Richard Cornish

Created the logo, page layout, markup and stylesheets for Digg’s first presidential election coverage page. The concept was for users to add candidates as friends as an informal representation of users’ favorability toward the candidates.

Final version‘s font sizes and photos tweaked by Digg’s in-house design team.

Created and co-authored an open-source Web application for the Django Web framework to easily create audio and video podcast feeds. Some models and some views code credit goes to Python developer Jeff Triplett.

Features include ability to enhance podcast with FeedBurner and iTunes Store feed submission, a Google video sitemap and default templates for show lists, episode lists and episode details.

A special section dedicated to the University of Kansas‘ 2007–2008 men’s basketball NCAA championship season, winner of the 2008 Associated Press Managing Editors Award for Online Convergence, recognizing “print-online combinations that exhibit the best applications of both in presenting the story.”

The Google Charts sparkline graphic was enhanced with jQuery, and the sliding panes were created with MooTools. Videos were re-encoded to H.264, displayed at a 700 pixel-width minimum, and served using SlideShowPro. Four-hundred season-related YouTube videos feed that user-generated-content hunger.

And there’s still plenty of Trajan to go around.

Extended World Online’s Ellington Marketplace application, a hyperlocal, robust business directory, to integrate with the existing tourism website of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The first Marketplace application existed at the Lawrence Journal-World.

I performed a myriad of custom design and developer requests and bug fixes, among them markup, stylesheets, some Flash ActionScript modification and Ellington CMS template logic.

In the spirit of EveryBlock’s Chicago Crime, a visualization of crimes reported in residences at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Crime reports can be browsed by year, type or residence.

Where Google Maps don’t accompany crime data, CSS bar charts were created. The homepage’s piechart was originally created using Google Charts, but later slightly customized. Development work by James Bennett.

My most ambitious project; I designed a college website composed of two departments, an institute and a radio/television station from scratch. I designed the layout while adhering to university colors and typefaces; wrote almost all copy, edited everything and created electronic versions from old paper documents. Photographs were a combination of well-selected campus-specific stock, those by a freelancer and the rest taken by myself.

I wrote standards-compliant markup, styles and scripts, and designed for a radio media player and converted a variety of old video sources to Flash video. I interviewed faculty members for consultation and students for informational profiles.

A journalist’s portfolio of articles spanning her career. One of my strongest typographical and traditional page design efforts; influences include A List Apart, Gapers Block and The Morning News.

Features include animated Google Maps, Google Street View—Maps and Street View APIs often integrated simultaneously—Google Charts, FancyZoom image enhancement, auto-sized and scrollable bar charts, and accessible printer link, text resize, RSS feed and XML sitemap file, all of which are auto-generated. Articles are also cut geographically to include “place profiles.”

Branded print pieces include her résumé, business card, printer-friendly article, and website handout promo.

The journalist updates the entire website herself from the user-friendly administrative interface. Created with the Django Web framework.

A portfolio website chronicling the achievements of a student teacher. I wrote some of the XHTML, created the design, wrote the stylesheets, and helped to put it online at its own, respective URL.

As one of my more adventurous color schemes, the design also features automatic, alternating “zebra” color rows using Javascript. The design works well in different horizontal widths, moving the branch of flowers as necessary.

A freelance website for a freelance writer and editor, the design uses bold reds and golds with clear typography. Articles feature automated “curly” quotes and other typographical entities and on-the-fly image resizing without intervention by Deb. Articles are categorized by feature or essay.

She updates the website herself with a customized Movable Type installation more than a year and a half later.

A freelance website for a chapter of the national non-profit organization the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses, AORN. For the first four years, the website was maintained by a webmaster, but in response, Movable Type was installed to allow members to update the website for themselves.

To aid in updates by members, I recorded video screencasts (third image) narrating the update process. The website uses Google Maps to display the location of meetings.

A blog chronicling this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, the tech industry’s biggest conference of the year, from Austin, Texas. Events, videos and plenty of RSS feeds rounded out the website’s “his and her’s” design theme. Twitter tweets were published on the homepage in true SXSW fashion, and the videos were syndicated as a (rudimentary) iTunes podcast and indexed as a Google video sitemap. She chose the colors.

Creating and implementing the design took longer than making the Django backend. Total project time: Five days.

Dissatisfied with the local media’s coverage of my university’s cities of Urbana and Champaign, I created a hyper-local wiki in a weekend. The wiki is powered by MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia. I designed the logo and edited the homepage’s markup and stylesheets.

After spending seven years on my university’s campus, I’m astounded by the amount of knowledge I learned “the hard way” that wasn’t available in any easily obtainable format. I’m convinced that the locals and veteran students have a wealth of knowledge that could be shared with new students, and the wiki is a step in that direction. Also covered by the student newspaper.

Upon discovering the hilarious and short-lived comedy series Arrested Development, I fell in love with it. When I learned about its difficulty in attracting fans, I created a registered student organization at my university and held viewing parties on places at campus.

The design emulates and extends the program’s introduction and quick wit in page elements having a “strewn about” appearance. The website’s news entries mark the first time I used and customized Flash’s FLV Playback component. I also designed and printed T-shirts for club members.

A fictional redesign of the popular camera review website, Digital Photography Review. Asked to explain my thought process behind designing a website, specifically a redesign, I wrote up my methodology in detail.

Features include a cleaner, tighter logo, a visually and functionally redesigned navigation and a strict adherence to the grid. The deliverables were a homepage and interior page composed as Photoshop mock-ups.

A fictional redesign of the (in)famous, right-wing news website, the Drudge Report. Assigned as part of a job interview assignment, directions included a better organization of existing page elements but keeping enough of the visual cues to be recognized as the Drudge Report.

I gathered all search forms into the sidebar above the collections of news wires and columnists, and used a monospace typeface to re-create the feel of old journalists on typewriters. See the old version.

As one of my first attempts at standards-based design in 2003, I created this one-page mock website for the DuPage County Democrats in the Chicago area as a proposal to take over the webmaster’s duties. I didn’t receive word back from the webmaster, most likely because he didn’t want to talk to the person who was also gunning for his job.

Although it stands as one of my first standards-based designs, I continue to use many of the techniques today that I discovered in this design. The colors and layers of shadows are subtle without becoming overbearing or gimmicky. See the old version.