recent projects
cityLAB
building a manageable yet flexible home for a Pittsburgh non-profit
Pittsburgh non-profit cityLAB reached out to me to create a site where they could share their ‘experiments’ and news about their organization. They needed an interface that was easy to manage and provided enough flexibility to accommodate future content while remaining consistent with their overall branding.
I developed a custom theme in WordPress using custom content types and taxonomies. I tip my hat to Pär Thernström for his Simple Fields plugin, which was helpful in developing dashboard interfaces for content that didn’t fit into WP’s simple Post/Page model.
The solution that we reached makes cityLAB’s website easy-to-use for multiple authors within the organization, regardless of their level of technical savvy.
TERRAIN
tailoring a blog to fit a whole city
Pittsburgh designer Jonathan Greene maintains a growing collection of ‘snapshots’ of the city from multiple contributors in the form of images, sound, text, and video. He had a specific vision as to how they would be presented on the web: in addition to a traditional blog listing, there would be a zoomed-out ‘broadsheet’ view where all pieces in the collection could be seen at once and readers could click into a pop-up view of specific entries.
After consulting a web agency that was unable to fulfill his requirements, Jonathan came to me to develop a solution where he could exercise exact control over the appearance and interactions. The result is a javascript-driven interaction design backed by WordPress on the server side. The interaction layer is largely decoupled from WordPress and could be adapted to another CMS with little effort.
Just as the collection is ever growing, so is the site’s functionality. In a future release we will be using the HTML5 History API to let the Fancybox pop-up behaviors play nicely with the web and allow readers to bookmark posts while retaining the immersive broadsheet experience.
Pablo Garcia/POiNT
extending a portfolio site to make it stand out in the crowd
Pablo Garcia, a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, came to me with a site in need of a refresh.
A non-technical user, Pablo had originally assembled it on his own using the portfolio CMS Indexhibit. His new requirements went beyond the flat information architecture furnished by the CMS, but since he was already accustomed to Indexhibit’s administrative interface, we decided to work around the CMS’s limitations and develop new features and layouts atop the existing codebase, rather than embark on a complete rewrite or migrate the data to another CMS.
I extended David DeSandro’s popular Masonry jQuery plugin (now part of a comprehensive suite of ‘bricklaying’ tools called Isotope) to fit into Pablo’s new design. It provides a bird’s-eye view of all of his projects on the home page where static content once stood.
As Pablo’s list of projects grows, he’ll need a way to categorize and filter the view. To that end, I extended Indexhibit’s URL routing to serve landing pages for categories.
Through a familiar but enhanced admin panel, Pablo can continue to develop and manage his projects comfortably.