Portfolio
Conney Project
The Conney Project is an endowed arts project at the University of Wisconsin - Madison focusing on Jewish arts. The Center for Jewish Studies at the UW is a client of Chatman Design, so that work led us to this project. One of the bigger events for the Conney Project is the yearly Conney Conference, a three-day event full of arts presentations, an entertaining and enlightening experience for all. The Conney Project website will be a home for those conferences, showcasing the artists, providing information, and archiving video from the events.
Status
Status is a lightweight group communication tool aimed at business/enterprise. Microblogging platforms like Twitter, Pounce and Plurk have proven to be extremely successful and popular way for people to communicate. But none of those provides business-level security and privacy. This is where Status comes in. Status works is comparable to (and in fact, integrated with) Twitter, but Status is purely based on private groups. Only invited members of particular groups can see each others updates. For an application like Status, the user interface needs to be as clean, simple, and usable as possible to keep it’s promise that it is easy to use. On top of that, all of the extensions of Status need to maintain a consistent UI feel (iPhone interface, Desktop Widget, etc.)
Rick Wilcox Magic Theater
Rick and Suzan Wilcox put on an amazing magic & comedy show in Wisconsin Dells, WI. The show is of extremely high quality (Vegas-style), so their website needed to represent that as well as serve two major functions: introduce people to the show and sell tickets. The ticket buying process is unique in that it is almost entirely visual and takes place on a single page. The back-end is powered by Ruby on Rails, so managing it is a breeze and can be done directly from the web browser. The rest of the site serves to introduce the site in as fun a way as possible. There is something for everyone, from a fun and flashy Kid Zone to Photos/Videos to user-submittable show reviews. Beacon Athletics is a client of Chatman Design.
Band Website Template
Enabling your clients to do site updates themselves has grown from a fad into a full-blown expectation these days. It needs to be secure, but the easier the better. The easiest way of all is if you can actually edit the content directly on the web page itself. Band Website Template is an example of this. The shows page has a login link where the sites administrator can quickly log in and add new shows or edit/delete existing ones. Since I needed this functionality for a band I was already working with, I recycled the idea into a purchaseable template which includes everything you need from installation instructions to the original Photoshop files.
CSS-Tricks
When you are writing about web design, I find that people take you a little bit more seriously if your site looks and functions well. I try and “practice what I preach” on CSS-Tricks meaning the site is W3C standards compliant, utilizes optimization techniques like CSS sprites, uses highly semantic HTML markup for accessibility and Search Engine Optimization and maintains many conventions for usability.
Beacon Athletics
Beacon Athletics is primarily an eCommerce store focusing on Athletic Field equipment (baseball, soccer, football…). It is too bad the web isn’t more like Field of Dreams where “if you build it, they will come.” There is far too much competition on the web for that. Web stores these days not only need look good and function better, but also include other compelling content to get people interested in the first place. The Beacon Athletics does this by offering interesting, valuable and free content to their visitors. This is done through leveraging their team of “experts in the field” to write a blog, as well as coveted PDF downloads like their “Field Dimensions Guide”, a must for any new field development. Beacon Athletics is a client of Chatman Design.
FreshArrival
One amazingly cool thing, every day. FreshArrival has been promising and delivering this since 2005. Each year, it gets a “fresh” face and this year it was my design.
Wisconsin Advertising Project
The Department of Political Science at UW-Madison does the most comprehensive data gathering and research on political advertising in the world. During campaign times, high profile media gobbles up this data for reporting purposes. This site serves as a home for that project and because it such a highly-trafficked and publicly-facing site, it needs to look it’s best to make the University and the Poli Sci department look good! The University of Wisconsin is a client of Chatman Design.
Kailin Yong
Kailin Yong is a world-class prodigy violinst. I met Kailin through the Boulder Acoustic Society, another band I helped with a website. Kailin’s site features a blog so that he can keep in touch with his audience and post new content at will, as well as multimedia content to give people a taste of Kailin’s unique style.
Center for Jewish Studies
The Center for Jewish Studies is a unique department on the UW-Madison campus in that it doesn’t have an actual building of its own, and its professors come from other primary departments. So, it was of central importance that their web presence be a strong complement to the campus community. The site is powered by WordPress (a modern Content Management System) with a custom theme. This approach means it is easy to add timely, fresh content or quickly update existing content. Community-driven features are also part of the site such as commenting, RSS feeds, and full site search.The University of Wisconsin is a client of Chatman Design.
Repellex
Repellex is a household-name in the gardening world (should I say a greenhouse-name?). The animal repellent products line the shelves of gardening stores and sections across the country. Despite their fantastic growth in sales in brick-and-mortar stores, they knew they would be missing out by not taking advantage of the higher profit margins in selling online. This easy to use eCommerce store does that for them. Their products all mention the website on the labels for more information, and the website features a store locator to get people to those store — a perfect two-way compliment.
Boulder Acoustic Society
A national touring band like B.A.S. needs a website that will work for them. The guys like to keep in touch with their fans, so the home page features a blog that they can update easily on the road. The show calendar is powered by the very same engine as the Band Website Template, as in fact the Band Website Template was developed after it was written for B.A.S. The site also features a dynamic slideshow that pulls from their Flickr account, yet another way the guys can keep the content on their site fresh without needing to mess with the guts of their website.
Felicity Muench
Just a simple and to-the-point personal website for Colorodo-based wedding performer Felicity Muench.
Jeff Campana
Jeff is my old college roommate and now an accomplished Ceramic Artist teaching at the University of Louisville. His recent work is built sort of modularly. Jeff has this to say:
Deconstruction and reconstruction yields a decoration that is structurally expressed, unifying the interior and exterior, prompting the viewer to contemplate the structure of the objects, as well as the process I used to make them.
His website reflects this modular style with illustration and layout.
Kohls & Associates
Madison law firm Kohls & Associates have better things to do than spend a bunch of time thinking about their webiste, like help people through extremely tough times in their lives. Their extremely straight forward site features three well-done videos that clearly walk through their main services in a way anyone could understand. Kohls & Associates is a client of Chatman Design.
DZone Promotional Graphics
When DZone transitioned into publishing its own unique content as well as being a link portal, they needed a way to promote those articles. I help them by providing promotional graphics for these articles, which are often metaphors or iconic symbols from the idea of the article.
Script & Style
I always wanted to social news angle to CSS-Tricks but never found quite the right angle to integrate it. The right opportunity came along to partner with David Walsh and create a separate site. Script & Style is essence a link blog with “Links to Help you Grow as a Designer and Developer”. The site is 90% powered by community submissions.
Pack 155
It’s not just companies and other money-making ventures that need and deserve well designed websites! Cub Scout Pack 155 really needed to get off their eye-sore Geocities page and onto a real site. This site is kid-friendly, yet packs in all the information and details to keep parents on the same page. Chatman Design project.
