I've been an avid user of MetaFilter, the 800-pound gorilla of collaborative weblogs, for years. So when the site's creator, Matt Haughey, announced the redesign contest in late November of 2004, I knew I had to enter.
It was a chance to give something back to the community that had provided me with so much information and entertainment over the years; it was an opportunity to try out my design chops on a really high-profile project. (And, let's face it, the lure of winning a free custom-painted iPod caught my attention, too.)
Here's my redesign of the site.
Click on the image for full-size
mockup
(launches in new window)
The contest results were announced on February 5, 2005.
My design wasn't the winner -- but Matt did mention my design was one of his favorites, which was extremely gratifying. He wrote:
"This is probably the strongest of the entries that used a three column design. Everything seems to have its perfect spot and I like the use of color that still mixes well onto a white page. I'm guessing the icons let you jump between sections, and I love the idea of surfacing the search engine onto the front page."
Shortly after announcing the contest results, Matt reworked the existing front page to include a search box. It was really cool to see at least one element of my redesign have an immediate effect on the site.
On the other hand -- it looks like I'm going to have to buy my own iPod.
Elisabeth Knottingham is an
CAUSALITY is an upcoming science-fiction webseries I co-wrote and co-produced in 2012.
The series involved a secret community of time travelers who can only travel into the past.
I gave nod to that idea with this stylized backwards-pointing arrow. I wanted a very clean,
sharp, classic look to this logo.
The Merchants of Deva are a convention hospitality and entertainment group, providing local science fiction conventions with parties and dances and other events.
I designed this logo for them on spec, and they enthusiastically adopted it. The group is named for a fictional organization in a series of fantasy novels by Robert Asprin -- interdimensional traders who are often seen as trickster demons.
Their old logo had a set of horns; I tried a different approach to suggest that playful demonic aspect with the pointed tail on the "E". I wanted a logo that suggested something slightly exotic, bold, and above all, cool. Something that looked simultaneously very classic and very modern.
I designed the logo with an eye towards multiple uses -- something that would look equally good as a rubber stamp, or on a T-shirt, button, or banner.
This is another logo intended to be bold, clean, simple and iconic. This logo is for an old mailing list I used to be on, one for members of the Gothic scene in Seattle. Despite their tastes for morbid movies, dark music and black clothing, these were some of the nicest, well-educated, polite and well-spoken people I've ever met on the Internet.
It was suggested that we needed a logo for flyers, invitations and the like. I wanted something that would therefore be immediately recognizable, even from a distance.
In the end, I decided to combine the ancient Egyptian "Eye of Horus" symbol, a motif often used in the Gothic subculture, with the outline of Seattle's Space Needle.
Science fiction convention concept art
At one point, I was involved with a group of people who were interested
in starting a new science fiction convention in Seattle, one that focussed on
the "cyberpunk" genre. We got as far as having a hotel booked, a date set,
and some flyers distributed, but we didn't confirm the booking in time and
we lost our weekend and with it, our momentum. But I did create some
interesting designs for it, including the logo shown here.
Roleplaying game concept art
I was also involved in a group of people who were interested in
writing a series of role-playing games and selling the rulebooks online
as downloadable PDF files. It was an idea that was a little too ahead
of its time, although other people have had success with similar ventures
since. I did create a set of concept art to show potential investors
and developers that showed the range of games we might produce.
This first one (one of my earliest works in Photoshop, in fact) was for a game that would be set in a dream-world whose inhabitants were first starting to realize their world wasn't real -- and that that meant they could do anything.
Roleplaying game concept art
This game was going to be set in a distant future where
players would be part of the military of an star-spanning
empire where Earth ruled with an iron fist.
Roleplaying game concept art
Pantheon was going to be our super-powered,
comic book hero game, although with a lot more sophistication
and realism than usually accompanies the genre. The game
was largely going to deal with how people with super-powers
interacted with the world's other superpowers -- governments
and corporations.
Roleplaying game concept art
Lastly was the game idea that we kept coming back to --
a "steampunk" game, set in a high-tech version of Victorian
London, long before that genre had gained the popularity it
enjoys today. This was my first stab at a title and a logo
for it, inspired by the fact that the 19th century Latin motto
for "Victoria rules" shared an abbreviation with virtual reality,
an idea that was becoming popular when this game was first
being laid out. In the end, we thought the name just seemed
too obscure to go over well with our general audience.
Roleplaying game concept art
This was the next version of the game outlined above --
the name just popped into my head one day and I loved the
sound of it. The graphic I created here is stil, to this
day, one of my favorite designs I've ever made.
Font design
I wanted the materials we created for Forever London
to have a very distinctive, unique look, and that meant I wanted
to create our own typeface for titles and section headings.
I came up with a design that was a blend of elements from different
Victorian display fonts overlaid on top of each other, complemented
with interlocking gears. The end result had a very Jules Verne look
that I was quite happy with.
When I started at CourtTrax, they already had a great product -- a web application for legal professionals and background screeners that aggregates searches across different court systems into one set of reports. What it really needed was a great interface, and that's where I came in. I completely overhauled the design of their user interface to be much simpler and more intuitive, and to have a look and feel more like a desktop application. I also added many features like collaborative note-taking, real-time chat, automatic PDF generation, and more.
