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
<http://www.english.ufl.edu/worlds/>
<http://worlds.gameology.org/>
<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
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
<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
<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"
<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
<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
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
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
Academic-Gamers.org
<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
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
Game Studies Group
<http://www.english.ufl.edu/gsg/>
This site is almost entirely out of date, but I had fun with the design.
Graduate Comics Organization
<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
<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
<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: History and Nostalgia in Videogames, forthcoming 2008 from Vanderbilt University Press. Edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor.
Other Sites to Visit
- Gameology.org
- ImageTexT
- TheVideogameText.com (soon)
Recent Publications
- "Deviant Materialities: Reflecting Surfaces and Hollow Bodies in CSI." Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. 13 (2008).
- "Film Music vs. Video Game Music: The Case of Silent Hill." Music, Sound, and Multimedia. Ed. Jamie Sexton. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2007.
- "Game Studies and Web 2.0: Finding an Audience Online." Flow TV. Department of Radio-TV-Film at UT Austin. 9 February 2007.