possible was holding me back, and there was no way that I could give the news and the articles the exact same amount of attention.

Putting them side-by-side was an idea that almost everyone hated. (I picked a new ten people through each incarnation). Looking back, I’m not sure that I really dislike it now as much as I did then. And that incarnation was an important step in the journey. I established the logo in a way that I really liked, and replaced the small icons with a larger collage that I spent hours making, showing off a few of the Valve games that we’d be covering. It felt more attention-grabbing than the icons did, and wasn’t a much larger file.

By the time I got around to messing with the subpages I had thought “Oh yes, this is absolutely it”. The latest batch of ten people liked it, the staff liked it, and even I liked it. When it came to doing the main site, what I decided to do was stop trying to promote the articles in such a way. The features were there, and didn’t need to be shoved down people’s throats. The Dark Grey is much easier to read, and the blue and orange colours are still present enough to catch your eye.

It ended up looking like this at the end.

The staff ended up loving it, and very very few users didn’t like the design, and even some of them had it grow on them after a time. Overall it was a very interesting project, a lot of fun to work on, and more pressure than I’m used to, which is excellent for keeping me on my toes. I’m looking forward to what comes next.

www.Halflife2.net

Alternate title: “What it means to be picky”

I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a registered user on OKCupid, which is a dating site. It’s not that I have trouble meeting women – between college and Boston’s night life I could get by just fine. What it is that I have trouble meeting women that I’m actually interested in. Picking up women at a bar seems to only be good for one thing, which is super, but isn’t really what I’m looking for.

What I like about OKC is that it’s run by geeks. These are the guys who created SparkNotes and The Spark, before they were bought out by Barnes and Noble. They run their own blog (through the site) called OkTrends where so far they’ve talked about neat ways to compile anonymous user information. Their first entry was comparing things like how much people from any given state shower. Or how interested they’d be in rape fantasies.

The second entry really caught my eye. But first, some background.

The way the site works is you answer a series of questions. And you choose what reponse your “ideal match” would choose. And you choose how important the question is to you. You can rule out someone who doesn’t believe in God, or who does drugs, or has no plans for college, wants or doesn’t want kids, how often they want sex, whatever, and it all goes into this algorithm, so that when you view someone’s profile it tells you how much of a “Match” you are with them.

So in their second blog post, they came up with this automated way to take the questions that you’ve answered, and their importance, and compile the entire thing into a flowchart. “Flowchart to my heart” if you will. Here is an incredibly simple one they whipped up.

The first one they posted was of someone on the staff. While I considered his difficult to break, it wasn’t overly complicated. You had to not believe God was more important than your family, be able to do simple math, share his views on homosexuality, evolution, flag burning, etc. So the way it worked is you followed the various roads through questions, and eventually they would lead to a red stop sign, depicting “no date”. a yellow circle depicting “only if you’re paying” and a green circle saying “let’s do it”. His ended up breaking down to 11 roads leading to no date, one road leading to let’s do it and one road leading to Only if you’re paying.

Here is his.

The second image he wouldn’t give us a full-size of because the girl didn’t want that much disclosed, but it featured 8 stop signs depicting “no date” as opposed to his one. I counted about 43 roads going to these very spread out stop signs. One road going to ‘Let’s do it’ and one going to “Only if you’re paying”. The graph is huge, and printed at a readable resolution, he claims it is “ten feet” tall.

This is a London girl, who has standards, maybe unreachable standards. She calls herself a “tough ass to crack”, and the staff member agrees. While the entire thing was very interesting, the part that stood out to me the most was what he actually called her flowchart. “This is what dying alone looks like as a png.”

Here is hers.

So that all took place July 7th. When I logged in today, I found that they had selected 33.3% of the users and allowed them to create their own charts. I made mine and had some fun with it. It lets you select which questions you want to use – of the two most important ones. It’s remarkably close to “Dying alone”, but there’s still some hope.

And this is mine.

How amusing. Three days after I updated my resume here, in four formats (Web, PNG, PDF, Doc) I got a promotion that requires editing them all. Still, very tolerable.

A few days ago I attended a Writing and Publishing workshop with my aunt, given by Mary Ellen Humphrey, a 12-time published author and former senator from New Hampshire. The amount of knowledge she had was amazing, and I feel like much of what she gave me saved me years of my life and possibly even thousands of dollars, as far as having a proper plan of getting published goes. She was a very interesting and very nice woman. I’m glad to have met her.

Since I’m taking this next year off from school – before transferring and working to get my Bachelor’s – I think I want to finally write a complete book. November is National “Write a Novel in a Month” Month, which I probably won’t participate in, but still, the thought crosses my mind that if people are capable of finishing entire novels inside of a month, I can certainly do one within a year. I’ve even got the premise set up in my head, it’s just a matter of ironing it out.

I’m currently reading Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman – the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy – and while I’m not normally into fantasy books, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m really hoping the rain holds out tomorrow so I can lay in my hammock and read for a few hours.

I’ve found that despite wanting to use this more as a blog, I haven’t had much to write in it. The truth is I’ve been very busy lately, so much so that this is the first time that I’ve actually touched this site in probably a month. The good news, though, is all the links should be working here. I finished posting my resume, added some things I’ve written, and so on.

I’m also proud to report that I’ll have some new designs up here soon. In addition to landing a commission for http://www.shamanicpoetry.com, I’m also doing a website that’s my biggest gig ever. I can’t talk much about it yet, but there’s something appealing to the idea that something I’ve designed can be seen by hundreds to thousands of people per day.

I also took my last college final yesterday, so once my degree comes in the mail I’ll actually be a graduate, which is a great feeling. I’m looking forward to the next chapter. I’m working on getting myself a promotion at work, and from there we’ll see what happens.

I’m moving on
I hope your coming with me
I hope your coming with me

An old friend has been going through a breakup over the last week or two, and she is currently at the stage of recovery where you blare angsty and bitter music. As I was talking to her earlier today, I decided to ask if I could burn her a Mix CD. After all, I have plenty of angsty breakup music.

She agreed, and then I thought to myself “Wait, how do I do that?” You know, some years ago it was easy. You’d just hold a tape recorder up to the radio. And after that you’d burn a CD. But one of the problems that I’ve run into in the past, is that many car adapters and vehicular CD players in general have some trouble playing burned CDs.

But what happens now? Everyone uses iPods and gets music that way. While iTunes is great for acquiring music, I can’t speak to how it is with sharing music.

I don’t own an iPod. What I have actually seems to be better for this sort of thing. I have a Creative Muvo that I got as a present about 3 years ago from a girl I was dating. It’s small (which was more rare for MP3 players then) and perfect for my needs.

The way that this works is quite neat. The blue part is just a USB port that’s tied to a single AAA battery. And the other part can disconnect from it, and that’s just a USB flash drive with, you know, play/pause/next/previous/volume buttons on it, and an LED indicating battery life.

Mine is quite simple being one of the older models. It “only” holds 512mb. The newer ones have displays and are up to a few gigs storage.

Now, let’s think about this for a minute. How awesome would it be to use Flash Drives as a new form of Mix CD? These little USB drives can be purchased for, literally, an 8 gig one is like $25. They basically give them out like candy in lots of stores.

So you get one, fill it up, and give it to someone. I mean, 8 gigs is a bit much. That would hold more or less 1500 songs. But you could even get a small one – for cheaper – and load it up. And how universal are they? You throw a full one to someone, they drop the files onto their harddrive, and then throw them on to the mp3 player. Anyone who can access an external harddrive using Explorer properly can do it.

It’s a good plan.