alan wells

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective – the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

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During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design – it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:

Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.

I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki – it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.

So after spending some time to migrate my blog from a $90/year hosted Typepad account to my self-hosted Wordpress install (since I’ve spent the last 6 months learning the basics of PHP this seemed much easier when I first looked into it last year), upgrading to WP 2.5, I’m finding myself inspired to start writing some things here again. Since I like to use this blog as a record of my own thoughts and work, I thought I’d share some recent work I’ve done. Last week we launched some new features on the Affinity Labs sites, probably the biggest release I’ve managed so far, and I’m pretty excited about the new UI we’ve created for our some of our channel pages and our article pages. First, the old design (thanks Google cache!)

And the new design:

During the summer of 2007, my roommate Porter Felton and I had an idea about where mobile technology might be going. It was before the release of the iPhone SDK, but the potential of mobile, location aware technology was still very clear. We began working on an idea for a location aware service that would find the most popular events around you based on popularity within your group of friends.

We decided not to pusue the business idea after looking at a number of other companies doing similar things (Loopt, Whirled, etc), but not before I designed and coded a working prototype for nightlife destinations in San Francisco. I learnd basic PHP and MySQL to write this site, which has CSS skins for both iPhone and desktop browsers. You could link it up with your Facebook account to see venues your friends were attending, and see lists of venues ranked by proximity and popularity.

Doing all this in a web browser seems rather quaint now that the iPhone SDK is available, but at the time I wrote the prototype, Safari was the only place for app developers to make iPhone services.

The prototype is still functional (except for the Set My Location address mapping feature), and can be accessed at www.gettoutt.com

Gold Standard Diagnostics is a Davis-based biomedical sales, marketing and distribution firm. I helped them build their website on a Joomla CMS platform (I handled the web design, CSS modifications, and CMS implementation).

I also helped GSD design and build their first tradeshow booth. We worked with a tradeshow booth production company, and I consulted on exhibit graphics and booth layout.

Buy Smart – A Strategic Consumption Campaign: A graphic campaign designed to be applied to the built environment to drive awareness of the impact that consumers can have with their choices

California Lighting Technology Center: Working with my partner Ashley Brown, we redesigned the CLTC exhibit space and designed a modular case system to support their needs for flexibility in the space. I used Illustrator, Photoshop, and SketchUp to bring the designs together.

Green Design Wiki: a resource for exhibit designers interested in sustainability. I still maintain this site, and it gets about 1,000 hits a month.

During fall quarter of my last year in college, the final project of my web design class was to create an online portfolio. I built mine in Flash, and it serves as a mostly complete catalog of the projects I had completed up to the time I built the portfolio. It doesn’t include the work from my last quarter of college, the most important of which is the Green Design Wiki, which I still maintain.

This flash portfolio includes print, web, and exhibit desing projects, complete with brainstorms, sketches, and final implementations.

View the flash portfolio.

Things I’ve been thinking about lately in relation to design:

You can probably judge the strength of a design by looking at the ideas you didn’t use. If you used the first idea you came up with, you’re probably not creating the best work you can. Sometimes you have a Eureka moment, but mostly I think design is about experimentation, trial and error, and arriving at the best solution after exploring at least a few that didn’t work out quite right.

Design should be intentional. By this I mean that there should be a reason that the elements in your design are arranged the way they are. If I ask myself why that type is set that way, or that element is in that position, I should be able to answer that question. If I can’t I need to work on the design until I find a place for everything and an appropriate explanation for that placement. To me, there is no place for random or arbitrary in design. However small or seemingly insignificant, we make a lot of decisions as designers, and I think the attentiveness to those decisions is the most imporant factor in how successful a design is…

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My good friend Kate is working on an art show to benefit people suffering from cystic fibrosis. Many local Davis artists have donated work to support the show, and she needed some help promoting the show.

Cystic fibrosis is caused by a mutation in a gene called F508. Building on that idea, we developed a logo, poster, and mailer for the event.