Folio (Print and Screen Media) - GordeonBleu

Welcome to Folio, a mixed portfolio of various websites and t-shirts I've been asked to design or redesign. The focus of this section of GordeonBleu is to showcase the external screen and print media I've contributed beyond the internal pages of GordeonBleu. Essentially, these are the works that do not fall under the GordeonBleu label.

The Sites
The extent of my contributions in this medium involves self-created graphics and photos, and hand-coded W3C compliant XHTML1.0 and CSS to ensure everything runs well under the hood.

» The Berkeley Project
Completed: August 24, 2006
Official Release: August 25, 2006
Abstract: In April, James approached me about forming a web team for the newly forming community service project, The Berkeley Project, modeled after The Detroit Project at the University of Michigan. The goal? To gather 1000 student volunteers by November 11. The site would serve as the face and sign-up interface of the group, and I agreed to take on the project.

» San Francisco Young Playwrights Foundation
Completed: August 29, 2006
Official Release: October 15, 2006
Abstract: During a meeting in May, Lauren asked if I'd be willing to work a bit on the existing SFYPF website. I accepted. After first considering a dark red scheme, I ultimately used a blue brick backdrop similar to the bricks of a Gordon shop in New York, as a way to preserve Lauren and David's blue color of the original site and any established features of the foundation's visual identity.

» The Open Computing Facility
Completed: October 10, 2006
Official Release: February 4, 2007
Abstract: At the start of 2006, I joined the staff of the OCF to help facelift the site, but it wasn't until June that I found time to offer a sample alternative to the aging site. I rushed it, and it didn't meet my own style guidelines. Yet before I could develop another, other projects came along, and I postponed again and again until October, when I worked something I felt was worthy of the OCF.

» The Style Contest - Theme "Digital Violet"
Completed: June 4, 2006
Entered: June 5, 2006
Abstract: In March 2006 came The Style Contest, a blog theme competition by Six Apart (parent of LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type). While I welcomed an opportunity to challenge my CSS skills, I had no intention of trying in the middle of a semester. Then one day, the judges extended the deadline just barely outside my final exams season, allowing me time for two rushed entries.

» The Style Contest - Theme "Cookies N' Cream"
Completed: June 3, 2006
Entered: June 5, 2006
Abstract: In the aforementioned contest, I based my first entry on a card I spotted. I was underwhelmed with the end product, but at least two e-mailers to date seemed to express interest in skinning their blogs with this one. If for some reason, either of these two themes appeal to you, all contest skins are available to paid LiveJournal users and to users of Movable Type and TypePad.

The Prints
I admit that this medium is still very new to me, specifically regarding t-shirts. I never planned to deal with tees at all, but then in June 2006, Griffin turned me to shirt website Threadless.com when we were brainstorming a t-shirt look for the Open Computing Facility (OCF), a computer group on our campus. That summer, I discovered that Brianna also knew about Threadless at about the same time as the site's new Type Tees contest, for those of us who found the ongoing artwork-based contest overwhelming. We submitted slogans for the Type Tees, which then turned into a few artwork submissions on my end, which finally led to a joint entry between Brianna and me. It won! And it was the first real printed t-shirt for an unsuspecting two of us.

By then, summer was nearly over, and I began diverting my efforts on three sites, two of which were rolled out as The Berkeley Project and the refreshed SF Young Playwrights Foundation. James, who approached me about the BP site, told me that the group's leaders asked me to work on their latest t-shirt. I initially thought I was simply adjusting colors and layout to their existing originals, but at the last minute, I decided it would be easier to work from the ground up and offered it just in time to be available to volunteers on the group's event day. Around the same time, the OCF group was ready to print a shirt with my logo, but Griffin and I requested a couple more weeks to finalize a more suitable design for the medium. In the end, we settled on a vector drawing based on an eBay toy that Angel linked me, and the shirt became available in the middle of the final exams season.

» Tees for the OCF | Tees for the BP | Threadless with Brianna | Threadless Experiments

The Ads
Okay, these aren't truly ads - they're more like slogan-based campaign banners. They do, however, reflect my love of print ads, and all the involved details from typography to taglines. I'm an amateur, but the judges of a Cal Earth Week thought contest didn't seem to mind in either 2005 or 2006. They awarded me prizes both years, so I must have done something right.

» See the banners

Projects in Development
Clearly, not every project we tackle will reach production, but the following are samples of projects that were once ongoing - Casey's new Notizi in 2007, and a new nonprofit startup called Teach It Well in 2007-08, headed by Andrew Rowland.

In March 2007, Andrew approached me about ideas he had for a site aiming to help teachers collaborate on effective teaching techniques to inspire students learning their subjects. We explored building the site with everything from CMS's like Jotspot and Drupal, to having one of our programmers build from the ground up with PHP and MySQL as we had done with the Berkeley Project. We are a small team who poured in our time until the second half of 2008, when we had no more time left to spare because of our full time jobs. (You need to create an account to use the tool, though the database could be wiped at any time.) For the logo, I used a golden color to represent a hopeful enriched educational experience, as well as sharp precision with the metrics.

In September 2007, Casey and Sameer were asking if I'd be interested in helping out with the visual elements of the UI of their news aggregator, to categorize it simply, that they chose to name Notizi. I went for a mix of reds as homage to The BBC and The Economist, with a blend of blue-tinted grays to shoot for a clean newspaper feel, much like that of The New York Times and its sibling, the International Herald Tribune. For the logo, I found inspiration from the look of a folded broadsheet. As of 2008, my friend Casey has moved on to greater and better things beyond Notizi, and is subsequently no longer public facing.

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2005-2008. folio. gordeonbleu. gordon mei. xhtml1.0.