Trevor Chow-Fraser

Updates from September, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Trevor 16:54 on 10 September 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  McGill Asian Religions Area Website 

  As a long-time student, and sometimes loafer, in McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies, it was a real pleasure and honour to work on the website of its Asian Religions Area, home to some of my most admired professors.

  At first I was not going to touch the actual graphic design. I spent the majority of my time tracking down updated information, and reorienting the information design to fit with the site’s revamped purpose. I also recoded the site so that it is now much more legible, both to search engines and to anyone who needs to update the site in the future.

  When, for a final touch, I was asked to make the design more graphical, the update was as easy as pie. I’ve always understood that content and presentation need to be kept separate, as per the web standards. But this is the first time I’ve actually taken a well coded site and simply switched stylesheets for a completely different experience. So exciting!

  I hope that the new design succeeds in representing both East and South Asian religions, without favouring either, and also without resorting to oriental cliches. The colour scheme, and the choice of images and motifs is designed with this in mind.

   

   

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  Trevor 16:31 on 30 April 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  URBAN Monitoring Website 

  Designing the website for McMaster University’s URBAN project was an interesting challenge, because it meant appealing to the usually staid academic audience, while also aiming for a more dynamic, general audience.

  URBAN stands for Urban-Rural Biomonitoring and Analysis Network. So it’s basically about engaging normal people in scientific, ecological work. For instance, there is a very successful project in Ontario’s Niagara penninsula, recruiting bird watchers to help track migratory birds in this ecologically important region.

  The URBAN website design started out with a round of logo designs. The goal was to allude to both aquatic, wetland and forest habitats, while also including the human, built-environment. After several rounds, we settled on this logo design, and the rest of the website coalesced around that.

  Since this website was guaranteed to have a wide audience, including funders and government agencies, I thought I would take a stab at using a CSS Framework. Ideally, this will ensure that the CSS is compatible with the broadest possible range of browsers. I chose Yet Another Multicolumn Layout because it seems to be a mature project, and comes with some good documentation. Integrating it into WordPress came with a few snags, but overall, it seems to have worked well.

   

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  Trevor 0:53 on 8 April 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Canadian Content Book Design 

  In March 2010, I was asked to design a journal for the Canadian Studies Association of Undergraduate Students (that name is a bit of a tautology, isn’t it?) I worked closely with the editor, Francesca Taddeo, a lovely and passionate person now studying Law at McGill. Although, I’m sure she thought she was being too demanding, it was great fun having to put together the entire journal in about two days. It was also a great lesson figuring out how to turn the digital document into a printed, paper-bound book.

  To better integrate the editorial side with my design work, I knew we could forget about figuring out how to streamline the avalanche of emails swirling past daily. Instead, I suggested that we squat a series of computers in the Faculty of Arts Computer Lab. So with Francesca and a few other editors, we went through all of the submissions, collating edits, standardizing document flow and format. I also had the opportunity to show them some design ideas, to register their interest and work-in their feedback. So, while I was parachuted into the organisation to simply pull together the book design, I feel that I also helped smooth out the editorial process. And I much preferred the face-to-face, studio-style process, compared to the endless rounds of comp-email-wait-recieve criticism that I’ve experienced with other projects.

  This has definitely been one of my favourite projects. Francesca allowed me lots of space to innovate and experiment, and I gave her full editorial control. I think it worked well! And of course, having produced an actual, physical artifact, we had to have a launch party. That was lots of fun too, and a great way to see ones work sent off into the world.

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