German Studies Redesigned

The new, hip, and edgy German Studies is now live on the Vassar Web after a long delay. Coming up with the design was one of the most challenging parts of the project. The department’s chair knows exactly what he wanted, and he would reject any layout that didn’t hit the mark. In doing so, he has pushed me to think harder and to be more focused. After many failed attempts, I decided to break out my conventional approach, and let the design drives the site. So when I came up with the crisp geometric look, the contrast between muted and bolded colors, the contemporary typography, and the unanticipated rollovers (English/German), he was thrilled. The look and feel is what he has envisioned the site to be.

On the technical note, the site is CSS driven and XHTML structured. The secondary pages are half scalable when changing the browsers’ text size. The German’s quotes appear on each page was adapted from Clarksco’s Random Quote Generator written in PHP. Many thanks to my colleague Megg Brown for content review and hooked the site up to Adobe Contribute for the German department to update information without ruin the codes and design.