Zach Whalen

Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Linguistics and Communication, University of Mary Washington

Web Design Portfolio

In addition to my research and teaching, I've developed some proficient hobby doing Web design, and the links below point to some of my work. Web design also plays a role in my teaching as I strongly feel that working with the tools of new media -- even the basic tools of HTML and CSS -- give students a better sense of how and why things are the way they are. Moreover, effective design is a strong rhetorical component of any web presence, and I believe that a good sense of design helps students to prepare for professional roles in which presentation is important.

As a general philosophy, the sites I help create use clean, accessible code, and I try to make each design as compatible as possible on a range of common web browsers. I'm very interested in CSS and developing techniques for coding with CSS to create flexible design. Each site has brought its own challenges, and I've used a wide variety of technologies to bring each project to life. These include CSS, XHTML, XML, Perl/CGI, Apache SSI, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. I also work with content management and blogging software like Drupal, Open Conference System (OCS), WordPress, and Blosxom. I also try to implement search engine optimization on each site I create, making use of metadata structures, sitemaps, and semantic coding.

Here are some of the sites I've worked on. In some cases, the current version of a site will not reflect the work I've done (some are defunct and others have been handed off to others), so I've provided relevent screenshots of each project.

Some of these were done as freelance work, but most were volunteer labor. I am officially not doing freelance Web design anymore so that I can concentrate on my dissertation, but that's not to say that I couldn't be brought out of retirement if the right offer came along.

2007 UF World Building Conferences

UF World Building Main Page

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/worlds/>

World Building Game Studies

<http://worlds.gameology.org/>

World Building Comics Studies

<http://worlds.comic-studies.org/>

This year's Comics and Game Studies Conferences are united under a single theme and are being held on the same weekend. To reflect this unity, I created three websites, one each for Comics and Game Studies and a single entry page introducing the two sites and solidifying the connection to the English Department. Both conference sites are based on modified installations of OCS.

Gameology.org

Gameology Screenshot

<http://www.gameology.org/>

This project was my most ambitious so far and remains my biggest commitment in terms of Web work. Gameology.org is the reincarnation of Academic-Gamers.org, and it is built on Drupal (extended through several custom modules and my own theme).

2006 UF Comics Conference

Comics and Childhood screenshot

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/comics/2006/>

This design was based on a poster design by Jane Dominguez, who adapted the visual style of Winsor McCay.

Center for Children's Literature and Culture

2006 British Women Writer's Conference

BWWC screenshot

<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/bwwc/>

This design was pretty ambitious, and I'm pretty proud of a neat trick I figured out: the size of the book image scales proportionally to the text. So check out what happens if you resize the text in your browser ('ctrl +' or 'ctrl -' in Firefox).

2005 UF Game Studies Conference, "Playing the Past"

Playing the Past Screenshot

<http://www.academic-gamers.org/gsg/>

This design collages together images from classic gaming moments, and games that situate history in some way.

Transforming Encounters Colloquium

Transforming Encounters Screenshot

<http://www.recess.ufl.edu/Transform2/index.shtml>

I created this design for the colloquium using images by Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 - 1717). The requirement was to use a butterfly somewhere in the design, so I took the idea of metamorphosis literally and created the butterfly animation at the top using Flash.

UF Center for Jewish Studies

<http://www.jst.ufl.edu/>

The design I created is no longer in use, but I will post a screenshot as soon as I can find one.

United Faculty of Florida, UF Chapter

UFF-UF screenshot

<http://www.uff-uf.org>

I know longer work on this site, but the design remains basically the same as the one I collaborated on with Harun Thomas.

Stacy Whalen's Piano Studio

Stacy Whalen's Piano Studio website

<http://www.stacywhalen.com/>

A website for my wife's piano studio. Yes, that's us in the picture posing with our dog, Teddy.

Academic-Gamers.org

Academic Gamers screenshot

<http://www.academic-gamers.org/>

This site began as a project of the Game Studies Group, and has since transformed into Gameology.org. Our blog was run on the Perl-based software Blosxom, which I extended by creating a way for contributors to maintain profiles and create entries through a web form.

2004 UF Comics Conference

2004 Comics Conference Screenshot

One of my first ambitious designs, the look of this website is based on my attempt to interpret the theme, "Comics and Animation: Simultaneity and Sequentiality," by referencing Winsor McCay, one of the great masters of both comics and animation.

Comics@UF Page

Comics@UF screenshot

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/comics/>

This version of the page is no longer deployed on the site.

Game Studies Group

GSG screenshot

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/gsg/>

This site is almost entirely out of date, but I had fun with the design.

Graduate Comics Organization

GCO logo

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/comics/gco/>

I designed the logo for the original site, which is still in use on the current version.

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

Imagetext Screenshot

<http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/>

An online journal of Comics Studies. The current design is the second of two, and the screenshot above is from a special Blake issue for which I adapted the design to a Blakean idiom. I also collaborated on the original logo and site design. For the current version, I've developed an XML-based metadata and templating structure which relies on Perl, SSI, and JavaScript to deploy content.

Enneagram of Awareness therapy by Lissa Friedman

Enneagram of Awareness Screenshot

<http://www.enneagramofawakening.com>

This was my first free lance job, and looking back on it now, I'm honestly not that proud of it. I provide it here, though, for the sake of completeness.

Teaching

I am teaching two courses this fall: "Forms of Narrative" (ENGL 251A) and "New Media: The False and the Virtual" (ENGL 376MM). More information about these courses is available on my teaching page.

Research

My dissertation is on videogame typography, and I have published on a number of topics related to games and other digital media. My continuing research interests focus on the material textuality of digital artifacts.

Please see my curriculum vitae for more information.

Book

Playing the Past

Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Videogames, forthcoming 2008 from Vanderbilt University Press. Edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor.

Other Sites to Visit

Recent Publications

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