Trevor Chow-Fraser

Updates from August, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Trevor 21:28 on 30 August 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Frosh on a Boat 

  McGill kept me busy in Summer 2009 as I designed websites for both Rad Frosh and SSMU Frosh, the two orientations open to all undergraduates, regardless of Faculty.

  The theme for SSMU Frosh 2009 was inspired by a popular music video of the moment—one which I had never seen before, but I’m sure most of you were already digging it. I had to admit, it was a fun video. And I was excited to tackle the theme, to find something fun and juicy. But I’m on a Boat has one big problem. Most of what makes the video fun really has nothing to do with being on a boat. It’s more just about being super affluent.

  It would have been inappropriate to promote such classist images for an event which is meant to welcome all students into the university. So I basically pushed the video out of my mind completely. Now that I think about it, maybe we could have evoked the Beachcombers (massive CanCon points there). Regardless, I thought I would just focus on the actual boat, and place it in something tropical looking (the irony being that we were welcoming students to Montreal!).

  Since the SSMU is one of those rare McGill institutions that actually tries to be bilingual, this website had to be available in french as well as english. Rather than providing two separate sites, I decided to display both french and english content on a single page: english in the left column, french on the right. Since the website content was pretty static, I thought this was both easy and also showed a certain parity between french and english, which I appreciate.

  Another thing about this project: we had close to 2000 people registering online, and using paypal to cover their registration fees. If anything went wrong with the system, it would have meant more trouble than I had ever dealt with before. Fortunately, Drupal turned out to be a great choice for this site. While it can sometimes be a difficult beast to wrangle, in this case I was easily able to pull the site together using core components, and it handled the whole situation flawlessly.

  The coolest thing about this project is that, because I designed the logo along with the website, I got to see my work on all of the T-Shirts, Mugs, Tote Bags, and more! Physicality is so much cooler than digitality.

   

   

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  Trevor 15:59 on 1 November 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  SSMU Sustainability Assessment 

  I spent most of the summer following graduation alongside my good friend Derina Man, researching and writing a sustainability assessment for the Student Society of McGill University. It was the culmination to many years working on environmental issues with the SSMU, and there’s much more that can be said about that.

  But from a non-activistey perspective, it was also an exciting opportunity to design my first book. Having put so much thought, work and strategy into the research and writing, I knew that this was a document that couldn’t simply sit on the shelf. Public communications is always a consideration in my organising, but with the Sustainability Assessment, the stakes seemed higher.

  So to finish off this project, I spent many weeks laying out our work, reformating and recontexutalising content, and sprucing it up with beautiful graphics and photography. The finished report is over 100 pages, so I worked hard to make it enjoyable to read. We didn’t expect anyone to read the whole report (although, some foolish souls have done so). Rather, we broke it into chapters, and I further broke these down into sidebars and action plans, alongside the main content.

  In the end, I hope that the SSMU 2008 Sustainability Assessment is a beautiful, readable book. I found inspiration in documents like the Sustainable Concordia 2003 and 2006 sustainability assessments, the International Energy Agency’s Lights Labour Lost, and Our Cultural Sovereignty, the 2003 report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

  Download PDF

   

   
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  Trevor 0:15 on 31 July 2006 Permalink | Reply  

  GreatLakesWetlands.ca Website 

  The first major website I designed was originally called WIRE Net (Wetland Indicators and Research Education Network). It now lives at greatlakeswetlands.ca, a more sensible name.

  Because I was just starting out, I wanted to try all sorts of crazy graphic effects and CSS trickery. But this website is for an academic / agency audience, people who are used to scanning Word documents all day, and don’t expect much else from their websites (at least, that’s what I assume from browsing the agency sites).

  I think it was very fortunate that I was forced to tone down my approach. I ended up focusing much more closely on the information structure, and figuring out how best to automate the massive amounts of information. That’s because this site was also built in the days before I knew what a Content Management System was. I knew how to use XHTML and CSS to handcraft sites. But there was just way too much information here to be coding each page from scratch.

  So I learned a little bit of PHP, enough to build some templates and to use variables to control the output. Now, with WordPress or Drupal this job would be much easier and faster. But since there’s no database, this site feels like it runs nice and fast.