design – Looking for Whitman

Redesigning Looking for Whitman

Matthew Gold — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:45:34 +0000

As we all know by now, Whitman himself was intensely interested in typography and design, an interest that led him to design and redesign various editions of Leaves of Grass.

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve just completed a major first step in the redesign of our own web-based project. You should be seeing a new header image on the home page of the site, along with new sitewide navigation and better frontpage tag navigation. Our “courses” and “projects” tabs now allow visitors to quickly and easily access various parts of the site.

This is only the first step, though. Coming soon will be a reworking of the main section of the frontpage so that we’ll be better able to feature the work of students in the course (right now, the righthand sidebar is extraordinarily active, while the main section of the homepage is relatively static). We’ll also be installing the new header across various parts of the website (especially the profile sections) to create a more seamless browsing experience.

We hope you like these new changes. If you have ideas for ways we could improve the design or functionality of the site, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post on the Announcements blog.

A New Project Tag

Reverend — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:57:44 +0000

After giving the matter some thought, I think we should switch our project tag from “whitman20″ to “ww20″ on the proposition that shorter is better for services such as twitter. So, please update your previously tagged items on social bookmarking services such as twitter and social photo services such as flickr, and please use “ww20″ from this point forward.

Whitman’s oeuvre may argue against the thought that shorter is better, but I think that we do have to make some allowances for modern technology!

Website Redesign Coming Soon!

Reverend — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:04:19 +0000

Please stay tuned for an overhaul of this website, which we will unveil before the start of the Fall 2009 semester. The new design will bring a new look to the site and will tie together many different aspects of its navigation.

The development team behind the project has already finished the heavy coding work required to create the sitewide gray navigation bar at the top of this page. Wherever you are on the site, you should be able to see this bar. Using it will allow you to travel to most other sections of the site.

I’m very pleased to welcome Claire Fontaine to the project, as well. Claire will be acting as the Director of Project Support; she will be coordinating the technical support team at every campus and will be working to ensure that we provide helpful and timely assistance to students just getting started on WordPress, our site platform.

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for the redesign!