I also completely redesigned their public website, and built a complete customer-management tool for internal use, with drill-down charts and graphs so we could see what kind of searches are users are doing and how often. (This new tool was much faster than their old one -- reports that used to take almost a full minute to generate are now ready in less than three seconds.)
Everything was powered by Perl and PHP, talking to a MySQL backend,
with a heaping helping of jQuery to handle all the Javascript
heavy lifting for a faster, cleaner, richer user experience.
DEMO VIDEO
For a better idea of some of the changes I made, have a look at this demo
video that I created for them that talks about the new features I added and
shows off the look and feel I designed for the web app:
When I worked as Lead Developer for Blue Utopia, I built most of the core functionality of their flagship product -- a Customer Relation Management (CRM) web application to keep track of individuals and organizations, including contact information, personal and professional information, detailed call logs, event history, and contribution records.
The system was built using PHP and MySQL,
and made extensive use of Javascript to make
it easier for users and to ensure they
entered data in the correct
format.
I'd always wanted to make a website for a restaurant -- most restaurant websites are inexplicably terrible, making it unnecessarily difficult to find basic infomation like hours, menus, or locations, so I'd always thought I could do better. When I was approached by a new restaurant here in Seattle, The Night Kitchen, to do their site, I jumped at the chance.
It was a clever idea for a restaurant -- open all night, closed in the daytime. And the owner was great to work with -- bright, fun, and Internet-savvy, she wanted their site to tie into online services like Twitter, Flickr, and Google Maps. She already had a great logo to provide me with, and that really drove the look and feel of the rest of the site. I tried my best to give them a site that's simple, clean, elegant and fun. She seemed pretty happy with it, and I was happy with it, too.
The Night Kitchen has, sadly, closed, and the website has been taken down.
I still miss those fried cheese curds.
I've always been fascinated by the "steampunk" genre of Victorian-tinged science fiction -- you can see some of my steampunk-inspired ideas over in my graphic design portfolio -- and when I noticed a couple of years ago that steampunk panels at Norwescon had grown popular enough to be standing-room-only inside and turning people away at the door, I thought it was time there was a convention dedicated to steampunk. Fortunately for me, some friends of mine had come up with the same idea at the same time and did all the hard work of making it a reality, leaving to me what I considered the fun part -- making the website!
After Steamcon's first year, I had to pass on the website duties to someone else -- but you can still see my archived copy of my original version of the site.
Steamcon was a tremendous success, especially for a first-year convention,
and I like to think that the site I designed for them helped play a part
in establishing it as a legitimate event. I received a lot of compliments
on the site, especially for the simple but striking Space Needle and gears
logo -- which I was delighted to learn the convention committee had made
into copper lapel pins.
DemoRoom approached my former employers, Talking Dog Media, and asked, "Can you copy the look-and-feel of one of our CD-ROM projects in Flash, for an on-line demonstration?"
We told them of course we could -- and then I set out to see if I actually could do it!
It ended up being the biggest Flash project I've ever tackled. It wasn't easy, but it was a lot of fun, and I think it really succeeded.
Click the screenshot to your right and the
Demo will launch in a new window.
Talking Dog Media was where I first really spread my wings as a professional designer. Aside from the Flash demo mentioned above, I also coded tools to automate posting content to their online courses, created custom web-based discussion forums, and created a keyword-based search engine for existing graphics made in-house so that they could easily be found and repurposed for new projects.
Here are screenshots of just a few of the projects I worked on:
First is a proposal
for a redesign of the Talking Dog
Media site. I was placed in charge
of redesigning their website after
taking the initiative to research and
write a document
outlining principles of web design
for the company to follow.
Second is a design I
created for a website for a magazine
called The Scientist. I believe
the client eventually decided they
couldn't afford to launch a website at
that time, but they were extremely
happy with my initial
designs.
Finally is the
homepage for Sedgwick Ports. I
didn't come up with the visual design
for this site -- this was a design I
was handed by Talking Dog's art
department. Nevertheless, I'm still
very proud of this site because I did
something with this design I honestly
didn't think was possible -- I made it
work.
Michael Montoure was a graduate of the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington, where he first started using the Internet back in 1987. His first web design work was for Linux Journal magazine, where he had been working as a customer service representative until he put together a set of web pages to convince them that he should be their new webmaster.
While working for Talking Dog
Media, he built sites for City
University, Eagle Hardware, and Valley
Medical, among others. Later, he worked on
the portal site for the
iCEBOX, an Internet information
appliance; worked as an HTML Developer for
Classmates.com;
and was lead developer for Blue
Utopia, building online campaign
management tools for political
organizations.
His most recent position was lead developer at
CourtTrax,
a provider of automated solutions to search and
retrieve real-time court information.
Montoure is also a professional horror writer. His website Bloodletters is a showcase of his horror fiction and artwork. He is currently available for freelance web-development contracts.
He can be reached at .