Elegant, simple design supported by lean, cutting-edge technologies built with free software and open standards. From building WordPress themes to redesigning a mailing list manager interface to rapidly deploying a wiki to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina, these are the principles which animate my work.

The View From The Ground

The View From The Ground is the longest running (since 2001!), most successful site in my portfolio. Structually and technically, it is a relatively simple site. It showcases my minimalist approach to design. The site is focused intensely on the content — content that is rich with the photographs of Patricia Evans and the journalism of Jamie Kalven. The focus on content means that the design must accomodate a wide range of designs within the stories themselves and must stay out of the way as much as possible to give the content the immediacy it deserves.

FEMAanswers.org

FEMAanswers.org is another simple site. It highlights my skills in deployment, system administration, and organization. About a month after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orlenas, I was contacted by a legal advocate named Craig Castellanet who wanted to deploy a wiki to act as a resource center for FEMA information but was concerned that the window for reaching advocates was quickly closing. After working out organizational logistics, deploying the wiki took under an hour. The entire project turnaround was about 36 hours. The short deployment cycle has allowed us to rapidly respond to user comments and refine the workings of the site. It is a good example of how the so-called “Web 2.0″ technologies can be used to efficiently address important social problems.

Willie Pickens

In November 2005, I released www.williepickens.org to promote the work of Chicago jazz artist Willie Pickens and his 2006 birthday concert. For this project, I stepped outside my typical style to make a visually rich site that is meant to evoke both the elegance and grittiness of the jazz era. This site leverages WordPress to provide the client — Willie and his patron, the Hyde Park Union Church — with easy content management.

lists.povertylaw.org

Interface design is one of my favorite things and the Sympa mailing list manager is a fast, feature rich application with an interface that is as ugly as the underlying technology is wonderful. Not only is Sympa ugly, the 4.x versions which Debian uses employ web design straight out of ‘97.

So, I set to work to build a better Sympa interface for lists.povertylaw.org (along with lists.tals.org, lists.childcarelaw.org, lists.housingjustice.net, and lists.lstech.org). The interface redesign attempts to make the interface more logical and usable, as well as web-standards compliant. The template is currently a beta version. The beta version of the theme is available under the GPL through the Sargent Center’s eJustice project.

The project is indicative of my best work: I created a simple, usable, standards-based interface as well as configuring the mail transport agent (Exim4) to significantly reduce the administrative burden of running a Sympa server, tighten security, and provide powerful spam and virus filtering.